That proverbial clean slate.

Everything is going to change. No, this isn’t about the Charlie Kirk killing and the impending civil war I contend has already started. And no, it’s not a nod to the YA novel The Maze Runner when the Gladers find Teresa in the box, and she cryptically blurts out this line. This is about my life, my hobby, my blog. It’s going to change. It started to yesterday.

Almost a year ago, Susan and I sat with my father as he slowly died of heart failure. Each day, his condition worsened. The entirety of our last day with him, he was mostly incoherent. Around seven o’clock, with the outside light fading into night, with Susan and I preparing for our ninety-minute drive home, my father became suddenly lucid. We talked a bit about what comes next after we die. He affirmed that he lived a great and satisfying life. And he dropped this bomb: “I made a mistake. I made a mistake with the kids. Jeffrey…” He fell silent.

I tried to prompt him: “What mistake, Dad? What do you mean?” He fell asleep, and we drove home. My father died later that night. I never learned what mistake he made, but my mind has thrown together a variety of possibilities. Sounds like something out of a mystery novel, right?

Like most writers, I read. Not as much as I used to, but still, a fair amount. Besides news and op eds and blog posts, I primarily read novels. Many times, in the middle of a good book, I’ll think ‘this is a great plot, where do authors get these ideas?’ I’ve had a lifelong block against writing fiction. That doesn’t mean I’ve never done it, I have a handful of times, but it’s always a thinly veiled version of my own life. And while I’ve published two novella length memoirs, the almost fiction stories I’ve written are mostly flash and never longer than short. Certainly nothing that could be expanded into a book. Novel writing just wasn’t in my cards.

Until now.

I’m getting up there in years. OK, I’m about to turn sixty-three, not so old, but both of my brothers retired by my age. I’ve never felt ready. When I take an unstructured day off work, I tend to laze around all day, and at four in the afternoon, guilt drives me to lace up my shoes and run a few miles.

“Hey Jeff, what did you do on your day off?”

“Uh, went for a run?” I envisioned my future retirement just sitting on the couch all day poking at the CNN and New York Times websites.

Susan thinks I deserve to retire. “Well, you could write.” A lofty goal for someone who comes up with an essay topic every eight or nine days. But over the past year, that last exchange Susan and I had with my father has gelled into a surprisingly interesting plot and the skeletons of some engaging characters. It feels like a book length work of fiction. I plan to write a novel. I’ve even given it the working title of Half.*

No, I’m not retiring just yet, but I’m currently rearranging my life to work less hours. I plan to free-up four mornings each week to write my story. I’ve subscribed to a podcast series called Deep Dive, in which some of our best contemporary authors offer advice on how to approach this all-consuming task. I understand it will be difficult, frustrating and at times painful, but I also hope to have fun. I started writing yesterday. I was terrified and exhilarated, simultaneously thinking “I can do this! and “No I can’t!”  

So where does this leave us? I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll still feel the urge to write and read blogposts, but maybe I won’t. I don’t want to be one of those bloggers who simply disappears one day leaving everyone to wonder if I died. So, goodbye? I doubt it, but I hope to see you much less, because I’m supposed to be writing Half and not essays for WordPress. But ultimately, I’m going to write what feels right, so maybe I’m not going anywhere (this essay right here an obvious lesson in procrastination). Regardless, wish me the luck that I, in turn, wish each of you.  

Peace.

*Half will not be the title of a book I write. The story has filled out and morphed from when I started thinking of it as Half. But rather than continually changing the title of my project as it grows and matures, this name serves as a useful placeholder.   

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

All the “God” I need

My wife Susan and I drove past a church the other day. Out front, a sign read TGIF!

I entered high school in the mid-seventies. At the time, poster sales proliferated record stores, drug stores, and Sears department stores—cute animals from kittens to seals, ugly animals from bulldogs to hippos, often portrayed above large white or bright yellow letters. One of the principal messages on these posters read Thank God It’s Friday. This message could be found in schoolrooms, doctors’ offices and various other places people didn’t really want to be. For the past fifty years, to me, TGIF meant only one thing: Thank God it’s Friday. Today, on that church sign, I learned a new one: Thank God I’m Forgiven!

“So that’s the deal? If I believe in Jesus, I’m automatically forgiven? I still gotta dodge jail, but I’ve got a ticket to heaven? Seems a little implausible.”

Susan hesitated, merging onto a highway, “I think that’s the idea, yes.”

