Category Archives: Collapse

Friends and Enemies

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We’ve all heard the expression, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” What does this mean? Should it even matter?

For a few weeks now, I’ve been ruminating on several things during this period of lockdown, or as I call it, “house arrest.” One of them is how social interactions and the so-called “glue” that holds us together seems to have been altered (perhaps permanently damaged?) by the novel coronavirus—maybe even worse than the lungs of someone who acquired Covid-19.

I’ve been spending minimal time in Zuckerberg’s Lunchroom, aka, Facebook. Why? Because people I once respected, or at the very least—could tolerate—have become people I hope I never have to ever spend time with in real time, again.

I know that I’ve been scarred by grief and loss. To not recognize this shows ignorance about anything related to the loss of someone held dear. At the very least, when someone is snatched from your life, you forever carry that experience and it colors perceptions, emotions, and human interactions.

Having touched on that, the process of moving through the time of days, weeks, months, and even years after a tragedy forces you into various altered states. It’s an evolution back to some newly-constructed “normalcy.” Then, you are thrown into stasis induced by stay-at-home orders and you feel like you have been ejected back into a place of darkness, pain, and you’re flailing about struggling to stand again.

Continue reading →

Triggered

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A week ago, the world seemed fine (or normal) for most people. The day here in Southern Maine was warm for early March. The winter of 2019-20 hadn’t been a particularly harsh one, as Maine winters go. There was a sense common in northern regions that signal spring and that place-based “rebirth” that many of us hearken to and anticipate during the dark days December and January.

For people living on the other side of grief and loss, the past three years have been a journey of darkness, sadness, and pain. But to remain here in this life, there must come a time when you get back to “living life.

For me, having lost a son in January, 2017, so much of the past three years have been lived inside-out. By that I mean, grief for me turned me inward. I lost my usual gregariousness and the ability to feel joy. I didn’t want to be around people. I was becoming a misanthrope.

Late last summer, after conversations with my better half, the mother of my son, we made a decision for me to leave the house where I’ve been barely existing as a freelancer and take a job outside. Not some evening tutoring gig or part-time sub teacher stint, either. No, applying for and being hired by a firm that provides healthcare to Mainers and patients just across the border in New Hampshire.

This new role placed me in a new contact center just shy of being open for a year. The woman who interviewed me and subsequently hired me was the sister of someone I graduated from high school with. Continue reading →

Rust Never Sleeps

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Just because all the news that’s fit to print emanates from Manhattan in no way means that New York City is the epicenter of the information universe. In fact, the traditional centers of news and commerce might actually be some of the last places that receive the memo that American greatness is in its twilight fade.

I like getting my communiques from other places, with names like Flint, Michigan, Youngstown, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana. These once great manufacturing hubs are examples of what happens to empires when the middle’s hollowed out. Of course, politicians feign interest in some of these places simply because it’s the silly season and they’re out on the stump for votes and gathering super delegates.

No movies, today (Gary, Indiana).

No movies, today (Gary, Indiana).

Belt Magazine publishes longform, investigative journalism—another tradition from America’s past that’s all but disappeared—about the Rust Belt. And as Belt’s founder, Anne Trubek, notes, while many national publications have picked up on a few trends highlighting “revitalization” and “cool hipster breweries,” these are simply one “pole” of a larger narrative, one that also must address our urban ruins, like parts of Detroit. Continue reading →

Amazon Was Here

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Retail is a mixed bag across the country. Malls in smaller cities are struggling, as former anchor tenants like Sears and J.C. Penney have closed stores, and many smaller shops have shuttered. Larger retail has shifted to shopping complexes anchored by a Walmart or other big-box store. Drive through any community other than Portland and notice the abundance of unfilled retail space.

The late, great Bookland Store sits vacant at Cook's Corner, in Brunswick.

The late, great Bookland Store sits vacant at Cook’s Corner, in Brunswick.

Smaller malls and shopping centers were popping up all over the place in Maine three decades ago. This pretty much sealed the deal for Mom and Pop small hardware stores and other locally-owned shopping options. Now, many of those same strip malls and retail havens have multiple vacant storefronts. Continue reading →

Prius in a Ditch

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I was actually going to write about hipsters, Portland’s food fixation, with a doughnut comparison (the holy kind vs. the German variety) thrown in for good measure—along with a few other things I’ve observed in my travels in and out of Forest City the past two weeks.

The post, which I cobbled together last night felt half-baked. Then, I got called out at 5:15 this morning at my part-time gig and didn’t get home in time to really do the necessary work to reinforce my narrative infrastructure.

Of course, the roads were a bit slippery this morning, as they were when I set out south @ 5:30. I had no trouble navigating them in my Ford Taurus, V-6 engine and all. I attribute this to my studded Nokian Hakkapellitta’s and my experience navigating snow and ice-covered roadways.

Just north of Bradbury Mountain on my return, I saw fire trucks and the boys from Pownal’s FD directing traffic on Route 9. There was a Prius in the ditch. How appropriate.

I managed to make my way through and couldn’t snap a photo without appearing to be a loon. I don’t believe it had a “Feel the Bern” bumper sticker, but I’m not certain.

Prius unable to navigate slippery Route 9.

Prius unable to navigate slippery Route 9.

You’ll have to be okay with my stock photo from the intewebs instead.

Oh, and I’ll be doing some additional work on my hipster post for the future.

