“See that mountain over there? Well, one of these days I’m gonna climb that mountain.” – Mountain Music, by Alabama This song came out in 1982, the year I turned 18. It must have been pretty popular because it seeped through the armor of the British metal I was wrapped up in at the time. And while the fiddle at the end of this song is pretty sweet, it wasn’t the song that resonated with me. Just that opening line above. Dude…
Is there anything more featureless than being a white, middle-class, heterosexual American male? There’s nothing controversial for us to fight for. Our job is to do our part to keep the species moving forward, and, thanks to religion and politics, we tend to screw that up. Our value has been reduced to our purchasing power. And when we don’t have much of that, we just fade away. Or we write books about raging against the machine that few read, and…
All young people should get a blog. I don’t care whether it’s a custom-hosted blog like this one, Medium, or Tumblr, teenagers should be documenting their ideas and experiences online in long form. A friend shared an unfortunate story with me this week about his son who was kicked off of a sports team at school. The reason for the dismissal was that he’d said something on Snapchat that someone misconstrued as bullying, and the school has a one-strike policy…
Few things on earth are as fertile as a child’s imagination, or as fragile as a little girl’s heart. She was 7. Whenever we’d poll the family as to what we should watch on movie night, she’d say Titanic. Every. Time. She loved the music, the costumes, and the love story. Titanic was pure enchantment to Cozette. So when I was shopping for Christmas gifts that year, I Googled “Heart of the Ocean.” Sure enough, the query returned links to…
When you get right down to it, we’re all just rats. “Look at me and how fast I can go! Join me and run fast too!” Said the rat with the big microphone spinning on the wheel. Smiling his rat smile. And we do. Because rats are simple-minded and easily manipulated. You can do tests on rats. Experiments. You can even give them cancer to see if they’ll survive. Keep them intoxicated and with full bellies and you can do…
“Today’s the fourth of July. Another June has gone by. And when they light up our town I just think what a waste of gunpowder and sky.” – Aimee Mann, 4th of July Part of the American problem is that, for some of us, in our heads we believe we’re all the same. We get up and look out our windows and see neighbors who look like us. We shop at grocery stores where most of the people drive the same…