So then conversely, if I live an ethical life, help others, and conduct myself much like a would-be Mother Theresa, but I worship the wrong deity, or no deity at all, I’m sentenced to an eternity of purgatory, or worse? Does this seem skewed to you?

I grew up as a christian, little “c.” No one talked seriously about heaven, hell, being saved or forgiven. We went to church and didn’t cuss. My church had a hippy vibe, we studied a progressive bible titled The Way, and when our pastor brought in an assistant pastor in the mid-seventies, he hired a black woman to tend his lily-white flock. Progressive! Heaven never came up as a topic. It was understood we all would go there.

My neighbors, Steve and Jack Peters and another close friend named Will belonged to Fourth Presbyterian. A charismatic church where popular, good looking college kids led the youth program. As a young teen, I started accompanying Steve, Jack, and Will to youth group activities. Not for the religious aspects but because they were fun.  Fourth Presbyterian was capital “C” Christian all the way.  

Ater the relay races and ping pong tournaments and soccer matches and skits, we met for snacks and serious talk. These cool young adults would save us. They told us we needed to strengthen our relationship with Jesus. They iterated and reiterated the message of Bible verse John 14:6—I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. This was when I learned the meaning of the title of my Bible.

One rainy Sunday afternoon at the end of a weekend-long retreat, the counselors passed out a bolt and a nut to each kid. They told us to screw the hardware together as a symbol of our commitment to Christ. They told us to ask God and Jesus to accept us and to acknowledge Jesus Christ as our savior. I tried to do it. I felt like a fraud. That was my last Fourth Presbyterian activity.

A year later, walking home from school with Will, he blurted out “Jeff, how’s your relationship with the Lord?”

Caught off guard and transported back to the pressure I felt from the counselors at the retreat, I slipped into my best Monty Python voice and said “M’Lord, how are you doing today, m’Lord. Top of the morning m’Lord.”

Angry, Will responded, “Jeff, I asked you a serious question about our Lord. Why are you turning it into a joke?” That was the last time I hung out with Will.

I remained a little “c” Christian for another fifteen or twenty years. Over time, through reading, writing and exposure to other cultural beliefs, my ideas about creators, saviors and afterlife settled into a hodge podge of theories that made the most sense to me.  

I find comfort from my belief in reincarnation and the expectation that I’ll re-encounter those souls from my current life who are most important to me. Conversely, I’m agitated by my surety that our universe is almost certainly a science experiment started by an advanced extraterrestrial, an intelligent designer if you will, who checks in on our progress only every hundred thousand years of so. There is no salvation except what we find in our current life by being our best ethical selves.

Ever since my middle teenage years, I’ve been offended by the absolutism of the one-way-to-salvation ethos of Christianity. None of us knows the true path to a rewarding afterlife, because none of us has been there yet. When it comes to spiritual truth, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and even my own crackpot theories are all on equal footing. Anyone telling you something different, well, that’s just wishful thinking.

Papa was a headbanger. No, I didn’t call my father Papa, but when I wrote “Dad was a headbanger,” the Temptations song Papa was a Rolling Stone popped into my head. I needed to change what I wrote. Of course, Suzy is a Headbanger by the Ramones could have just as easily sprung up in my brain. Then I would have had to write “Jerry is a Headbanger.” Sheesh, it’s hard to get started on this story. Regardless, Papa, Dad, Jerry, he was a headbanger. And by headbanger, I don’t mean a metalhead with goth tattoos and long greasy locks he tossed in time with Sabbath or Metallica or Napalm Death, I mean he banged his head on shit. All the time.

From my earliest memories, I knew my father was accident prone. To gross out my brothers and me in our first decade of our life, he frequently popped out his bridge revealing a gap where his four front teeth belonged. He lost them playing hockey in high school just a few years after he grew them. During intimate moments like evening story time on the couch, he would jag his eyes to the side to show off a train track of red stitch marks where his smashed eyeglasses sliced his eyeball during a squash match. And who could possibly forget the great Cann taboggan incident of 1969? My father broke his wrist, and my brother David sprained his ankle. Other stories abound: the time he locked his thumb in the car door; the time he peeled the skin off his calf and shin like a banana; the time molten lead splattered his face; I could go on.

