Things I’ve learned so far

1. You can’t always get what you want.
2. Pessimism is a cheap and easy high. Don’t fall for it. Pessimists never accomplish anything, and the satisfaction of saying “I told you it wouldn’t work” turns out to be not very satisfying at all. If the pessimists were right, we’d all be dead.
3. Luck is real, but it’s a total waste of time to obsess over other people’s good luck, or your own bad luck. Take the circumstances you find yourself in and do the best you can with them.
4. We all develop habits that feel fun now, but are not very good for us over time. If you find yourself getting bored with a particular bad habit, the tendency is to double down — “this used to be fun, I’ll make it fun again by doing more of it/doing it in a different way.” In fact, that’s the universe telling you it’s time to quit that habit.
5. You can always try it again someday if you really miss it. But you probably won’t miss it at all.
6. The new car never gets the gas mileage advertised. It’s always 4 to 10 miles less per gallon.
7. This type of little petty lie is so common in business and advertising, that most of us do it all the time in our personal lives as well. Break that mold by doing exactly what you say you’re going to do, every time, and people will be pleasantly surprised and think you’re actually way better than you are.
8. Woody Allen was right when he said 90% of life is just showing up.
9. The hard part is when you have multiple things you could show up to. That’s why you need to have your priorities straight. Sometimes you’ll choose wrong. Don’t beat yourself up. Just remember for next time.
10. Spend more time with your kids. They grow up really fast.
11. Spend more time with your dog. They’ll probably be gone before you.
12. Turn off the TV and go outside more.
13. Look at the person you’re with more, and your phone less.
14. The solution to a cluttered space is never to buy more stuff. That includes stuff that promises to help you organize your cluttered space.
15. Whatever you want to do, get ready to treat it like a full-time job or you will fail. This particularly goes for art. I used to play in bands. We all thought we were awesome. But none of us ever rehearsed eight hours a day, seven days a week. That’s why you’ve never heard of any of the bands I played in, while Metallica has sold 40 million records.
16. Raising kids is a full time job. So having kids is like having two jobs at once, which is hard. You’ll feel like you’re working all the time because you are.
17. If you generally don’t like people, don’t have kids. They’re people. And you have to teach them everything.
18. If somebody says “it takes a village” as they drop their kids off at your house so they can go take care of their latest crisis, they’re never going to reciprocate by taking care of your kids when you need them.
19. Avoid anybody who calls themselves “an ideas person.” That means they want somebody else to do the work while they take the credit.
20. The most important component in job satisfaction is working with great and honorable people. A boring job can make you happy if the people are great. The most exciting job in the world will make you miserable if the people are incompetent or jerks.
21. Don’t put crap into your body unless you want to feel and look like crap.
22. Well-tailored clothes can make you look thinner, but you should hit the gym anyway.
23. If you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.

The narrowing

The root cause of most psychological distress is an inability to accept the narrowing.

In the instant you are conceived, the possibilities for your life are infinite. You could be anything — a leader of nations, an astronaut, a Nobel laureate, an inventor, a doctor, a novelist, a rock star, a racecar driver, a star athlete, a wealthy business owner.

For some, the narrowing begins almost immediately. Children who are born with genetic illnesses or severe disabilities are going to spend a lot of time in the hospital instead of learning the skills necessary to keep their life paths open. Competitive society will ostracize them and doors that are open to other children will remain closed.

The same goes for children born into families suffering from abject poverty, including most born in underdeveloped countries. The possibilities for them are still theoretically infinite, but their paths will be harder and the risks will be higher. Hunger, war, physical or psychological abuse, lack of education, and other extreme conditions set a different bar. If your life is spent fighting for survival, reaching adulthood is a win.

Expectations around race, class, and gender can narrow the possibilities further. If nobody you know is a doctor or engineer, if everybody continually tells you that certain paths are impossible, if your family or peers threaten you with psychological or physical abuse if you even mention or dare to conceive of such possibilities, it takes an uncommonly strong will to buck convention and keep that sense of possibility alive.

But assuming you are born with some degree of privilege and don’t need to fight every day for basic needs, the sense of possibility persists for a few years. The narrowing begins in earnest during early childhood.

Sports is a particularly stark and early example. With limited spots on the team, only a certain number of people are invited to play. If you lack the talent or physical coordination or simple basic attributes, you don’t make the team.

One by one, your childhood dreams fall by the wayside. Not everybody gets to be a ballet dancer. Or a concert pianist. Or an NBA player.

A poor choice or tragedy may dramatically narrow your paths all at once. A car accident. An unplanned pregnancy. The death of a parent or other close family member. A sudden loss of housing or income.

Assuming you avoid or manage these pitfalls, eventually you learn what you’re good at — mainly by listening to the praise and encouragement of other people — and you begin to devote more time and energy to those pursuits. With luck and hard work, that positive feedback loop carries you through formal education and other gateways and you find your way into an independent adult life. You meet people. You make friends. You make money. You fall in love. You have fun.

What you don’t realize until much later is that every choice you make, every path you decline to take, narrows your path further. If you throw yourself into a job you don’t love, it might become a career, until one day you wake up and realize that other career paths are closed and you have no choice but to keep working where you are because you need the money. If you date too many of the wrong people, you might end up marrying one of them, forgoing the possibility of finding true and enduring love. If you develop bad habits, they might become addictions that make you crazy or sick.

On the other hand, you might FOMO yourself into nothing at all, half-committing to job after job, partner after partner, until you end up unsatisfied and alone, wondering where your chances went.

Even if you’re successful in the life you’ve chosen, the narrowing continues. At some point, you realize you’re not going to get promoted to the top job. You’re not going to close that big deal and land the corner office. Those stock options are never going to be in the money. You’re never going to sell that book, that screenplay, that business idea. There is no windfall, no lottery ticket, no inheritance. You begin to take the good things for granted — your health, your friends, a pleasant home, a happy family — and wonder if you could have done better somewhere else, with other people, in another city or country. You look ahead to your parents and elders and see how the narrowing continues, their lives growing smaller and smaller. No matter how rich or successful you are, eventually you lose your faculties. You can no longer travel. You can no longer drive. You’re housebound. You’re in a group home with no privacy. Bedridden. Hospitalized. Finally, a narrow box.

People deal with the narrowing in different ways. Career changes. Divorce. Adultery. Hedonism. Plastic surgery. Obsessive hobbies. A return to inappropriate or failed youthful pursuits. Therapy. Meds. Midlife crisis purchases — cars, boats, second homes, exotic travel. All of these things can temporarily widen your narrowing horizons and make you feel better. Sometimes, the changes bring you unexpected late life success or fix problems you’ve been ignoring for years, giving you new peace of mind.

But they are all temporary. Even if you choose every right path, it is easy to be nagged by all the paths you never took. And the narrowing eventually returns.

The happiest people are the ones who make peace with the narrowing and spend their lives in the here and now.

Breathe. Take nothing for granted. Enjoy where you are. Be vocal with your gratitude. Celebrate your friends and family. Give love freely, with no expectations. Acknowledge your emotions, high and low. Find joy in what you do. Stop faking it, nobody cares. Lend a hand to others in need.

As I approach the end of my 54th year on earth, I am striving to get better at all of this. I still have a ways to go.

A moment of clarity at the dog park

Early this year, we got a pandemic puppy from the San Francisco SPCA to replace Luna, our beloved Boston terrier who died last year. Our new pup, Topaz, is much more DOG than Luna ever was, part lab, part pit, part mutt, 50 pounds at eight months old, tail thumping and licking and gnawing, surface surfing for scraps, spectacular high jumps and a big muscular chest that pulls you along like a freight train. Doesn’t bark much, which is good. Pulled Angie over chasing after a couple of kids and broke her elbow, which is bad. A lot of work and a lot of early mornings.

But I mean, how can you say no to this?

So I’ve found myself taking Topaz to the dog park most days. There’s a park near our house, Upper Douglass, which features a wide open field overshadowed on two sides by a rocky cliff with a walking path for particularly rambunctious dogs and their terrified owners, and the other two sides by a chain link fence overlooking a spectacular view of the city, interspersed with tall spindly pines.

bliWatching the dogs play without much interference from their humans offers a lot of insight into human behavior. Groups of dogs break off from one another, focused momentarily on a singular task, like chasing a ball or another dog, or digging in a particularly aromatic hole. None of these tasks matter beyond the moment they’re engaged in them, but at the time the dogs take them very seriously and devote their full attention to them. Various canine personalities emerge. There are the social butterflies who cavort from group to group, temporarily throwing their all into a particular task then quickly getting distracted and moving on when the action gets slow. There are the aggressors, always trying to top the other dogs and show who’s boss. There are the taskmasters, focusing intently on a particular task at hand and goading other dogs into joining. There are the teases, waving a ball or stick in front of another dog to try and instigate a chase, and immediately losing interest if nobody follows. There are the referees or pundits, who don’t get involved themselves but run nearby, barking the whole time as if delivering instructions or commentary. Sometimes, a pair of particularly compatible dogs gets into a rhythm, sometimes topping, sometimes submitting, gnawing at each other’s faces and wrestling but never pushing it too far — the rules of the game are known to them, obscure to the humans, like Olympic sports would be to an alien. There are the observers who stand at a safe distance, watching but never playing. The elderly, the infirm, the wounded. All of them make an appearance.

