I’ve been living in a world of musical theater over the last week or so. Last weekend, I attended Terrific New Theatre‘s opening production in their brand new space (for which I bought them one of the dressing rooms in memoriam Tommy) – Sunday in the Park with George. I also saw a performance of the new national tour of the revival production of Chicago as two friends were on stage – Brent Crawford Mauldin as the band leader and Drew Fillinger as Mary Sunshine. I am boning up on my lines and lyrics for Little Women as we start the tech process on Sunday (we’re in good shape and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in costume and makeup and under stage light). I’ve been listening to the OBC recording of Ragtime as I hadn’t had it in rotation for a while and the recent Encores production in New York, of which I saw a few clips, reminded me of just how good it is. Tomorrow, I venture out to the IMAX to see the new film version of Wicked which all the theatre kids have been raving about.

A lot of people who know me through other walks of life think that my preoccupation with music theater art forms is something between eccentric and frivolous but as we continue to descend into uncertain political times, I am constantly reminded as to how much these works of art have to teach us. The good shows that get revived over and over have very deep themes that hold up a mirror to the audience that views them and , even though they may not completely understand what they are seeing or being told, there’s something subconscious that lingers after the final curtain comes down and stays with them.

Let’s just take the ones that have entered my life this past week. Sunday in the Park with George is probably one of the lesser known masterpieces of the American musical cannon as it’s just not done as often as it should be. The music is difficult and requires actors with a high degree of musicianship. As the show (at least the first act) is about the creation of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Istand of La Grande Jatte, there are very specific technical requirements so that the audience can see the famous painting come to life as tableau vivant. But what is the show really about? It is about creation. It is about the need for change. It is about how we define our legacies. Complicated philosophical subjects to be sure. A production at this time of uncertainty and change outside of any of our control brings all this to the front. Late in the second act, a contemporary artist, George (who may or may not be Seurat’s great grandson) meets with his great grandmother who is the principal figure in the painting and they sing a duet ‘Move On’. It contains the following lyric which I always find myself referring to when I am uncertain. ‘I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken. The choosing was not. You have to move on.’ One could easily apply this to the recent election.

‘Chicago’ is a very different show with a very different message. When it premiered in 1975 in a brilliant Bob Fosse staging with Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera and Jerry Orbach in the principal roles, it was successful, but not a phenomenon. It had the misfortune to open opposite another show, A Chorus Line, which helped revolutionize the direction of musical theater. Fosse’s concept was to use classic vaudeville tropes to tell the cynical story of Roxie Hart, the murderess who manipulates the system to get away with it. I’m old enough to have seen the very last bus and truck tour of the original production and I still love the colorful circuslike atmosphere of that original staging. The original production left a lot of people cold as there’s no one to root for. Everyone is equally corrupt and unpleasant. Encores brought the show back in the mid 90s in a simple staging, very sleek and black and white, overseen by Ann Reinking, Fosse’s muse. This version was a sensation, transferred to Broadway, and is still running nearly thirty years later. I think this was a case of the audience catching up with the show. Between the time of the original production and the time of the revival, we were subject to the OJ Simpson trial and that opened a lot of eyes to the sordid intersection of criminal law and showbiz. Now, of course, we realize that most of our major institutions are corrupt and spin is everything so Chicago simply affirms our current world view.

Little Women is a modern adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel of the 19th century March family. With this book, she more or less invented Young Adult fiction, helping define a literature with themes appropriate for older children and adolescents. I had never read the book (until last month when I listened to the unabridged audio in the car as part of my research for my role) nor seen any of the multiple film or stage adaptations so I approached the material with relatively fresh eyes. What impressed me the most was how far ahead of the curve Ms. Alcott was in defining the lives and roles of women outside of the usual strictures of Victorian living. Jo, who has been a role model for countless girls over the years, in dress and behavior is what we might refer to today as non-binary and very much takes her life and decisions into her own hands. The men in the story are very much subservient to the lives and needs of the four March girls and their beloved Marmee. The show takes a long and somewhat complex story and boils it down to just over two hours and ten characters. And we see both the girls and the adult women they become. It really is an excellent example of the craft of adapting literary source material to the musical stage. The hardest element of a musical is not the music and not the lyrics. It’s the structure and style of the book. It’s so difficult that there are very few good musical book writers out there.

Ragtime is about America. It tells the story of the birth of modern America through several families whose lives intertwine in the first decade of the 20th century. There are the traditional WASPs. There are the African Americans. And there are the recently arrived Eastern European Immigrants. In a brilliant opening number, these three populations, eye each other suspiciously, circle around each other, and sing of their lives, traditional Western, African-American, and Eastern European/Jewish musical influences melding together to create the musical form of Ragtime which becomes a metaphor for the nation entering a new century as a world power. One of the first rules of musical theater is that you have roughly 10-15 minutes to introduce the audience to the musical, visual, and stylistic language that will govern the evening. If you can successfully do that, the audience will follow you to the end of the show. If you fail at this task, they’ll start looking at their watches half way through the first act and a number will drift away at intermission and, no matter how good your second act is, the show still won’t land. Ragtime succeeds brilliantly and that opening number gets us launched on a sprawling canvas with dozens of characters but we never get lost or cease to care. Ragtime is another show that speaks to the moment we find ourselves in, making the case that our varied cultures are all equally important in creating who we are and where we are going. Anti minority and anti immigrant sentiment may bubble up but they cannot be separated from the fabric of society without destroying it.