Comparatively, his headbanging was pretty tame. In fact he never even seemed to notice. Walking down the basement stairs, he would smack his head on the low hanging ceiling at the bottom of the stairs. He wouldn’t react; he’d just keep walking. Installing a sump pump, he whacked his head against the cinder block wall while wresting with a bolt. Cabinet doors, kitchen counters, getting out of the car, the dude just bumped his head. Like Les Nessman on WKRP in Cincinnati, he frequently wore a Band-Aid on his forehead.

I’m the headbanger now, and an arm-banger and a knee-banger, etc. I attribute most of this to poor vision. Sitting on opposite ends of the couch in the evening reading books, Susan will sometimes stretch out her hand, fingers waving, looking for a touch, a squeeze, an acknowledgement of our closeness. After fifteen seconds, incredulous, she’ll blurt out “Can’t you see my hand?” The answer is no, my peripheral vision sucks. Outside of the clear tunnel before me created by my eyeglasses, the world is a mystery. If I don’t already know the open cabinet door is eight inches from the side of my head, I’m almost guaranteed to smack my temple on it.

Like my father, I don’t notice these bumps and bangs. Several nights ago, I crept through my almost pitch-black bedroom to grab something from my closet. When I flipped on the light, I noticed a blotch on my arm, a bleed below the skin with two tiny, bloody pricks in the middle. It hurt like it just happened, but I had no recollection of any sort of incident. Did I walk into a wall? A piece of furniture? Did a vampire bat swoop down out of the dark and nip me? Did I bang into something on the way to my bedroom? I find it disconcerting that I don’t remember.

My blotch has been with me all week. Something to look at and ponder as it faded away. For a while I saw a demon’s face, but by the time I took the above photo, it morphed into a buffalo. Did my father get to a point where he looked at his scabs and bruises and wonder where they came from. I’m certain he did. Maybe we all do. My theory is we get used to physical pain. The older we get the less we feel. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism to deal with creaky bodies. Or, with a litany of age-related health issues, maybe those minor cuts and bruises are just the least of our problems.

~

A few years ago, Bruce at the Vinyl Connection wrote about Papa was a Rolling Stone, a song I hadn’t heard in years. I listened to it as I walked to work that morning. Later in the day, I commented on Bruce’s post that listening to it was like a religious experience. I’ve probably played it a hundred times since then, no small feat since the song is twelve minutes long.

Suzy is a Headbanger, from my favorite Ramones album, is NOT a religious experience, but it sure is fun. Have a listen.

After the library book sale, I boxed up the Native American table. It’s a mindless task. Grab an unfolded box from the stack on the floor. Give it structure, the shape of a box. Maryann slashes two strips of packing tape in the shape of a cross on the bottom with her tape gun. Fill it with unsold books. Thousands of books remain. This is my least favorite part of the sale. Lots of work to eliminate unrealized earnings.

Boxing books is an art, a puzzle. Some people rock it. No dead space anywhere in the box. Every cubic inch filled with book. I suck. I lay the books flat, then spine up, then top up. No matter which way I twist them, I finish with a hole, a tunnel, a perfect square from the top of the box to the bottom, just an inch too small in every direction to fit any more books. At least my quarter-empty boxes are easier to carry. I go back to Maryann’s station to build another box.

One of the books on the table is Little Big Man. I grab it and stick it in my pile of stuff—my lunch bag, the iPads that run the book sale software, the cashboxes bursting with bills, extension cords and lightning cables, my coffee cup, empty for at least nine hours. It’s a long day at the end of a long week. But Little Big Man is a score.

I’m scamming. I already took my five free books allotted to workers. But the sale is done. Anything leftover goes to a wholesaler, pennies a piece. He will sell them or recycle them. This book won’t be missed. Plus, thousands of people have already rejected it.

~

I read the novel Little Big Man in 1994. I rode my bicycle across the United States that summer. Strike that. I meandered by bicycle across the United States, coast to coast, as far south as Albuquerque and north into Canada. When not riding, I read tattered old books from small town junk shops and journaled. I drank warm beer alone in my tent.

At the time, Little Big Man altered my thinking. Thomas Berger tells the story of a white boy growing up in a Cheyenne Indian tribe. Berger describes the culture and spirituality of the Indians. On my long daily rides, I regurgitated what I read the night before and internalized it. Unconsciously, I altered my identity to align with the story. I thought of myself as a Human Being, which is what the Cheyenne call their own people in the book, implying that everyone else is something less.