Yesterday, I was sitting back on a chair watching the dogs play as the fog started to billow down over the cliff toward the park. A flock of birds flew high overhead. It was strangely quiet, despite the occasional bark or chuf.

Then I had a blinding insight that’s hard to describe. It became clear that none of the things I was seeing had anything to do with each other.

Not only were the dogs blissfully unaware of the unimportance of their tasks relative to their human owners, and blissfully unaware of the details of their surroundings, but the birds didn’t know about the dogs and the dogs didn’t know about the birds. The trees didn’t know about the dogs or the birds. The cliff didn’t know about the trees. The fog didn’t know about anything. These things existed completely discreetly and independently of one another, with no essential connection. Any connection I drew between them was arbitrary, and existed only in my consciousness — which was no more expansive, and no less limited, than the consciousness of the dogs.

I’ve long had this idea that the universe is all connected, and sometimes speaks to me in signs or portents. Everything happens for a reason. If only I could read the signs more effectively, I’d make the right decisions more often, I’d know what was going to happen before it happened, I’d understand my relationships and how to thrive at home, with friends, at work, in life. Sometimes, it seems as if I am able to read these signs ahead of time and make smart decisions, which I congratulate myself on. Other times, I see in retrospect how I missed something that should have been obvious, and kick myself.

But in the dog park, I realized this is all wrong. This way of looking at things — which may come more naturally to the religious, those who view the world as the manifestation of God’s will — assumes that what happens inside one’s mind is connected to what happens outside one’s mind. It assumes that our own consciousness is a part of something larger that we can occasionally glimpse through art, through science, through study, through a series of coincidences that we impose patterns on. (Mark Vonnegut termed this “grace” in “The Eden Express,” a fantastic book about a mental breakdown.)

But there’s no reason to believe that anything in our mind has anything to do with anything outside of it. The universe is infinitely larger than we can perceive, and what we see every day is just a play inside our heads, based on our own very limited human psychology — just like what the dogs are doing is disconnected from everything around them. The dogs receive occasional commands and nudges from we humans, the “higher” power in their universe, just like we may receive occasional nudges from some web of consciousness that’s one step up the chain. But these nudges and insights are an inessential, minuscule part of a whole that is so great, so complex, so disconnected, that it’s essentially unknowable.

I used to get this feeling sometimes looking at the stars. I imagine astronomers and microbiologists — people who are regularly confronted with the near-infinite scope and complexity of the universe — feel it often. But I had somehow forgotten that feeling, and became caught up in my ego and the presumed importance of my life, my circumstances, my mental chatter.

There is something liberating about the idea that the mind is finite and the universe is infinite, but I have no idea what to do with this knowledge, so instead I just did what I do and made a blog post in case it helps somebody else get to a helpful place.

What if?

Originally written in October 2020.

What if he really does it, is what I keep thinking to myself.

He’s not subtle. You can say a lot of things about the man — he’s venal, narcissistic, vengeful, mercurial, criminal — but he says what he means and means what he says. He said Mexicans crossing the border were rapists. He said the Central Park Five were murderers. He said Obama wasn’t born here. He encouraged the police to use more force. So why was anybody surprised at the photos of immigrants in cages or police firing tear gas at peaceful protesters?

My father’s side of the family is Jewish. I have a Jewish last name. Although my father is not observant — he and his parents were fully secularized 1950s California Jews, celebrating Christmas and eating bacon — I was nonetheless raised with a keen awareness of the generations-long tragedy of the Jews. “How Odd Is God” and “Fiddler on the Roof” and Anne Frank. Later, Primo Levi. Viktor Frankl. Tadeusz Borowski, whose “This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” remains seared into my brain from when I read it more than 30 years ago.

Still, Holocaust literature does a disservice to the state of things because it presents only the most extreme outgrowth of authoritarianism. We look for laws criminalizing particular ethnic groups or people forcibly removed from their homes and packed into ghettos, then trains. We don’t see these things — not now, not yet — and we think, OK, maybe things aren’t that bad. Maybe I’m spending too much time on Twitter or reading doomporn in The Atlantic or New York Times. Maybe this is just an elaborate fund-raising scheme for the Democrats. 

Would he really try to steal the election? Would he really refuse to accept a peaceful transfer of power? Would he really encourage his army of goons, the camo-clad rednecks with pickup trucks and gigantic flags bearing his name, to trade their bear mace and paintball guns for actual AR15s? Would they use them?

Maybe he’s bluffing. The man does bluff. 

But maybe he’s not.

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2020 is a strange time to be 50 years old with children. It’s a strange time to be any age, but we GenXers were always cynical, always prepared at our core for the worst. Perhaps it comes from growing up under a dominant parenting strategy of benign neglect. Latchkey kids with weekend dads. Or maybe it was all those nuclear war movies like “The Day After.” The collapse of the Soviet Union never felt like the end of history to us. We always knew something else would come along. Something always does.

They were talking about global warming in the 1980s. It was on the cover of Time Magazine. There were radical environmentalists in the news, that Butterfly girl who camped in the giant redwood up in Humboldt so they wouldn’t chop it down, the manic ravings of the Unabomber. But the rest of us, we tried! We went door to door, asking for money for Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups or Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, accepting that seven out of ten people would slam the door in our face and two would be openly hostile, but one might engage and, sometimes, contribute. 

What happened, our grandkids will ask. Well, first the internet came along and simultaneously distracted us and made us feel important — suddenly we were the smart ones, explaining to our clueless parents how this was going to change everything and hell yes they should buy some Netscape stock, but not Microsoft because Bill Gates was evil and didn’t get the internet or open source. We rode that train for a few years, the luckiest of us escaping with enough cash for a down payment, everybody else with memories of unhinged corporate parties and flaming cocktails and that weird year where everybody suddenly rediscovered swing dancing. 

Then came Bush v Gore. The first contested election in our lifetimes. The first time since the 1800s in which a candidate with a minority of the popular vote won the presidency through an Electoral College majority. We were glued to the TV. Things were happening in Florida. There were two sides, the media told us, protesters on both sides. Chaos. Who was right?

The Supreme Court shut it down. It was an obviously political decision along straight party lines. But we all knew the Supreme Court was political. Brown v Board of Education was political. Roe v Wade was political. Twelve years of Reagan and Bush the Elder had turned the court back the other way, 5 to 4. What did we expect? 

They put their fingers on the scale for Team Oil. Team Carbon. Team Doom. 

Gore, who, let the record show, barely talked about the environment during his campaign and gave up nearly 3% of the popular vote to Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, belatedly went all in for Team Green. He made a movie and started flying around the world doing speaking gigs and became the guy who could’ve saved us. But really, he wouldn’t have. 

Then came 9/11 and the brutally dishonest pivot to Iraq. We marched against that, too, millions of us took to the streets but it didn’t matter. It was never going to matter. Colin Powell and the White House whipped the press into line with talk of yellowcake uranium and WMDs and that was that. The next decade disappeared into endless overseas wars and recriminations and torture and IEDs and drone strikes and disabled veterans ODing on opioids, horror after horror after horror. The TV, turn it off already. Easy to grow numb. Easy to forget.

Meanwhile, we grew up. We joined bands and wrote novels. We brewed beer and pickled vegetables. We got Serious Jobs working for The Man. We got health insurance. We bought houses. We had babies who turned into kids — another 40-hour-a-week job, minimum, in addition to the one we needed to pay our underwater mortgages. Who had time to protest? Maybe later, after the kids grow up.

But hey, we recycled! We composted. We filled our houses with metal thermoses so we didn’t have to add another Dasani bottle to the landfill. We bought Priuses. We bought Teslas.

Secretly, inside, we knew we weren’t really these people we were pretending to be. We were still rad, still indie, our hearts were still Tarantino and Linklater and Cobain (without the heroin-suicide part). The tattoos and piercings and guitars still meant something. We could turn on a dime. When things really went south, when the revolution came, we’d be ready.

We’re so not ready. 

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“Should we buy a gun?”