I haven’t seen Wicked yet. I’ll see it tomorrow. I have seen the original stage production several times. (Tommy and I saw the original cast in 2003 on our first trip to New York together). It’s not my favorite show. I think it has book problems, trying to stuff far too much plot into too short a time (especially in the second act – the two part long running time of the movie will likely solve that issue). I’m also not overly keen on the score as it does not appear to hang together all of a piece. It’s stylistically all over the map. But yet again, the story of strong woman standing up against a weak male leader who is trying to cover up his failings by rousing the populace against a harmless minority has a few parallels to the moment in which we find ourselves. I wonder if the hordes at the multiplex will understand that? Perhaps not on the surface but again, when you add music to storytelling, it goes through different brain centers and gets processed in ways that lead to alterations in consciousness. Perhaps people will begin to alter their behavior unconsciously for good.

Thus endeth today’s lesson in history of the American Musical Theater.

Get up. Get dressed. Go out. Do good. (Now available in T-shirt form).

I haven’t written a long post in a week and a half so I suppose I better break out the laptop, move the cat out of the way before he can walk over the keyboard and screw it up again and let my fingers do the walking as I download some of the things currently rattling around my brain. This is going to be one of those just start writing and see where it goes entries. Sometimes I have a plan with specific points I want to make. Sometimes it gets vomited up whole from some dark place in my interior. Sometimes it’s random stuff that bubbles up and then gets connected to the next topic through the weird tangents that my mind tends to create. I think this is one of the latter.

A friend asked me earlier this week why I tend to keep myself so busy trying to keep all of the balls in the air and all of the various activities balanced. This week, for instance, I have usual work issues, a legal case to finish reviewing, the last few runs of Little Women before tech is upon us, a need to finish a rough outline of the new book, and various social obligations. My answer was to say I really have two choices. I can either keep myself busy and engaged and structured with my time well accounted for or I can sit in my bedroom and scream into the void. And the former seems to be more productive.

I, of course, continue to read the political news (my moratorium on consuming any televised news programs continues) and roll my eyes at the choices of leadership being announced by the incoming administration. No one is asking my opinion on any of this so I, like the rest of the country, will have to learn to live with what is imposed upon us. That’s the way our political system works. If we don’t like it, we’ll have to get off our collective butts and change it but I don’t see that happening in a society that’s either narcotized by the proverbial bread and circuses or leading lives of quite desperation in the cycles of continual debt that late stage vulture capitalism is forcing upon the majority of the younger working population. The one thing I won’t do, however, is dismiss the worst ideas coming out of the new regime as simply being political rhetoric. One of the first rules of dealing with authoritarians is believe what they tell you the first time. I find myself time and again going back to Masha Gessen’s 2016 essay ‘Autocracy: Rules of Survival’ written at the time of Trump’s first election. She’s expanded it into book form in the intervening years and should be required reading, but won’t be.

I am approaching the next six months in my medical career cautiously. I have no idea which poorly thought out ideas will or will not become government mandates and in what order. I will remain at my post as long as I am not asked to compromise my personal or professional ethical codes and continue to deliver the highest quality care possible within the constraints of a changing and collapsing system. Will I be able to continue to work for a few more years as planned? That remains unknown. Here are some of the more serious issues I see coming down the pike.

1. The continued erosion, if not the downright destruction of the public health system. Various political actors, mainly with no real knowledge of how science of healthcare actually work, remain upset by what they see as chicanery around the pandemic shutdowns and vaccinations. As our public health system is highly fractured between states, counties, and municipalities, none is big enough to withstand coordinated attacks for long and it will be fairly easy for significant defunding of programs. There are new pathogens always waiting just around the corner for just the right conditions to allow for a new outbreak. H5N1 influenza, which can have up to a 50% mortality rate in humans, has been spreading in the dairy and poultry industries. There have been sporadic human cases which may have been caused by human to human contact. We don’t have the conditions yet for a major event but just the right mutation could change that rapidly.

2. Endangered academic health centers. Medical schools are finely tuned ecosystems depending on flows of funds from the federal level, mainly for research through the NIH and education/clinical care through Medicare and, to a lesser extent, Medicaid. Many of the expenditures made might, to an untrained eye, look spurious or like a waste but science depends on a certain amount of free inquiry. We have antibiotics because Alexander Fleming got interested in a moldy orange. A DOGE bureaucrat, thinking that the modern equivalent of the study of rotting citrus is not useful, could completely upend decades of work and potential new advances without understanding what they are doing. It won’t take a lot of redirected or removed funds to push these institutions towards insolvency in their current form.

