waddaya think?
On the Difficulty of Remaining Young
After screwing up the world for the last 50 years or so, we baby boomers are clearly no longer lead players in our culture. We have become generic character actors, comic relief, like Chester in “Gunsmoke,” a reference surely lost on people busy streaming “Stranger Things” and “White Lotus.” We boomers rightly sense we have become irrelevant to the central story, unconnected to the moment’s gestalt, which many of us believe may be a digestive disorder.
Is it surprising, then, that we have become the butt of “ok, boomer” jokes? Yes, admittedly, we have ruined the planet, despoiled the oceans and bear much of the responsibility for the success of “Celebrity Apprentice.” But does all that justify becoming the coronavirus’s target demographic, constantly referred to as the elderly, the fragile, the at-risk and worst of all, the dead?
When Our Music Collections Melt Into Air
What old technology do you still have – or miss the most – and why?
Comments (1)
Mitchell Stephens A week ago · 0 Likes
I'll go first: Bench front seats in cars in the days before seatbelts -- for, you know, snuggling.
This is a complaint – about modern times, on behalf of my music collection.
I’m not often inclined to quote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. But, when it comes to the song “I’m Free” by the Rolling Stones (in particular), to the various iterations of said music collection (in general) and to the experience of my generation (in even-more general), Marx and Engels were onto something. “All that is solid,” as they put it, does indeed “melt into air”….
Reversing Time — a short video
by Mitchell Stephens
This particular counterfactual grows more interesting as we age.
What Not to Say to Your Kids, About Raising Their Kids
by Esther Davidowitz
When you're being told by your child, a complete parent newbie for goodness sakes, how to handle, feed, soothe, bathe, talk to your own grandchild, bet these words spilled out: "This is not what we did and you turned out all right."
Bet it didn't go over well….
Getting older, going further
by Carol Offen
In 1977, when I was in my late twenties, my husband and I met an “elderly couple” (he was in his early seventies and she was younger) who impressed us so much that we recently coined a word in their honor. Their last name was Cornyn, and we have paid tribute to them with the word cornyng: when older travelers (that’s now us) are sufficiently adventurous to venture off the beaten path….
Who gets what?
by Jerry Lanson
I’ve been planning my death for a while now. Decades actually. But then, you’re looking ata guy who has had more imagined terminal illnesses than baseball cards over the span of a lifetime. And I had a lot of baseball cards — that is, until my parents, without asking, decided to throw them all out when I was in college.
Still, there’s important stuff to sort out.
Writing About My Generation