My wife asked me this back in the first weeks of the pandemic, when it became clear that the lockdown was going to last for a while. Businesses would close. People would lose their jobs. They’d get hungry. They’d come up the hill to where we live, we, the lucky people with multiple computers and jobs that let us work from home. First, they’d beg. Then, they’d break in. Finally, they’d just kill us.

My wife grew up in rural Tennessee and learned to shoot at a young age. She left as soon as she could and never looked back, and has vehemently renounced the racism and sexism and closed-mindedness of the place. 

But she also knows how precarious this life is. San Francisco is not quite the liberal cliche Red America envisions. The city is gritty, dirty, filled with homeless people in tents and drugs (yes, we’ve all seen the news), but also with hustlers, gangsters, shallow California types into cars and clothes and real estate, and entire neighborhoods of blue-collar skeptics who wouldn’t be out of place in Queens. 

At the same time, San Franciscans share a sybaritic sensibility driven by the jaw-dropping natural beauty of the place, the peek-a-boo fog over hills piled high with pastel houses, the proximity to hundreds of miles of sandy beaches and ancient forests, the absurd abundance of vineyards and breweries, organic berry farms, nut farms, olive farms, marijuana farms. The weather always feels like spring and everybody’s horny. The city cycles through thousands of beautiful young people, a new crop every year, some born and bred here in the clean ocean air, some migrants rising up to chase their fortunes. 

It can make you soft. 

So what if he really does it? What happens next? Will San Franciscans take to the streets in protest? Will the mayor and Board of Supervisors declare Trump an illegitimate president? Will the MAGAs invade in their pickup trucks? Will they start shooting? Will they come after Pelosi, Feinstein, anybody with a Black Lives Matter sign in their window?

Will the cops protect us?

The cops in San Francisco today are not as dominant-aggressive as they are in other parts of the country, but there’s a history of brutality against minorities — San Francisco was one of the cities Obama’s Justice Department said needed major police reforms. After George Floyd, the mayor called for defunding the force and training an army of mental health professionals and social workers to deal with psychotic street people and other non-emergencies.

Will the cops, defunded, still feel duty to the city they were sworn to protect? Or will they fade into the background? Or, worse, go civilian and join the pickup truck crews?

I never understood the logic of the Second Amendment fundamentalists. The idea is not just to protect your home against criminals — a couple of handguns should be enough for that. The true believers view near-military-grade weaponry as a bulwark against a hostile government like all those Holocaust writers described, like Germany in the 1930s. 

But really? How long can one man, or even a small militia, stand up against a military force with flamethrowers and tanks and bombs? Better to go out in a blaze of glory, maybe that’s the idea. Live on your feet or die on your knees.

Now I think, what if the tables are turned? What if the military and the cops and the militias join up against the liberal city-dwelling elite? Who would fight back? The liberal-elite city militias? Do those even exist? Is antifa even real? How long would they last against an alliance of National Guardsmen and ICE and pickup-truck MAGAs with semiautomatics?

I try to calm down and think like my parents, like the people in the upper-middle-class suburb where I grew up. We’re lucky. We’re white. We own property. The cops drive through our neighborhood to protect us, not to attack us. In a worst-case scenario, it’s a balm to think that our privilege would allow us to be ignored or bypassed. It’s the minorities, the protesters, the anarchist kids whose blood will run in the streets. 

But then what? Eventually they take over the courts. Those for-profit prisons have to be filled. Those angry young men in pickup trucks need new enemies. 

I work as a journalist — an “enemy of the people.” I have a Jewish last name. 

Should we buy a gun? 

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In February, on Presidents’ Day weekend, I suffered a freak accident. 

We were in Yosemite with another couple and their kids. There was no snow at the elevation where we were staying — February was unusually warm and dry, the kind of “unusual” that we all know with a sinking feeling is the new normal — but the kids wanted to go sledding, so we drove up to Badger Pass and stopped at a snowy sloping meadow off the main road. The kids slid down a chute on those fifteen-dollar plastic discs they sell at Walmart while I stood at the bottom and served as their backstop. There was plenty of meadow behind me, but this was the wilderness. For all we knew, the meadow ended in a cliff.

My kids slowed down before they ran into me, but my friend’s son seemed to think it would be sporting to knock me over like a bowling pin. He accelerated into the collision right as his dad handed me a piece of beef jerky. I should’ve dodged, but instead I reached down with my right arm to block the kid from undercutting my legs — he’s solid for a ten-year-old, a beefy little American tank — and the front of his plastic disc slammed into my arm, detaching my biceps tendon where it connects the muscle to my inner elbow.

It took four hours to get to the emergency room in San Francisco. My wife drove the whole way, fast and focused, a stoic warrior princess, while I shook from the adrenaline and ice and tried not to bend my arm.

Two weeks later, I went in for surgery. The doctor — Dr. Zhang, a bouncy orthopedic surgeon who seemed way too young for such a serious job (you know you’re old when all the doctors seem young) — he would cut my arm open, reach up under my biceps for the tendon, pull it down, and sew it back on to the bone. It was an outpatient procedure, but I’d be knocked out under general anesthetic for the first time. I was scared. 

As we drove to the hospital, a sudden fire started on the mountains south of the city, sending a column of smoke billowing up into the air. I’m not the biggest Grateful Dead fan in the world, but their guitarist and leader, Jerry Garcia, grew up in the Excelsior district of San Francisco, right below those mountains. Fire, fire on the mountain. Grateful, dead. 

Over the last seven months, I’ve sometimes wondered if I actually died on the table and I’m stuck in some kind of hallucinatory afterlife. Suddenly everybody’s stuck at home? We’re all wearing masks? Everything’s canceled? 

Is this a punishment or a test? 

I know 2020 has been a lot harder for other people than it’s been for me. My daughter spent the second half of eighth grade staring at her friends through little windows on her computer. No band trip, no dances, no graduation. Now she’s suffering through the beginning of high school with no way to make friends, no way to gossip or flirt, no camaraderie, no humor. The teachers try — she’s in a select high school, which she worked hard to get into — and the lessons are challenging, but she’s lonesome. She cries about it. It’s not fair. 

Life’s not fair, I sometimes tell her. You ain’t seen nothing yet. (I don’t say that second part.)

Nobody in our family has caught Covid yet. I know only three people who’ve had it — two children of friends and one work acquaintance. None of them got very sick. San Francisco has been the safest large city, statistically, throughout the whole pandemic. We also dodged the riots and police brutality that gripped New York and Portland and Seattle and Oakland and Minneapolis and so many other cities after George Floyd was shot. I have a home, and a job that lets me work safely from it, and a family that mostly enjoys each other’s company, even after seven months in almost constant proximity. We live in a city where you can go to the beach in November and March.

But still, as we go through all the normal ups and downs of a modern middle-class American life — the car dented by an errant driver, the mysterious case of head lice that keeps traveling from kid to kid despite neither of them having been in school for nearly seven months, the tragic stumbling end of our beloved dog’s life after years of decline — all the time wearing the scratchy N95 masks my wife bought after the last round of California wildfires in 2018, assiduously maintaining our six-foot bubbles, sanitizing every time we get in the car, doomscrolling on the toilet at 4 a.m., pretending we’re having a fun dinner out as we eat shivering in the wind while the servers try to hide their terror (I always tip 25% now), trying to stay in touch with distant friends and relatives through Zoom calls, then regular phone calls, then brief texts as we all tire of one another’s endlessly similar quarantine stories, eyes going blurry from fourteen hours of screen time a day, reading about our favorite places disappearing after the other, no more dim sum from Ton Kiang, no more perfect bread between the reclaimed wooden walls at Outerlands, no more sticky rice in the Ferry Building — the only food in the world that makes my son light up every time he tastes it — missing the things we took for granted, no weird angular guitar noise at The Chapel, no sax-art esoterica at SFJazz, no symphony, no arena rock, no art museum, no Academy of Science, no Giants games, no Warriors games, no flying to Seattle for Seahawks games, no flying anywhere for any reason at all…well. Sometimes, it’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for yourself.

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When the gyms shut down in March, I developed a new exercise routine. 

Every morning, I drive to a different part of San Francisco and climb a hill. If it’s not too foggy, I can sometimes watch the sun rise. There’s a lot of nature in this big city. I’ve seen hawks and wild parrots and raccoons dropping from trees. I’ve surprised several coyotes. I began to think maybe I wouldn’t go back to the gym at all, even when the lockdown ended.