I even recall journaling in the parlance of the Indians in the story. In one entry, I appropriated the word ‘medicine,’ as used by the Cheyenne, meaning mojo or personal essence or vibe. “Caught a nasty cold today. My medicine has gone bad.” Something like that. I dug through my journals yesterday to see if I could find those sections and pull some quotes. I didn’t find any, maybe I’m making that part up.

I don’t expect the book will have much impact on me this time around. During the summer of 1994, I was lonely, lost in my own head, and maybe a little crazy after months on the road by myself. Besides, the book, written in 1964, might have aged well for its first thirty years, but by today’s standards, twenty-five pages in, it seems super racist.

How many times will I do this, reread my favorite books from yesteryear, and find I don’t like them anymore? A Clockwork Orange, Jitterbug Perfume, various books by David Sedaris. Not only has the world changed, but I have too. I’m less confident, less convinced I have all the answers. I’m not willing to laugh at or overlook appalling topics like I did decades ago. Respect for others has become one of my guiding principles. The anti-woke among us might scoff at this as a weakness. I see it as my strongest trait.

Walking around the block, Susan and I pass the Columbia Gas family playing in their yard. The young couple, maybe late twenties, with two kids, an infant and a toddler, are one of the few families consistently outdoors. I know I should be able to supply a name rather than reference the work-truck parked in front of their house every evening, but that would take friendly banter, introductions, something we’re unlikely to do.

The mom holds the infant and calls her tiny terrier close. The dad pitches a wiffleball to his son. The kid, not yet three feet tall, takes a clean cut and sends the ball across his property and well into the next yard. It’s the sort of hit an adult would smack and then nod with satisfaction.

Susan, the more quick-witted of us, shouts “Wow, way to go!”

Me? I hesitate for a moment and then call out “Man, that kid’s gonna to be the next Ty Cobb.”

The dad cocks his head, mouth agape, looks at me but doesn’t respond.

Susan and I walk in silence for five seconds. She turns to face me, “Ty Cobb?”

~

What? It’s an apt reference, if a little dated. Cobb was a hitting machine. He holds a record twelve annual batting titles, had a .300 batting average in twenty-three consecutive seasons, a .400 average in three seasons, scored more five-hit games than any other player in history. The kid and his dad should be proud of the Cobb comparison.*

Of course, Cobb’s playing career spanned from 1906 to 1928, almost all of which happened more than a century ago. He died before I was even born. I think there’s a good chance the Columbia Gas dad never even heard of Ty Cobb.

I suddenly feel old. As a fitness focused adult for the past forty years, I did a good job cheating the effects of aging. Over the past fifteen years, I’ve become accustomed to wide-eyed people saying “What? You’re HOW old?” Their guesses always took eight to ten years off my age. Those days might be over. Last week at a fundraising event, a woman I talked with asked me when I plan to retire. At sixty-two, my retirement date could still be five years away.

Until just a couple of years ago, my youngest was still in high school. This connection mentally rooted me squarely in Generation X. All the other parents were X’ers, so I felt like one too. My obsessions with rock music and a steady diet of Seth MacFarlane cartoons no doubt helped. Now that Eli has graduated and moved out of the house, I’m starting to look and think like the boomer I’ve always been.

Since my boss retired eighteen months ago, I’m the only one left on my organization’s senior management team in his sixties. The others are ten to twenty years younger. I’m picking up a vibe, not from my peers, but from the dozen or so under-thirty employees scattered around my company. I think I’m being chronologically lumped in with the four or five retirees who work for us part-time as something interesting to do with their days. These employees have each been retired from their careers for years.

In my first professional job, my massive government contracting firm was broken down into divisions of five to seven hundred employees. The finances for my division were overseen by a kindly old man with a gaggle of twenty-something “girls” doing the actual work. Ed Bailey sat at his desk and dispensed 1950s truisms and wisdom all morning and then took an hour-long nap at his desk in the afternoon. Every time I walked into his office and found him upright but sound asleep, I thought, Jesus, retire already.

Am I now Ed Bailey? Maybe this is a common feeling for recent empty nesters, or more likely for people still working in their sixties. I can’t shake the sensation that I’m overstaying my welcome. I suspect this is mostly in my head, but increasingly, I feel out of touch with the cultural references that surround me. I sense the same discomfort directed towards me that I displayed around Ed Bailey forty years ago. I guess I can take comfort from the fact that I don’t yet fall asleep at my desk. At least I think I don’t.

