Getting Closer

I admire people who complete projects. Completion is much harder than it appears from the outside. This is coming from someone who had to learn how to finish, one tentative step at a time. Later, I learned how to combine these steps and began hitting some major deadlines. Reaching and crossing the finish line, while never easy, is now something that happens regularly for me.

Books are tools that I think more people should commit to writing. If you are someone who is a thought leader, or who has some ideas that others have demonstrated an interest in, then you are a prime candidate for authoring a book. I’ve indicated that books are much better than business cards—everyone has a business card—not many people have a book. Commit to getting yourself into the latter category.  It’s empowering for one thing. It’s also another way to differentiate what you do from everyone else doing similar things. Continue reading

Back from Collapse

It felt good to run this morning. Yes, it was cold and I didn’t wear gloves. The cold, crisp October air, rushing into my lungs reminded me again that the road back from my accident in August has been slower than I anticipated. That’s when I tumbled off my bike and all the training that commenced back in January got put on hold.

I didn’t think it would take nearly three months to get back to where I was before I cracked a rib and punctured my lung on August 5th. It’s been a slow, uphill climb, but I’m really close to being able to do everything that I had been doing prior to crashing my bike that Monday night after work. Continue reading

Get Funky

It’s been a long week; government shutdowns, training to begin my end-of-the-year moonlighting, projects being finalized—sometimes you just have to end the week with a little funk.

When my sister and I were coming up, we had this expression we’d break out on one another. We’d say, “funk is toe jam.”  We’d laugh. I don’t know where the hell this came from. I’m sure we heard some singer talking about it, or we read it in Rolling Stone, or some other social arbiter of the times. Continue reading

Memory Failure

What we remember and history are often two separate things. Memories are flawed, no matter how insistent we are that we remember exactly what happened.

Lots of things shape our memories; our pre-existing thoughts and beliefs apparently help certain memories “stick” better. Apparently, even our political orientation can contribute to the formation of false memories. Continue reading

When Things Unwind

George Packer: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America."

George Packer: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.”

Anyone born around 1960 entered the world in the midst of America’s longest-running period of prosperity. This economic boom began after World War II, extending out for another 25 to 30 years and ended in 1973.

American economic cycles have always been characterized by boom and bust periods. Even during what some call “The Golden Age of Capitalism,” the time frame between 1945 and 1973, there were recessions during 1945, 1948, 1953, 1957, and 1960. There are a variety of explanations and theories about why these fluctuations occur. Continue reading

Small Town Newspapers

I spent an afternoon this week at the Lisbon Historical Society, reading through newspaper accounts about the town. I’m trying to nail down some events from the 1970s and 1980s. Reading back through the clips, I noticed a place that was considerably different than most of what I remembered at the time, when I was coming up.

Back in 2007, the year before writing Moxietown, my initial plan was to write an extensive nonfiction treatment on my hometown of Lisbon Falls. I just found the original outline of the proposed chapters. Some of that book ended up being folded into my first book of history about Moxie, which then led to a second one. There are no plans for a third. Continue reading

Owning a Home

Foreclosures in America are at a crisis level.

Foreclosures in America are at a crisis level.

We can debate whether or not owning property is an American birthright. Home ownership, however, is part and parcel of a dream that we’ve all been sold on since before we could walk.  What does 10 million foreclosures say about that dream?

Most anyone reading that number is likely to have a couple of reactions, I’m guessing. One, where did the 10,000,000 number come from? I’ll get to that in a moment. By the way, 10,000,000 is a number that represents the number of people making up the population of the state of Michigan, America’s 10th most populated state. Continue reading

The Labor Shift

Work defines who we are in America. When I was born, the models for work were General Motors, IBM, and Xerox among many. These large corporations were built on a tacit understanding that once you made your way through their doors, you were taken care of for life—or at least until you retired. Of course, there were pensions back then, so you were taken care of during retirement, too. Continue reading

Country at War

The George Zimmerman verdict denotes a nation at a crossroads. Maybe we’ve already crossed some kind of line of demarcation. Post-racial America? Maybe if you’re a Beltway elite you think that. For those of us keeping score elsewhere, I contend we’re not at all.

While the Zimmerman trial garnered the lion’s share of coverage via the MSM, other news stories continued to trickle out.

Rolling Stone magazine, once the quintessential rock rag, featured Boston Marathon bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev  on its recent cover. Predictably, the binary, black/white moralists were outraged, claiming that Rolling Stone “glamorized” Tsarnaev, giving him the “rock star” treatment. If you actually read the article, a nuanced, well-written piece by Janet Reitman, you might come away with the idea, like I did that circumstances and ideological persuasion can change people, turning docile, well-liked young men into cold-blooded killers. Continue reading

Bringing the Moxie

The Moxie Boy and Moxie Boy-in-training.

The Moxie Boy and Moxie Boy-in-training.

Today’s the start of a three-day Moxie weekend. I know I’m supposed to be blogging about Moxie, but sometimes, I think I’ve written just about all I want to about Moxie. Maybe that’s why this year, I’ve toned down my usual Moxie blogging quota.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate Moxie’s history, and all that goes along with this distinctly different soft drink that’s been around since 1884 because I do. The two books, the signings, the interviews I was asked to do, and the Tee Vee appearances are “all good,” as they say. It’s just that my interests and things I want to write about are much broader than one product, even a product as unique as Moxie. Continue reading