Around the middle of August, my ritual took on a new dimension: Before I set out, I’d check the air quality map on my phone. San Francisco was surrounded by fires — three huge ones that burned the redwoods near Santa Cruz and the scrub east of San Jose and north of Fairfield, and a smaller but annoyingly persistent one up in Point Reyes. A tiny shift in the wind would turn the air into campfire smoke and the dots on the map to orange, then red, then purple. When the wind was stagnant I often found myself out by the beach, where there was sometimes a small strip of yellow dots. I developed a nasty cough but figured it wasn’t Covid since my wife had just tested negative.

Wildfire smoke is a different class of natural disaster than a hurricane or blizzard. Those can be devastatingly destructive to life and property, but at least they end. You pick up the pieces, clean up the streets, restore the power, and move on. 

Smoke lingers like a malevolent spirit, permeating everything. You feel the ghosts of millions of trees in your eyes and lungs and mouth. There’s no escape unless you work in a climate-controlled office. And those are all shut down this year.

One Wednesday morning in September I woke up to mostly good news — yellow and orange dots. I pulled on my sweats and drove over to Bernal Heights, a small barren hill over on the east side of town.

I parked and started walking, but something was wrong. Usually, the sky starts to get light around 6:45, even when it’s foggy. Instead, it was staying dark. I thought for a brief second that I’d missed a time change and the sun was rising an hour later. But it was September. Daylight savings started in March.

As I climbed, the sky grew lighter, but the color was wrong, a sort of hazy yellow-orange. There’s a spiral maze of red-colored rocks on the northwest side of Bernal and I walked through it, muttering something like a prayer, then took a quick shot to post to Instagram with a jokey caption, Red rocks, orange sky. Life on Mars.

When I got back home around 8 a.m., the streetlights were still on and the joke wasn’t funny. I began my workday at my computer like usual, but outside the sky kept growing darker. It reminded me of the time Mt. St. Helens blew, sending a cloud of ash across Eastern Washington and turning day into night. This was the same, but orange, not black. The cars were covered with ash, but it was dead tree cells instead of silicon. 

The pictures don’t convey how surreal it was. It wasn’t just one tableau of orange in one direction like a sunset. Everything was orange. The entire sky, horizon to horizon, the light, the shadows, inside and outside. People compared it to being at the bottom of a glass of orange juice, but it reminded me of the album cover for Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy.” Zeppelin scholars understand that album represents the bottom of the band’s descent into the underworld, the last step before they began their futile climb toward light.

The orange lasted throughout the day, only turning back to hazy yellow as the sun started to set in the west. Then it was night, true night. What if tomorrow was like this, too? What if it lasted for a week? How long until the plants started to die and the crops started to fail? How long until we all went insane?

The next day, the sun rose through filtered grey fog and I cried. 

Later that week, the smoke descended and all the dots on the map turned black. 

One of the only good things to come from the pandemic was buying my son his first real bike. It reversed one of my biggest shames as a father — we live on a hill, so our kids never really took to bikes when they were little, and we never pushed it. Suddenly here we were with ten and fourteen-year-olds who had never learned to ride a bike. It made for some awkward moments. “You’re doing what for your birthday party? Oh, sorry, I just realized we have plans that day.”

The bike thing went great, though! There’s a national bicycle shortage, it’s not clear exactly why — the pandemic has a lot of Soviet-Union-right-before-the-fall vibes — and we were worried we couldn’t get one. But we lined up outside the shop early one Sunday morning and my son immediately spotted the bike he wanted through the window. It was still for sale, not already sold. It fit him perfectly. It had a bell and a kickstand, two options that he knew he wanted. The electric blue color matched the color of the helmet we’d bought him last year for an hour-long “how to ride a bike” clinic. 

I was worried he wouldn’t figure it out and get frustrated, but it was smooth. I started by pushing him along with one hand, then letting go after a few seconds, then I taught him how to start the pedals himself, and within a couple hours he was speeding along like he’d been riding for years. He’s an earnest kid, smart and extroverted, but he’s not doing well with the lockdown. I was seeing the first signs of adolescent rage around the dinner table and in our long car rides to the beach. 

Riding his bike, he was away from his overbearing family, away from the unfair circumstances of his childhood. He could go where he wanted, flying fast, free. Happy. 

But you can’t ride a bike in the smoke.

How much worse can this get? How many more “can’t” conversations will we have with our kids this year, next year, for the next twenty years? 

Sorry, you still can’t go to school — the vaccine didn’t work, the teachers are on strike, they all quit, there’s no school anymore. Can’t go to Disneyland, or New York, or Hawaii — the rides are closed, Broadway’s gone, we’d have to quarantine, flying isn’t safe anyway. Can’t leave the country — our passports are no good anymore because the rest of the world is scared of our disease, our incompetence, our institutionalized cruelty.

Can’t go outside — the air’s bad this month. Can’t go to the beach — too many dead seals. Can’t go downtown — too many guns, the cops are gone. Can’t drive to Oregon or Montana or cross-country — we have California plates, they’d think we’re antifa and shoot us. Can’t afford those berries, they’re $20 a box. Can’t have sushi, the big fish are all gone. Can’t talk about that book in public, they’re always listening. The microphones are everywhere, we paid for them and put them in our house and our cars and our pockets.

Global warming was on the cover of Time Magazine in the 1980s. We did nothing and here we are.

Donald Trump told us exactly who he was and what he was going to do.

What if he really does it?

Remembering Luna

I’ve never been nostalgic. I have trouble looking backwards. I don’t even like to look at old pictures more than once or twice a year. But as I get older and my mind fades, I find that this habit has made me forget parts of the past, and I don’t want to forget Luna, our sweet beloved dog, who we had to put down this week after a couple years of decline, so I’m doing what writers do and writing down some memories.

In 2005, my wife Angela and I were settled into our first house in the Bryant neighborhood of Seattle and getting ready to start a family. Like many couples in similar situations, we thought a dog would help us figure out how to work together to care for another living being, someone who was totally dependent on us. Plus, we’d both had dogs as kids and thought they were sweet and fun.

In retrospect, it would have been kinder and better for the world if we’d gone with a rescue dog, but it was our first dog and we just didn’t know what we were doing, so we did what knew how to do, and searched Craigslist for various breeds. Fox Terriers. Airedales. Kerry Blues.

But the previous Thanksgiving, I’d visited my brother in El Paso, and his girlfriend Kimberly, who took care of rescue dogs, had a little Boston Terrier named Tony. He was one of the crazy Bostons, running all over the place, and liked to dig up the solar lights in the backyard and lay them out in a line.

But the thing that really drew me to him: During a break after Thanksgiving dinner, the mother of one of Ryan’s friends stepped out into the backyard to smoke a cigarette. She sat down to light it, and Tony came zipping across the yard, jumped up, and snatched it out of her mouth. It was the coolest spontaneous trick I’d ever seen from a dog, so I was advocating pretty hard for a Boston.

Then we saw Luna’s picture in an advertisement and that was that.

We contacted the breeder — she was supposedly born on a farm in Union, Oregon — and paid them a few hundred bucks, maybe $500.  The breeder’s daughter said she’d be in Seattle in a few days anyway, so we made an appointment to pick her up.

We’d been at my friend Kevin’s birthday party, so I was a few drinks in and Angela drove. We met the woman in a ground-floor apartment off Aurora Avenue, a dismal four-lane highway that stretches through North Seattle.

The litter of puppies was crawling and tumbling around on the floor behind her. They were all about six weeks old, and just tiny, about the size of my foot. Three rambunctious males, and cowering behind them, the submissive runt of the litter, the only female, with a mostly white head. That was our dog.

The breeder gave us papers supposedly proving she was a pedigreed Boston, descended from a mother named Princess Care Bear. They weren’t from the American Kennel Club, but from some outfit in New Orleans we’d never heard of called the Continental Kennel Club. I always kind of suspected that she wasn’t from a farm in Oregon at all, but had been spawned at a puppy mill at some house in North Seattle — a friend of a friend’s wife who lived near there ran one out of her garage, and I think it was kind of common — but it didn’t matter. She was ours.

I remember riding home in the front seat holding her tiny body in my hand as she whined, missing her litter and her mom. I promised her that we’d always take care of her, no matter what. We threw possible names out to each other, and eventually decided on Luna. No particular reason, it just sounded right.

A bandmate of mine, upon hearing we’d gotten a puppy, joked that it was like having a drunk baby in the house — they don’t know anything, they’re clumsy, and they make messes all the time. It wasn’t that bad, but it was far more of a commitment and challenge than we’d anticipated. But we also fell completely in love.