* No, I’m not a Ty Cobb freak, and I don’t follow baseball at all. I had to look up all of those facts and stats on Wikipedia, making it even stranger that I latched onto Cobb as a comparison. Pete Rose would have made a lot more sense. At least he’s from my childhood.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels

Early in the week, June texted me. I’ve got a credenza and three file cabinets. She’s clearing out her home office, finally retired, the library where I work as good a donation recipient as anyone. A few weeks ago, she dropped off a big box of office supplies.

I texted back the next day. Can you send pictures?

I already did.

Sorry, I’m off my game.

Self-care, Jeff, self-care

Off my game: I’ve used that phrase twice this week. I’m screwing up at work. This morning, I called in sick but didn’t check my calendar. My nine o’clock showed up on schedule, she drove in from the next town. She hasn’t responded to my apology email.

It’s been a crazy two weeks. I took a five-day east coast jaunt to Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island; instructed extra spin classes subbing for an injured colleague; worked a massive three-day book sale; had dinner with an online friend I’d never met. Two weeks of constant motion.

Getting sick was a given, I’m always sick after the book sale. It’s a superspreader event. Annually, thousands of people pack a rented auction house to shop a year’s worth of donated books. As a cashier, I interact with many of them. I handle their money and their credit cards. I make small talk. Because of Tourette, I lick my lips and wipe them dry every eight seconds. I tried to wipe on my shirt sleeve, but I must have used the palm of my grimy hand a couple hundred times.

Wednesday morning felt like swallowing broken glass. My Covid test read negative so I went to work and processed payroll. I spent the rest of the day asleep in bed. Thursday, feeling better, I worked all day and stupidly instructed a spin class I should have cancelled.  Today, Friday, I’m down for the count.

Coughing, congestion, contagion. I’m home alone and avoiding Susan when she’s around. The vibration of my pervasive stimming grunt in the back of my throat loosens mucus in waves like a bursting dam. Quick trips to the bathroom flush away the draining fluids that would otherwise settle in my lungs. A three-week cough is my inevitable result of a simple head cold.

A Monday blood test signaled high cholesterol. I had it under control with my daily oatmeal breakfast. I fell off that wagon six months ago. I returned to breakfast cereals. Cinnamon Oat Crunch Cheerios promises three and a half hours of satiation right on the front of the box. That never happened. After ninety minutes my hands shake from hunger. Yesterday I made oatmeal with blueberries and walnuts. I felt ready to tackle the fifteen pounds I’ve put on since 2012.

This morning knowing I was sick, and hungry from my post-spin calorie deficit, I scarfed down three bowls of Golden Grahams. I shopped for donuts and cake. I bought an Italian sub and kettle chips for lunch. Hot dogs for dinner. I grabbed a bag of Old Bay seasoned caramel corn just because. For some reason, I think self-care means junk food.

As my sick day draws to a close, I feel disgusting, overfed. My comfort food has left me uncomfortable, weighted down. I’ll take another shot at self-care tomorrow, an oatmeal breakfast and some time outside now that the heat and humidity of the last two months have passed. I doubt I’ll feel good enough to go to yoga, but starting the day with a two-mile walk might be a few steps in the right direction.

Photo by cottonbro studio on pexels.com

At my 8th grade lunch table, we compared hands, budding palm readers, one and all. Marcus Pappas blurted out “Cann’s and mine look like old lady hands.”  He had a point—thin and boney—but it irked me that he said this out loud. Marcus died thirty-five years ago while still good looking, except, I suppose, his hands. My hands resemble weathered saddle bags, scarred and spotted with tea stains. Still thin and boney, add wrinkly now too. Veins squiggle beneath the surface like caffeinated worms.

I last saw Marcus at Tilden pool in the mid-eighties. My neighborhood had two pools with competing vibes. To me, Tilden seemed the more laid-back pool. And, it had a swim team. Tilden pool attracted the athletic families. The other pool, Old Farm, is where the rich kids went to bask in the sun. My family wasn’t wealthy, but we weren’t athletic either.

Tilden threw annual parties on the Fourth of July. Beers, burgers, a greased watermelon in the center of the pool for the teenage boys to fight over. My high school friend Drew invited me as a guest one year. Drew’s family were Swimmers—note the capital “S.” When he teamed up with my brother and me on a triathlon relay team, Drew’s leg was the ocean swim. Tilden families! His older brother coaches swimming to this day.