Politics Won’t Fix Us

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[Yet another blog post hammered-out the night before and set-up to auto-publish the next day—jpb]

We’re waking up this morning to the political punditry reading the tea leaves and parsing the results of the anachronistic Iowa caucuses. Pre-caucus polling had Trump and Sanders holding substantial leads, with a snowstorm bearing down on the Hawkeye State Monday night, which may or may not have kept Iowan caucus-goers home and skewering the prognostications. It’s now high political season in America.

Once again, the half of America that pays any attention to the process is getting all huffy about why Bernie’s 1930s labor communism shtick is superior to Trump’s bluster about re-establishing American greatness. Whether you’re “feeling the Bern,” or Trump’s your man for turning America back to some perceived golden age, you’ll be just as disappointed as Obama supporters were back in 2008, falling for his hope and change rhetoric. But that’s exactly what politics has been reduced to in the 21st century.

I read Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 over the weekend. It’s a book I’d heard about back in 2012 when it came out. As happens a lot with me, I went to Curtis Memorial Library on Saturday looking for another book, came home with Murray’s, and plowed through it Saturday afternoon.

Not that one man has all the answers, but Murray’s explanation about what’s happened to America over my lifetime made some sense. The book resonated with me in much the same way George Packer’s book did, which I also made a big to do about here at the JBE. Continue reading →

Drinking Dirty Water in Flint

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Water is an essential element of life.  We require it for drinking, cooking, and bathing—as well as other household functions common to civilized life in the U.S. Biologically, humans are 60 percent water, including a higher composition in vital organs like the brain, heart, and lungs. So when a major municipality’s water supply is compromised, it becomes a serious issue and even a domestic threat.

In Flint, Michigan, a depressed Midwestern city in the heart of America’s Rust Belt, city officials—in an effort to save money due to a shrinking tax base—switched the source of the city’s water supply in April 2014, from city of Detroit’s, whose source was Lake Huron—to the Flint River. Incidentally, residents of Flint recognized the river as a filthy tributary where a host of industrial chemicals and solvents had been dumped for decades. As soon as the switch was made, residents started complaining that the water looked, smelled and tasted funny. They said it often “looked dirty.”

The Flint River-just one of the sources of the city's water disaster.

The Flint River-just one of the sources of the city’s water disaster.

But it gets worse, for those living in economically-ravaged Flint. The local water treatment plant (with the approval of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality) failed to mix chemicals to the river water that would have lowered its corrosive nature. This resulted in lead from the ageing service lines leeching into the water. Lead levels spiked, exposing thousands of children to lead poisoning. Continue reading →

Desperately Seeking Simpatico

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I like words. I even used to have a blog with the title, Words Matter. Yes, they do.

One of the many benefits to being a reader is that unless you are reading material aimed at second graders, you are apt to find unfamiliar words that stretch and if you take the time to look them up—build your vocabulary. I know—having a robust vocabulary puts me back in the 1950s when we still had a middlebrow culture—rather than the dumbed-down, brain-addled one here in the second decade of the 21st century.

Can you spell as well as a 14-year-old? (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Can you spell as well as a 14-year-old? (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

I’m halfway through my second book of 2016. It’s a book about the collapse of Detroit City. On page 62, there is the following sentence, about midway down the page:

In the same way that the microsocieties formed at Zuccotti Park and other Occupy encampments in 2011 provided, for the simpatico, an exhilarating glimpse of freedom, postindustrial Detroit could be an unintentional experiment in stateless living, allowing for the devolution of power to the grass roots.
–Mark Binelli, Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis Continue reading →

You Can’t Say That

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Gen Y shutting down free speech.

Gen Y shutting down free speech.

Free speech and the right of Americans to speak their piece is arguably one of our nation’s most vaunted freedoms. Short of yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theater and a few other caveats, whether you agreed with another’s protected speech, the right to say it was sacrosanct for more than 200 years.

Leave it to millennials to fuck that up! According to Pew Research, our milliennial snowflakes are much more likely than older Americans to say government should be able to prevent people from saying “mean and hurtful” things about minority groups.

Millennials want to eliminate bad words.

Millennials want to eliminate bad words.

Continue reading →

Stopping for School Buses

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This means stop.

This means stop.

Let’s begin this week’s Friday blogging exercise with a little traffic safety review for you drivers. According to Maine Revised Statutes for Motor Vehicles, under Title 29-A,  §2308: Overtaking and passing school buses, it reads as follows:

  1. Stopping. The operator of a vehicle on a way, in a parking area or on school property, on meeting or overtaking a school bus from either direction when the bus has stopped with its red lights flashing to receive or discharge passengers, shall stop the vehicle before reaching the school bus. The operator may not proceed until the school bus resumes motion or until signaled by the school bus operator to proceed.
  1. Penalty. A violation of this section is a Class E crime which, notwithstanding Title 17-A, section 1301, is punishable by a $250 minimum fine for the first offense and a mandatory 30-day suspension of a driver’s license for a 2nd offense occurring within 3 years of the first offense.

 Most of you are probably wondering, “why is Jim turning the JBE into a blog on traffic safety and rules of the road?” What? Did you not see the WMTW-8 report by Katie Thompson, on idiot drivers passing stopped school buses in Cumberland? I guess those high-end, tony suburbs aren’t attracting civic-minded types any longer. No, just rich schmucks with “get the hell out of my way” attitudes that are always riding up on my ass when I’m simply driving the speed limit on rural backroads like Route 9, coming back from points south and headed back to the compound in Durham. Continue reading →