Over the next fifteen years, she gave us so many memories. Like:

• Cowering at the top of the stairs mewling, because they were too big for her to climb down. It took a few weeks for her to learn.
• Imagining that she would sleep on a dog bed on the floor, then going on a business trip and discovering that Angela had invited her into the bed. Once a dog is in the bed, the dog never leaves the bed. She spent most nights right between us, or nestled between my legs.
• Puppies have teeth like little needles, and they fall out, just like human baby teeth. Only because dogs are dogs, they can’t tell you they lost a tooth. So instead we’d just find these little things that looked like grains of rice lying on the floor.
• One time a cooked Cornish game hen fell on the floor and she devoured it in about two bites. She was less than a year old and less than 20 pounds and we were sure she was going to die from the chicken bones and we were horrible dog owners who were going to be scolded by all our friends and families. Nope. She was perfectly fine. Didn’t even miss her next meal.
• I was playing music with my band in the basement, and the loud bass bothered her so much that she climbed up on the door of the open dishwasher and cowered.
• We were getting ready for a party and had left some cheeses out on the kitchen table. She jumped up there and started eating them, moving from most-stinky (Pt Reyes Blue, which she finished) to second-most-stinky (some kind of Brie, which she half-finished).
• Training her to chase a ball in the house to try and give her some exercise during the rainy Seattle winters. She was not a natural retriever, so I had to reward her with treats the first few times so she’d bring the ball to me. Soon enough, she figured it out and would retrieve dozens and dozens of times before getting bored. She’d chase the ball skittering on the hardwood floors and bouncing off the walls.
• Traveling to the beach in Oregon when she was about 6 months old. I had her on a leash as she dragged me to the beach, and I stumbled into a hole, spraining my ankle and putting me on crutches for the next few weeks. From then on, we let her off leash, and she was great — she never ran off, and always came to us when we called.
• When Angela was pregnant with both kids, Luna knew immediately and curled up against her belly in bed instead of sleeping between us. Both times, she beat the pregnancy test.
• When we first took Ava home from the hospital, Luna had this look on her face like her job had just gotten harder. Four years later, when we brought Marlon home, it was the same look only even more stoic. She always stayed near them. Whenever we went camping or traveling with her, she’d position herself between the kids and the door to the outside world, ready to attack anybody who’d even consider hurting them.
• She appropriated a baby blanket from Ava, a turtle head connected to a satiny green and tan square, and used to run around the house dragging it behind her like a totem. We left it somewhere on a road trip to visit my mom in California when Ava was 3.
• She was the fastest small dog I’ve ever seen. She’d run huge circles in fields or on the beach, outpacing every other dog at the dog park except the Italian greyhounds and whippets. Her ears would pin back on her head and she looked more like a rabbit than a dog.
• One day I was walking her in our neighborhood in Seattle and a woman asked me what kind of dog she was. We talked for a minute and I explained why I liked Boston Terriers so much. A few weeks later, she and her husband were walking their own — a male they named Nemo. We became friends with the couple, Sarah and Felix, who owned a restaurant in the neighborhood called Pair. Later, they hired Angela as their pastry chef, and she helped them design the menu for and open their second restaurant, Frank’s, down the street.
• We would dog-sit each other’s dogs. Nemo was bigger and stinkier than Luna, and we used to call him cigar-butt. He had this thing about balloons — he hated them and would always try to pop them. We could occupy him by tying a balloon to the ceiling so it was dangling just out of reach. He’d jump and bark at it, and Luna would bark at him. Luna continued to bark at balloons her entire life, especially the sound of two balloons squeaking together, until she was too old to see or hear them.
• One of her tricks: About a block from the house, I could take her off the leash and yell “go home!” and she’d run as fast as she could, straight for the front door.
• She loved playing with many breeds of dogs at the dog park, but had a particular affinity for bigger dogs like Australian Shepherds, who would try and herd her as she tried to outrun them in these huge sweeping arcs, and for pit bulls, who are half-terrier, half-bulldog, just like she was. We were always worried a pittie would go bad and attack her, but it never happened. The only incident like that was with an Australian Shepherd at Baker Beach in San Francisco, who picked her up by the scruff of the neck like she was prey. I knocked the shepherd down with my hands, picked Luna up, and chewed its owner out for poorly training her dog. It wasn’t fair, but I was upset and my adrenaline was high. Weirdly, she never liked other Bostons much. We took her to a few meetups in Stern Grove but she always stayed on the sidelines and growled any time one of them got too close her. She was unusually submissive and calm for a Boston, so I think she just thought the others were annoying spazzes.
• When we moved to San Francisco, the house sold much faster than expected and we had to pack up and make a lot of arrangements in a hurry. Luna always stayed behind in the house with the dwindling supply of furniture, and had a questioning look on her face. Angela and the kids eventually flew down while I drove our car down I-5 in November, making it over the Siskiyous just ahead of the snow. She was in my lap in the driver’s seat, uncomplaining and wedged up against the door handle, the entire time, 14 hours over two days.
• She loved Ocean Beach and Fort Funston and would run in circles in the sand for hours. She’d get into these trances where she’d dig holes, or try and dig a ball out of a hole only to have it go deeper and deeper.
• One time, I was cleaning the barbecue downstairs and there was a huge pile of ashes. They smelled like meat, so she started eating them. That was one of the few things she ever ate that made her actually sick. She got into the kids’ chocolate Easter and Christmas candy several times, which is supposed to be fatal to dogs, but she never even threw up from it.
• We noticed she was starting to get old about three years ago when her vision started to fade. She’d see me throw the ball at the field, but would set off in the direction I threw it then lose her way. Over time, her vision faded entirely, and she stopped chasing balls altogether, first in the field, and eventually in the house.
• Her vision got bad enough that she was no longer able to navigate stairs. I learned this the hard way on a very hot day when Angela and the kids were out of town, vising her family in Tennessee, and I was home alone with her. I’d just given her a bath to cool her down and she walked into the hallway, then tried to turn into Marlon’s room to lay in the cool carpet. But instead, she mistook the open path to the stairwell for  his room, and went tumbling down the landing. I was sure she’d broken her neck or leg, but she was able to stand and walk and seemed OK. We eventually bought a baby gate for the top of the stairs.
• Her hearing faded as well. At first we thought she was just ignoring us, but then we realized it was serious when she no longer came running when we opened the metal container where we kept the dog food.
• Her walks got shorter and shorter. She used to be able to go over Mt. Davidson off leash, but eventually that became too much for her, and one time she slipped off the path into the bushes because she couldn’t see as well as we thought she could. So we started taking her around the block, always on a leash, then just down to the end of the street, and then finally just let her go to the bathroom in the front yard. Sometimes we’d carry her a block and she’d be able to walk back. Other times, she’d make us carry her both ways.
• A little more than a year ago, when she was 13, she developed this night time habit of waking up several times — at midnight, and 2, and 4, and 6 — and begging for food. Her belly also started to get distended, and her eyes got this reddish look in them. Eventually, we took her to the vet and they diagnosed her with Cushing’s Disease, which is usually caused by a tumor on the adrenal gland, either near her pancreas or on her brain. They did a scan and didn’t find anything on her pancreas, so we assumed she had a brain tumor. But we started giving her drugs for the Cushing’s, and she perked up again and stopped waking us up multiple times most nights. But there were still plenty of bad nights, and she never slept later than 5:30. Often, she started around 4.
• The mornings were her most active time over the last few months. I’d carry her up the stairs, give her her first (or sometimes second) breakfast with her pill, then let her wander around upstairs. She would always push open the doors to the kids’ bedrooms and check on them, at least once, sometimes several times. Most of the rest of the day, she’d sleep, sometimes in weird places like under the piano bench or curled up in a corner. One time, she fell asleep in her water bowl. Another time, she crawled behind the oven and started barking when she realized she couldn’t get out. Animals often try to hide when they’re sick, so we knew the time was getting close.
• A few months ago, right after the coronavirus lockdown started, I was working at home when Ava came downstairs and noticed she was lying funny with her mouth foaming. I roused her and she started pacing, off-balance, and continued to walk in circles like she was in a trance for about an hour. We weren’t sure what had happened, but a couple weeks later she was in bed with us and started having a full seizure, kicking and foaming, then proceeded again to pace for about an hour. We took her to to the vet and as they were examining her she got nervous and had another seizure. They told us what the possibilities were — most likely a brain tumor, but at the age of nearly 15 they agreed it didn’t make sense to spend money on a canine neurologist to get a final diagnosis. They prescribed her anti-seizure medication and advised us to begin thinking about the end. The drugs seemed to work for a while, but she still had at least one more seizure that we noticed.
• On Wednesday night, we were in the car together and her body became strangely stiff. When we got home and let her out to go to the bathroom, she couldn’t stand up and kept listing to the left, turning and falling. Her ear on that side of her head was flopped over and at some point we realized she’d also hurt her eye, probably when she fell. We hoped that she might recover overnight but we woke up and she still couldn’t walk, so we called the SPCA and made the final arrangements to bring her into emergency care. They were extremely sweet and professional about the whole procedure, and I cannot emphasize enough what a great organization they are — please donate if you can and you love animals at all. And if you’re looking for a good vet in San Francisco, there’s no better place.