We were just out of college, still living at home. Drew guarded at the pool on weekends, and I settled into the job I loathed for the next ten years. Marcus showed up at the party. His feet were messed up, misshapen, apparent through his heavy black boots. He walked using metal crutches with forearm cuffs. Dark glasses shielded his unseeing eyes. He roughhoused with his service dog on a grassy hill, the two of them smiling, juking, and rolling around. Much of the crowd looked on. My vocabulary still underdeveloped, I didn’t yet know the word, but I understood performative when I saw it. Marcus wore a goatee, and his wavy hair flipped up at the bottom of his ears. A beautiful boy at the end of his life. 

~

In my first weeks of college, I looked to qualify the growing internal ill-ease that washed over me. I charred my knuckles on my desk lamp’s molten metal shade. I sparred with a fire alarm box, punching out the safety glass. I plucked the shards from under my skin to hide the evidence of my crime. I held the glowing ember of a lit cigarette against the back of my hand in a deserted minor league ball park. My friend O looked on, his expression inscrutable. Thanksgiving break, my mother clenched my scabbed hands and tried to read my mind.

~

In the final weeks of my junior year, I punched an oak tree leaving my knuckles rough and swollen. I sneaked out of a mixer early, too self-conscious to talk or dance with my date, I abandoned her for the night. I craved destruction. Not the tree, though, it was four feet wide. A week later, a different tree, a twin, a couple dozen yards away, crashed to the ground on a sunny afternoon. Across campus, drinking beer on the lawn, we looked to the heavens and wondered about thunder from a blue sky. Had I punched that tree, I could have claimed victory when it fell. I couldn’t untwist the cap from a plastic Pepsi bottle for years. Arthritis flares when I make a fist.

~

My wife Susan spotted a porch glider as we drove past a junk shop. The aluminum frame seemed sound, but the wooden seats rotted through, the hardware fused with rust. We crammed it in the back of our Subaru on a fifteen-dollar investment. Susan took the kids to Storytime at the library while I took a reciprocating saw to the glider, cutting off the useless parts. Dripping with sweat as I hacked away at rotten wood and rusted metal, my hand slipped into the oscillating blade, slicing off an unnecessary chunk from the end of my index finger.  

Assessing the damage under a running faucet, I could see the wound wasn’t stitchable, and it didn’t seem to impact the function of my finger, just the shape. I wrapped it in paper towels and focused on dismantling the glider before Susan and our kids got home.  

~

The skin surrounding my right thumb is numb from the joint in the center of my hand to its very tip. It’s a bizarre lingering result of a dramatic over-the-handlebars mountain bike crash. In the time since, my dislocated shoulder has hurt and slowly healed, but my tingly thumb never improved. It’s annoying and it causes me to drop stuff. The surgeon says he can’t fix it, and he says no, it won’t get better with time. As an ironic insult, despite the surface numbness, I’m often left with shooting pains deep inside after I grip something for an extended period of time.

William Shakespeare popularized the saying the eyes are the window to the soul.   That might be true for him, but for me, apparently, it’s my hands. They tell my story, draw a map of my past—a lifetime of dis-ease, recklessness and bad luck. Of course, it would be nice if my hands weren’t so chewed up, achy and numb, but wishing for that is wishing against the person I am today. We are the sum of our triumphs and mistakes.

Inspired by: https://georgiakreiger.com/2025/07/07/hands/

Image courtesy of kstudio on Freepik

So *this* is who we are!

Sally Edelstein’s blog Envisioning the American Dream included a post yesterday (July third, the day the house approved the senate version of Project 2025) that mourned the loss of American exceptionalism. To her, exceptionalism meant a country striving towards the ideal stated in the last line of the original Pledge of Allegiance: One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I left a comment that I began workshopping earlier in the week on a couple of other blogs touching on the concept of American exceptionalism: American exceptionalism began its slow crawl to its grave with the U-S-A chant at the 1980 Olympics. The only exceptional part of America today is our arrogance. We are now the bullies of the world–the kid you liked in 2nd grade but became a dick long before high school. The house is about to cast the vote that will codify poverty, double-down on climate change and cast us ever closer to insolvency. The America you’re looking for is gone.

Today is the culmination of the Republican vision from my entire adult life. The rich get richer… Other benefits include more funds to deport our working class, millions of Americans losing health insurance coverage, more financial pressure on American colleges and college-bound Americans, and a last-ditch-effort to try to prove trickle-down economics can work.

A couple of populist tax cuts included in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” directly benefit my family:  Susan earns tips, and both our kids earn overtime. All that income is now tax free. I suppose this should make me happy, but I’d rather see the nation pay down its debt. Donald Trump’s businesses have filed for bankruptcy six times. Is this his clever endgame for America?

On the day Trump solidified his first Republican nomination, I posted on Twitter: Today’s news seems like the last sentence in the first chapter of a dystopian novel. Using that analogy, I feel like today, Independence Day 2025, we’ve hit the cliffhanger chapter break immediately prior to Armageddon. The chaos of the past nine years was the exposition. Tomorrow, things get ugly.

Trump is often portrayed as an undisciplined megalomaniac. The undisciplined part just got harder to prove. Today, he achieved many long-held goals of the Republican party. That he did it on his self-imposed, symbolic deadline of Independence Day is icing on his cake. Well played, my nemesis, well played.

Buckle up, America. The ride gets rougher from here.

Photo by Sonder Quest on Unsplash

Remember 2022, the golden era of the internet? Back then, a reel popped up on my Instagram feed. Security footage captures a man sitting on a Target-ball in front of a store. Target-ball? You know what I mean, those large red concrete balls spaced in front of Target’s glass entryway. They make smash-and-grab rammings nearly impossible. In the footage, an out-of-control car slams into the ball next to where the man sits. The ball caroms into the ball beneath the man, knocks it away like a billiard ball, and the new ball stops directly under the man’s butt. One ball replaced the other. The man barely reacts. He probably doesn’t even know he’s sitting on a new ball yet.

“Whoa!” I watch it again and again. I can’t see any evidence that it’s fake. Convinced, I share it with my family. Real life is better than fiction. I love stuff like this. Loved! In 2022, I could watch it all day. That’s in the past now. Today, anything unbelievable is assumed to be AI.

Last week, I saw a video on Facebook. A grizzly draped itself over a car. It inadvertently pushed the car down the road as it tried to find a good angle to lick spilled food off the car hood. Realistic? Horns blared, the bear huffed, the car beneath the bear struggled under the added weight. Even the camera angle looked believable, as if the photographer tried to keep an extra car between themselves and the bear. Everything appears legit, but the bear is too big, even for a grizzly. It’s as big as the car.

I’ve seen a grizzly up close. The Cabela’s Sporting Goods in Hamburg, Pennsylvania has a taxidermized grizzly standing upright in their store. When my kids were young, we often stopped there for bathroom breaks as we drove to visit their grandparents. Cabela’s had the grizzly, a couple of elk and several huge aquariums filled with lake trout. It’s a nice break after a few hours in the car. The grizzly is massive. It’s unbelievable, frightening, awe inspiring, but it’s not as big as a car. Probably.

Here’s the thing. Maybe the grizzly video could be authentic. Maybe grizzlies actually grow that big. What do I know. I’m a city-guy from Washington, DC. But it no longer matters. I can’t tell the difference between real and fake. And if it isn’t real, what’s the point. The video isn’t exciting if Google Veo 3 thought it up. It’s impressive that AI has advanced so far since Chat GPT’s splashy release a couple of years ago, but it has ruined the magic of the unbelievable. It put an end to wonder.

Yesterday, the New York Times published a test. They posted ten short videos. Readers watched the videos and then guessed whether the content was genuine or AI generated. I got seven out of ten correct, but not because I could spot AI, the videos all looked real to me. I just used basic psychology. The more outlandish the video seemed, the less likely I was to call it AI. The most mundane videos, a guy livestreaming as he walked down a dirt road, two news anchors introducing themselves, those were fake. A whimsical clip of a model releasing balloons into the sky while flapping birds surround her, that one is real.

This is my question, my fear. Will I ever be stunned by a photograph again? A list of some of the greatest, most recognizable photos in history: Charles Ebbets – Lunch atop a Skyscraper; Nick Ut – Napalm Girl*; Alfred Eisenstaedt – V-J Day in Times Square; Steve McCurry – Afghan Girl. The next time a world-changing photograph is published, will we even know if it’s real? Will an artist capture a unique and beautiful (or terrible) moment in time, or will a clever app simply generate something sure to stir those idiotic humans who keep the electricity running.