These discreet incidents don’t really capture the full nature of what it’s like to have a loyal, friendly dog as part of your family for 15 years. The hardest adjustment, so far, is realizing how habitual her presence had become — I still move to let her out as soon as we get home, or expect to hear her snoring, or think I can just walk over and give her a belly rub.

Dogs are strange and wonderful creatures. They’re not people — sometimes they seem like it, and you almost wish they could talk to you, to tell you what they’re thinking, to comfort you by saying the right words, but in fact they’re probably not thinking about much at all. They live in the moment and they make us live in the moment a little more, too.

We’ll never forget her, but at some point we won’t miss her quite so much and we’ll probably be ready to get another dog.

The disaster theory of generations

First off, the entire notion of generations is interesting mainly to a narrow group of mostly white American upper-and-middle class marketers and media people, with a few academics thrown in. Nobody cares which generation you’re in when half your family has been wiped out by drug addiction, or you’re struggling to figure out which job you need to quit since your aunt who used to take care of your kids just had her son thrown in jail. 

But to the extent that the topic is worthy of discussion at all, the current generational demarcations are inconsistent, arbitrary, and ultimately unhelpful.

The lines between generations are usually based on birth rates — there were a bunch of kids born to returning servicemen and their wives in the years after World War II, which created a “baby boom.” Later, when these kids grew up, marketers and media people began referring to them as “baby boomers,” following them through their teenage rebellion in the 1960s, their turn toward selfishness in the 1970s, and their growing conservatism in the 1980s. At some point, the definition of the Baby Boom began sliding forward, encompassing kids born all the way through the mid-1960s, even though there was no particular tie between those children and the post WW2 boomlet.

Some students of the field have now begun to talk about “cusp” generations or microgenerations, which share characteristics of the generations on either side. This makes a mockery of the whole concept by acknowledging that cultural commonality is a constantly sliding continuum. 

However, there are some natural demarcation lines in modern American history. Those are the very few historical events that shook the foundations of people’s certainty about the world they were living in. These singular traumatic events — these “breaks” in reality — shaped patterns of thought for everybody who witnessed them, paving the way for the social and cultural changes that came in their wake. 

One prime example: People in my parents’ generation say they’ll always remember where they were when JFK was shot. That was the beginning of the end of America’s post-war innocence, the precursor to a decade marked by assassinations, riots, and the bitter cultural divide over the Vietnam War. 

(Humans are hardwired to be risk-averse, so shared traumas naturally have a greater psychological impact on us than shared good news, like the moon landing in 1969 or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.)

Under the Disaster Theory of Generations, people who remember JFK’s assassination are in a different generation than those who do not. That places the end of the Baby Boomer generation around 1960 — several years earlier than most generational theorists currently place it. (The three-year window before each traumatic event is based on the idea that most people become conscious of the larger world beyond their families and immediate surroundings around that age. Even if a person born in 1960 doesn’t remember where they were when they learned Kennedy was shot, they probably remember their parents and older siblings talking about it.)

To the extent that generations are a useful way of thinking about U.S. society at all, it makes far more sense to split them by traumatic historical events than by some arbitrary spot on the ever-fluctuating slope of rising or falling birth rates.

The generations and their dividing lines

The living generations in the US break down as follows:

The Greatest Generation, born before 1926. The defining event of this generation’s youth was the Wall Street Crash in October 1929, which kicked off the Great Depression. This generation’s childhood was dominated by economic deprivation, but they persevered to build America into the dominant world power. They fought to victory in World War 2 and oversaw the post-war boom and its massive advances in society, economics, and culture. 

This generation is characterized by optimism and a sense of American exceptionalism. Any problem can be solved, and America’s going to solve it. Interstate highways. The space race. The Civil Rights movement.

The Silent Generation, born 1926 through 1938. The defining event of this generation’s youth was Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941, which brought the US into WW2. This generation was too young to have fought in that war, but too old to be drafted for Vietnam against their will (although Vietnam had plenty of career officers and volunteers from this generation, like John McCain). In its prime, the Silent Generation saw the initial glow of post-WW2 optimism replaced by the malaise of the Korean War and rise of the Cold War with its new threat of global annihilation. By the time the upheaval of the 1960s came around, this generation was past the age of youthful rebellion and instead craved law, order and stability.

They’re characterized by a cautious sense of gratitude for the achievements of the past and nervous pessimism about the future. Nixon’s “silent majority” in the 1970s. Archie Bunker. Reagan Democrats in the 1980s. Rabbit in the Updike novels. 

Baby Boomers, born 1939 through 1960. The defining event of this generation’s youth was JFK’s assassination on Nov. 23, 1963, which shattered their youthful optimism and kicked off the upheavals of the 1960s. In its prime, this generation suffered the indignities and horrors of the undeclared and ultimately futile Vietnam War, the failure of the Civil Rights movement, the malaise of the 1970s — the oil crisis, Watergate, economic stagnation, the Iran hostages  — and the cold cartoonish “rebirth” of Reagan’s 1980s. 

Characterized by a strong distrust of government and institutions and a belief in the primacy of the individual’s quest for self-actualization. Libertarianism, radical activism, feminism, communes, cults, born-again Christianity, “greed is good.”

Gen X, born 1961 through 1980. My generation presents a puzzle. While Gen Xers lived through many historical events — Watergate, Iran, Reagan’s election, AIDS, the Iraq War, the Rodney King riots, the Oklahoma City bombing — none of them were singularly traumatic breaks in our shared reality like the other events on this list. None of them would ever be the subject of a “do you remember where you were when…” conversation.

But there was a shared traumatic experience of nearly everybody whose childhood encompassed the 1960s and 70s: The fear of nuclear war. Every GenXer I know had nightmares in which thin ICBM contrails were seen overhead as a precursor to blinding flashes of apocalyptic light, or had conversations in which some commercial or military landmark nearby meant they were “for sure one of the first sites the Russians would target.”

With that in mind, I propose the national broadcast of the TV special “The Day After,” a drama in which the U.S. gets nuked by the Russians, as the defining event of GenX’s youth. It may seem ridiculous now, but at the time there was no time-shifted TV and few VCRs — you watched shows when they were on — and other entertainment options like cable TV and video games were still scarce and rudimentary compared with the infinite selection of entertainment options available today. About 100 million people watched its initial broadcast in November 1983, and it remained the most-watched TV movie ever until 2009. There were other similar Cold War movies in the early 1980s, like “War Games” and “Red Dawn,” but none with such graphic effects — the highlight I remember was the nuclear bombs turning living creatures into red-and-orange glowing x-rays — or shown in wide distribution during prime time.

Growing up under the shadow of nuclear war may explain why this generation is characterized by pessimism about the future, cynicism toward institutions, and general detachment. Even when the Cold War ended and there was a brief period of sunshine, this generation never quite believed. Think “Slacker,” Kurt Cobain, the dot-com bubble. 9/11 and the subsequent rush to war in Iraq was the ultimate vindication of this generation’s cynical viewpoint.

Millennials, born 1981 through 1998. The defining event of this generation’s youth was the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001, which brought a stark end to the post-Cold War boom and trivial obsessions of the Clinton years that dominated their childhood. In its youth, this generation saw the beginning of the never-ending War on Terror, two recessions — including the worst since the Great Depression. Its prime, still underway, has been characterized by the unrelenting rise of corporate power and income inequality, overshadowed by the new Armageddon of climate change.

Characterized by performative narcissism and deference to corporate power cloaked with in-group irony. Smartphone attachment, social media, Instagram photo shoots, memes, splinter-group politics, side hustles, brand devotion, “cancel” culture.

Gen Z or Zoomers, born 1999 through 2017. The defining event of this generation’s youth will be the coronavirus pandemic and George Floyd demonstrations in Spring 2020. It’s unclear what this is a precusor to, but it feels like a major and traumatic breaking point. Certainly, nobody alive now will ever forget it. This generation’s childhood has been overshadowed by endless American war and the growing threat of climate change, tempered by the nearly infinite opportunities for knowledge and entertainment.

So far, this generation seems to be characterized by anger at the intransigence of its elders and a determination to right historical wrongs. But they’re still young, and many things will change during their lifetimes.

Implications and caveats

While the Disaster Theory of Generations adheres to well-established generational definitions, it tends to place them several years earlier than current theories.