As if to put an exclamation point on this thought, just before bed last night, I saw a tornado reel on Facebook. Tornados fascinate me. The raw, focused power makes the ‘finger of God’ analogy I’ve heard since childhood the most appropriate descriptor. The tornado in this video was a monster, ever approaching the camera as it tore a swath across the barren countryside. It’s exactly the sort of video I would watch repeatedly, mesmerized by the awful beauty of nature. Instead, I gave my head a quick shake swiped to watch Anatoly prank another room full of muscleheads. Hmmm, I wonder if that one was real. It’s much easier to create these videos on a computer than find a group of weightlifters who haven’t heard of Anatoly.  

*The attribution of Napalm Girl is currently in dispute. World Press Photo has determined that it’s possible Nick Ut, did not shoot the photo. “’Visual and technical’ evidence ‘leans toward’ an emerging theory that a Vietnamese freelance photographer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, took the photo.”

Image: Screenshot captured from Facebook

He stood on the corner before me as I crossed the street. His head bobbing and nodding, making eye contact, his lips already moving before I even made it to the sidewalk. A Fox 43 camera dangled at his side. I couldn’t hear him—a live version of Folsom Prison Blues by the Dream Syndicate filled my ears—but I already knew what he was saying. I raised a finger, the universal sign for ‘hang on a second.’ I dug my phone out of my pocket and paused my music. “What’s up?” I asked, as if I didn’t know. 

“I’m hoping to talk with you about an incident this past weekend with Sheriff Muller.” Of course. Everyone’s talking about the incident with Sheriff Muller. The Fox News guy went on for thirty seconds about Facebook memes, No Kings protests and public perceptions. He didn’t need to bother. I’m following the story closely. I’ve jumped into the online fray. 

James Muller, the Sheriff of Adams County, Pennsylvania, my county, attracted attention by posting a meme on Facebook the same day as the Gettysburg No Kings protest. He posted a photo of a white Dodge Ram pickup splattered with gallons of blood. The caption: The All New Dodge Ram Protestor Edition. I’ve included an image of the truck, but not the caption. I don’t want to make it too easy for people to repost the meme. This is humor to a seventy-nine-year-old law enforcement officer. To me, and many other citizens of my county, it’s reprehensible.   

I turned down my opportunity to be interviewed. I work in a semi-public, non-partisan position. Yes, I publish my leftist opinions weekly, but I’m not on TV. People need to seek out what I write. TV comes directly to their home. Plus, Fox News, won’t they just edit me to sound like a ranting fluffy-haired snowflake?

Unsurprisingly, the outrage against Muller isn’t universal. It falls along partisan lines. Here’s a sampling of Facebook comments associated with a neutral Pennsylvania news website that ran the story:

Melissa S: Love it. He has my vote

Wyatte E: What happen to the first amendment!?!

Christinia M: Democrats can promote assignation attempts and that is Ok. But this meme is causing such problems. Only in America.

On a side note, many of the comments echoed this sentiment: Why does any county have a SEVENTY-NINE year old sheriff??

Good question.

I couldn’t resist the urge to dive into the fray, make my opinion known. In response to a comment by John W: This outrage from the same group of people who thought it was “funny” of Kathy Griffin to post a meme of her holding the decapitated head of Donald Trump. Give me a break. #doublestandards

I responded: No, Kathy Griffin is a comedian whose job it is to shock people. Sheriff Muller’s job is to protect the very people he’s threatening. Also, if you found it abhorrent when Griffin threatened Trump, why don’t you find this abhorrent as well. Seems like you’ve got some #doublestandards of your own.

I got a couple of likes, but not the dust-up I expected.

The story seems to be growing, becoming the national news item it deserves to be. My wife and I hesitated over attending the No Kings protest fearing political violence. Since the protest, I’ve talked with a dozen people who stayed away for that very reason. As we inch ever closer to an ideological civil war, it’s not lost on me that the violent rhetoric seems to come primarily from Trump supporters, with many of the threats coming directly from the Trump administration. John W needed to reach back eight years for his Kathy Griffin example. I don’t recall any Republican politicians being handcuffed and/or arrested by the Biden administration.

Sheriff Muller’s joke about murdering citizens expressing their first amendment rights is just another step along an increasingly trodden path of citing violence as a valid method to combat dissent. When half the commentors on news websites agree with this rhetoric, how far behind can the actual violence be? I’ve heard that in discussions on Gettysburg subreddits, people are advocating against visiting our town this summer. Seems like a pretty sane idea to me.