This resolves some nagging problems with current generational theory. Barack Obama, born in 1961, never made much sense as a Baby Boomer. His cool air of detachment and disinterest in re-fighting the culture wars of the 1960s stands in sharp contrast to the Clintons, the younger Bushes and Donald Trump. He grew up in a complicated blended family with absent parents, was raised in part by his grandparents, and as a teenager smoked massive amounts of pot in a beat-up van with his friends. Classic Gen X!

These generational divisions also dovetail nicely with the rise and fall of popular media and technology, which have a profound influence on how people think. The Greatest Generation came into its prime in the age of radio — immediate, urgent, attention-grabbing. The Silent Generation grew up during the peak era of Hollywood — and not coincidentally were in power when America elected the first Hollywood President, Ronald Reagan. The Boomers are the TV generation, shown in their embrace of corporatism — stick around for the ads! — and trance-like focus on reliving the same stories over and over again. Gen X is the internet generation, fragmented and disorganized, subject to random obsessions over trivia. Millennials are the smartphone generation, continuously posing and reacting for the ever-present cameras in everybody’s pockets. Gen Z may end up being the Minecraft/Fortnite/Roblox generation, prone to over-simplifying the world so they can tear it down and rebuild it.

These technological lines aren’t airtight. GenX certainly has an obsession with TV — we were mostly raised by it, after all — and Boomers are just as addicted to their smartphones as everybody else. But the dominant technology during one’s prime helps shape an individual’s core personality in a way that later advances don’t. When a technology is new, it represents the future, and shapes how we envision that future. 

Also, the entire notion of generational differences is problematic anyway. It’s easy to find inconsistencies and exceptions in all the generational stereotypes — there are idealistic hippies among the SIlent Generation, detached slackers among the Baby Boomers, Gen X entrepreneurs who’ve built massively powerful corporations. Politically, the concept of generations further divides an already fractured society rather than uniting us.

But, to the extent that generations are a useful and interesting concept at all, this theory seems like a better way to define them.

20 years of tech journalism

I started my first job in tech journalism on April 1, 1995. Twenty years ago.

I had moved to San Francisco in 1992 to intern at a goings-on-about-town magazine, The City. It went out of business, as publications do, in 1993. I kicked around for a couple years, doing odd editing jobs like the memoir of a wealthy tech executive (he was in chips; I don’t remember his name) and copyediting legal summaries, driving delivery and playing in bands and generally screwing off. Rents were kind of cheap back then. You could live here without a “real” job.

But I was bored. One day my roommate saw an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle — this was back when you looked for jobs in print newspapers, as most people didn’t have the Internet. (Most people hadn’t even heard of the Internet.) It was for a new technology publication. He knew I’d used email back in college, so said “hey, why don’t you apply for this?”

It was for an editorial assistant job at a new company called CNET. Wired and The Chronicle weren’t calling me no matter how many times I sent my resume, and the only other place I wanted to work, a humor magazine called Might started by some guy named Dave Eggers, didn’t think my one submission was funny enough to publish.

So, CNET! OK then.

I interviewed with the editor-in-chief, a guy named Chris Barr. He was super friendly, a California grey-hair ponytail who’d won some kind of award in tech journalism when he was at PC Magazine or PC World, one of those. That’s how he got this gig, he told me. He took a surprising amount of time with me, considering that I was literally his first hire and he had to hire an entire editorial team who actually know how to review computers, write, report, and run a magazine — all the things I had no idea how to do. I guess he liked me well enough, and he spent a little time training me and figuring out what I could do. I remember driving him somewhere in my beat up Ford Escort, listening to a cassette of Faith No More, which was the best band in the world in my mind after Jane’s Addiction had fizzled out, and him saying something like “Oh, that’s guy music. The kind of music I could never listen to with my wife in the car.”

He seemed impossibly old. He was probably about the age I am now.

My first day, I got a computer. A Compaq PC, I think it was, running Windows 3.1.1 for Workgroups. I had never used Windows — I’d had a little experience with DOS, through a friend who was really into computers, and tried WordPerfect once but hated it — but other than that all my writing had been done on Macintoshes. I figured it out in a few days, tapping around, learning about file folders and hierarchies, eventually learning from old hands what config.sys and autoexec.bat were, and soon I was typing away.

But what was I typing? We had email — Eudora was the program we used — and I’d used email in the computer lab in college (following a set of instructions to log on to their UNIX-based system, even though I had no idea what I was typing). So I was actually familiar with it, unlike a lot of people at that time. So I was assigned to create this email newsletter. I remember coming up with a top ten list, like David Letterman. It kind of became a hit and drove a lot of people to check out the site in the early days.

But what about the actual, you know, magazine? Or whatever it was?

The weird thing, the thing I didn’t quite understand, was that we weren’t going to actually print anything. This entire magazine was going to be on the World Wide Web, this thing I’d read about in Wired recently. Chris tried to explain it to me, but he didn’t do a very good job, or maybe he didn’t really understand it himself, but there was something about installing TCP/IP software, then once I’d done that I would have to download and install a web browser, Mosaic, or maybe this new one that everybody liked called Netscape Navigator.

For those of you who don’t know: Before Windows 95, Windows PCs needed special software just to connect to certain parts of the Internet, including the World Wide Web. Not just a web browser, but the software just to get online in the first place. Unless you used a program like AOL or Prodigy, but we weren’t going to be publishing on those services — we were going to be on the Web, where anybody could publish. Weird idea, right? Who’d read it, anyway?

But we did it and suddenly our writing was appearing online. We wrote everything in text files which the “producers” would convert to HTML and post — we didn’t do database-driven publishing yet (although I know it existed because the legal publisher I’d worked at used it).

We used Yahoo to figure out what else on the Web was worth looking at. We read about Amazon, this online bookstore thing, and scoffed. We argued whether e-mail should be hyphenated and whether Web should be capitalized. We laughed at ridiculous porn pictures that took forever to download. (Yes, people looked at porn at work. Openly. And laughed. Times were different.) We watched the OJ trial and reports about the Oklahoma City bombing, but we weren’t really doing news yet — the CNET news site, News.com, wouldn’t launch for another year — so there wasn’t much we could do but watch and argue about the glove.

Microsoft launched their big new thing, Windows 95, in August. I didn’t exactly understand why it was supposed to be a big deal, but I was assigned to drive down to the launch party at Great America in Santa Clara and report back what it was like. I took notes on a piece of paper — laptops were a luxury not afforded mere editorial assistants — then found a pay phone — cell phones didn’t exist yet — fed it full of quarters, and read my composed story to the editor back at the office. Literally phoned that one in.

The next four years were a blur. We went from 40 people sitting in front of plywood-door desks in an old gym to 500 people spread across several buildings in the shadow of Telegraph Hill. The phrase “dot-com” went from weird computer geek terminology to Super Bowl TV commercials. Microsoft became the most powerful and hated company in America.

I went from writing an email newsletter to writing CD-ROM reviews. (That’s what they called software, like games and interactive encyclopedias, for a couple years before everybody was online and could get that stuff on the web. It was a huge business for about 18 months then went totally kaput.) Then I wrote scripts for CNET’s programs “The Web” and “TV.com” (One of the talking heads was this guy named Ryan Seacrest. I used to wonder how he felt, working in the backwater of San Francisco on some obscure show about computers that ran only on the Sci-Fi Network. Guess he had the last laugh.) We also had Al Gore’s daughter and the first Bachelor, Alex Michel, pass through as employees.

Eventually I graduated to doing hardware reviews and features. That was the most fun. I wrote a skeptical take on the Y2K bug (I was totally right) and somebody wrote me a nasty email saying I was an idiot and I wrote an email back in which my first three words were “Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.” He posted it to a Y2K bulletin board and an hour later I was receiving a very angry lecture from Chris Barr, who was now so high up the hierarchy he barely had time for me. He wasn’t that angry, actually, he just told me never to feed the trolls. “Apple fans are the worst,” he said. “Just don’t respond.”

At one point I got sick of the constant reorgs and changing job descriptions of a fast-growing startup and went for a job interview at the Chronicle. (This time, they called me!) I talked to some nice reporters there, and it seemed OK. Then I went into the HR person’s office and she asked me flat out, “Do you really want to work here? You know this is a union shop and you’ll never get a raise beyond a couple percent per year, with a top salary of $53,000. You have stock options at CNET, stick around and you could be rich!”

She basically talked me out of the job. I should thank her.

Anyway. I eventually left CNET in 1999, stock options intact. I traveled, worked in Seattle for 10 years, and did a lot of other things.

But what strikes me about my time at CNET is how we’re still having exactly many of the same arguments and conversations today, almost 20 years later.

• People then didn’t believe online journalism would replace print, even though everybody at CNET took it for granted. We basically drove Ziff-Davis — best known for PC Magazine — out of business because we had no printing costs, and bought the online remnants for pennies on the dollar in 2000. (Another company got the rights to the print publications, and those rights went from private equity firm to holding company to something else, and still exist in some form today.) People didn’t believe it then, and amazingly they still don’t believe it today.
• We debated endlessly about where to place elements on a page to get the most people to click.
• We promised detailed reports to advertisers about who was clicking and where they were clicking after they left the site. We used a technology called “cookies” to track them. Some people got upset about the privacy implications, but most people got over it.
• We argued whether we should try and be smarter or hipper or cooler, like the cool kids over at Wired or Salon or this weird online serial soap opera that had funny animated characters. Only the thing was, people actually read CNET. A ton of people. That’s how the company made it through the dot-com crash, finally selling to CBS years after I left.

The most hilarious thing was when all these people started pontificating about “blogging” in 2004 or so. What was the big deal? It was pretty much exactly what we’d been doing at CNET for years, just on a different set of platforms. People writing about technology.

Nothing really changes except the scenery.

We now have more computers and we use them more hours of the day. That means there’s way more demand for interesting stuff to read than there’s ever been before, and there are way more great writing jobs available than when I got out of college — and I’m sorry, everybody whining about the death of journalism is simply pissed off because the newspaper jobs they fought so hard to get are no longer that great to have. There seem to be more public relations people, too.

But the basic idea of tech journalism hasn’t really changed. We take complicated stuff and make it understandable, and explain why people should care. We puncture company hype and uplift the deserving but obscure. Most important, we talk to people and look for great stories to tell.

It’s really fun and I hope I get to do it for another 20 years.

Whatever happened to CITEworld?

Every week or two, I get a Twitter DM saying something like “Hey, when did you leave CITEworld? What happened?”

Here’s a FAQ I’ll point to the next time this comes up:

What happened to CITEworld?

Update: As of July 2015, the site is totally gone. It now redirects to CIO.

The site still exists, but as of the end of October it is no longer publishing any original content. All new content that appears on the site is repurposed from other IDG publications. All of our old content is still live. Any of this may change at some point in the future, but I won’t know about it.

What happened to the CITE Conference?

The last CITE Conference happened in April. As far as I know, there are no plans for future CITE Conferences. Again, that may change, but I won’t know about it.

Why did IDG make this change?

It was a business decision. I had no say in it. That’s generally how publishing goes.

CITEworld managed to build a decent audience for a B2B site over its two years — we were getting more unique monthly visitors than at least one other IDG site that is still a going concern — but the company chose not to invest any more to turn it into a real core part of the business. It probably would have taken another year or two.

What are you doing now?

I left IDG in November to return to Business Insider as our west coast bureau chief. I’m excited to be part of the most popular business news site in the US, and to continue growing and improving our tech and other coverage in San Francisco. You can always reach me at mrosoff at businessinsider dot com.

I am no longer involved with CITEworld in any way.

What happened to all of CITEworld’s writers? 

Reporter Matt Weinberger is now with IDG’s Computerworld and writes for some other IDG publications as well. You can check out our Twitter list if you want to get in touch with any of our writers or see what they’re up to now.

Any regrets?

Nope. It was a lot of fun and we built something useful and valuable for as long as it lasted.

But one thing I learned is if you have a hunch that there’s an issue that needs to be addressed head on, don’t wait for even one second. It’s really easy to ignore those tickling little feelings that you could be doing more on a specific issue, when there’s already so much to do. It’s really easy to stop making noise when you get ignored, but keep screaming.

What tech journalists say vs. what they really mean

There’s this graphic going around called “What Programmers Say vs What They Really Mean.” I suggested on Twitter that we need one for journalists, but nobody else took the bait, so…

Clickbait: A clever headline that appears on a rival publication.

This: A clever headline that appears on my publication.

Pandering: Another publication’s article that involves sex, money, drugs, blood, explosions, kittens, or other topics that don’t really have anything to do with technology.

Expanding our audience: We need to get our pageviews up. Find something about sex, money, drugs, blood, explosions, kittens, or something else that has appeal beyond the neckbeards.

Pageviews: What rivals are chasing.

Great stories: What I’m chasing.

Went to the dark side: A rival just got a job in PR.

Tech journalism is dead: I just took a job in PR.

Cashed in: A rival just got a job in VC.

Tech journalism is dead: I just took a job in VC.

Impenetrable, needs editing: An article more than 2,000 words long that appeared in a publication I don’t like.

Long-form journalism: An article more than 2,000 words long that appeared in a publication I like.

My editor made that change: I’m an idiot, sorry. I’ll change it and hope my editor doesn’t notice.

I’ll ask my editor: You’re an idiot, sorry. We’re not changing a single word.

Chinese Wall: I’m ignoring this request from sales.

Synergy: My boss just asked me to reconsider this request from sales.

Slideshow: A story told with a series of pictures that appears on a rival’s web site.

Gallery, Feature, Visual Storytelling: We’re doing slideshows now.

Snowfall: I wish we had a real art budget like the New York Times so we didn’t have to do slideshows.

Churnalism: When a rival publication rewrites press releases faster than I can do it and gets the mention on Techmeme.

Breaking: Look how fast I rewrote this press release.

In bed with PR: A rival publication got an exclusive.

Exclusive: None of your business who my sources were or how I got the story.

Horrible hack: A rival journalist.

Misunderstood: Me.

Any I missed? Comment below.

Putting readers first

Pat McGovern passed away yesterday. He founded IDG — my employer, the company that publishes CITEworld — back in the early 1960s. I’m new at IDG, so did not know him very well, although I met him a couple times, but I’ve been struck by how many long-time (and former) employees of IDG absolutely revere him. Part of it was the way he’d walk to each person and hand them their Christmas bonus personally, always stopping to chat and always remembering a few key facts about the person — pretty unusual in a company with thousands of employees.

But the deeper root of their admiration, I think, is the fact that he was there at the beginning of this industry. He was one of the people who invented it. And while other pioneering companies like Ziff Davis have been chopped up and reconstituted so many times that they’ve become meaningless, IDG is still IDG.

More to the point, Pat McGovern understood what very few media businesspeople do: The customer is the reader. Advertisers pay to reach readers. If you serve the reader, the advertisers will have no choice but to come along.

I’ve heard many tales along these lines from coworkers who’ve been around longer than me — most of which aren’t for public consumption — but it became really clear when I read this interview (long, PDF) with him from 2000. There’s a lot of great stuff in there that today’s tech reporters who have never heard of Pat McGovern might want to read, like how he set up a business subsidiary in China before the US and China even had diplomatic relations. But in particular, check out this anecdote about the launch of Computerworld in 1967:

Pat McGovern: The industry was horrified  that we were writing these stories about bad performance, bad applications. No one  would advertise with us. They said, “You are the enemy of our industry.” We put out  the publication, almost without any ads at all for the first six months. Then the  people apparently did some readership studies and found out that even though our circulation was only about a third the size of the magazines that were all being mailed out en masse, as controlled circulation or free publications, more people were reading our publication and relying on it than anyone else.

They would call us and say, “I really hate to have to do this, but my research, and also  our sales people are calling me to complain. They say, “The publication I find on the desk of my prospect is this Computerworld, and why aren’t we advertising there? That’s where the attention of the prospect is. So I’m going to have to advertise. It really burns me up to do it.”

To really make matters worse, our Editor who was in the English, Journalistic tradition, which is very aggressive and investigative, started a column called “Measure for Measure,” in which, any time an ad appeared in the publication, he would review the copy for justification and accuracy and completeness. Of course, since almost every ad sort of relies on hyperbole of some fashion, or over-dramatization, almost every ad would be excoriated by his report. The advertisers just couldn’t believe it. Not only did they have to advertise in a publication that criticizes their company, but their ad itself, is going to be critiqued and blasted for incompetence.

Interviewer: Who was selling the advertising?

PJM: Many people. After a while they would quit. They would say, “I just hate to  send the ad in, because I know after your column appears I’m going to be called by this chap and he’ll say, ‘What the heck is going on, you’re tearing my ad apart, and my boss is asking how we can we have such a stupid ad.”

DSM: Who were your first advertisers? Which companies?

PJM: I remember Memorex was one of our first advertisers. I remember their ad, which claimed all this reliability, “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” That was totally destroyed by the attack that this was all done without evidence or justification, a meaningless claim.

As a study in contrast, take this essay by a reporter who recently quit her entry-level job in tech journalism at VentureBeat. In her perception, today’s tech journalism is all about chasing pageviews and fending off pitches from marketing people.