3. Disavowal of science for common wisdom. Dr. Mehmet Oz looks to become the new director of CMS which administers Medicare and Medicaid. These are huge government programs and Medicare in particular is the 600 pound gorilla around which the whole health care system revolves. Dr. Oz is personable and presents a lot of carefully calibrated ‘common sense’ in his media appearances. Unfortunately, when you look over time at what he advocates, 40-45% of his recommendations have no medical or scientific basis and another 15-20% are the opposite of what medicine and science have shown to be true. I use plenty of common sense in my practice, but I temper it with what I know has good science behind it, otherwise I might be bleeding people, using leeches, and refusing to wash my hands (all things that were accepted common sense in their day).

4. Inability to provide care. A crackdown on immigration is going to decimate the already limited pink collar work force from which the day to day workers in nursing homes and other senior care institutions are drawn. As most of these businesses have been purchased over the last two decades by conglomerates for a purpose of profit, they will be closed down if they prove unprofitable, either because of a need to pay higher salaries than business plans intend or because of fewer paying customers due to a collapse in quality or other factors. No senior living facilities, than middle America will have to figure out who takes the elders in and who has to remove themselves from the workforce to provide the care at home.

5. Continued societal denial of aging. As the World War II generation is nearly completely gone and the Silent generation is predominantly in their 80s and 90s, the Baby Boom will be moving into their aged years rapidly (13 months to go before they hit their 80th birthday). They have denied the realities of aging for decades and I don’t see them embracing them now and will likely try to arm themselves for a war against inevitability which they will lose as has every other generation that has come before them but with what collateral damage to societal institutions and younger generations.

But not all is bad. I’ve been to the theater a few times. The new movie version of Wicked is out and I’ll get to see it this weekend and I have to put on some holiday clothes and head out to a tree lighting ceremony soon. I’m going to focus on the good stuff.

Get up. Get dressed. Go out. Do good.

(A friend asked if he could sell T-shirts with this, my latest mantra on them. I said why not? If they come to market, I’ll post a link…)

I get earworms all the time. I have a surefire cure. If there’s a tune rattling around my brain that refuses to leave, a verse of ‘It’s a Small World After All’ usually banishes the culprit back to the misty regions whence it sprang. Today’s earworm, which I’m sure was inspired by the gleeful annihilation of post-World War II American society represented by the revelations of each new choice for the incoming cabinet, is the old Tom Lehrer song ‘Who’s Next?’ Lehrer wrote it in the early 60s in response to the proliferation of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, but the rising tension and comic dread of the song could apply to any rapid sociopolitical change outside the control of the average citizen. The last lyric of the song ‘We’ll try to remain serene and calm when Alabama gets the bomb” was a dig at the contemporaneous civil rights violence but it still hits home. The nutty politics of this state disfigured by the overemphasis of God/gun/gays have metastasized out of Montgomery and are basically the engine that runs the current Republican party. It’s more or less prevented any improvement in the lives of Alabama citizens for years and that’s coming soon to a state near you.

Tom Lehrer, who is still very much alive and with us at the age of 96, was a comic genius. As a young Harvard math professor, he took his skills at musical pastiche and wordplay and had a brief, but illustrious career as a musical satirist, performing in night clubs and releasing three albums of comic songs which, for the most part, remain funny to this day. As someone who wrote political satire for fifteen years for the Politically Incorrect Cabaret, I don’t think most realize how difficult it is to write this sort of humor in a way that doesn’t quickly date and grow stale. Listen to some Lehrer (if you’ve never heard of him, you might start with ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’) and then listen to some Capitol Steps recordings from the Bush/Clinton years. Lehrer still works. The Capitol Steps is way too topical and of the moment to have any resonance decades later. They’re almost painful. Speaking of the PIC – don’t any of my Millennial theater friends or Gen Z theater kids want to take it over? I’ll help with the transitions and the first show of a new regime, and I think I have an appropriate venue which can host it for minimal investment. Cabaret type satire is one of the most effective ways of punching up at the power structure and holding a mirror up to the audience to show them the parts of themselves they’d rather not acknowledge. Besides, there’s always the fun these days of getting on an ‘Enemies of the State’ list.

I’m remaining relatively calm as the bus lurches towards the cliff. I’ve been here before. I think I expended all of my angst and weltschmerz during the first Trump administration and its sequel, Covid pandemic. No point in wasting energy doing that again. Nothing I can do is going to change any of it. We all had our chance to cast our votes, and we chose. However, for my mental health, I am keeping my television off news channels. I have replaced news radio in the car with audiobooks. I am staying out of the darker corners of the internet and social media where the unhinged loons of both the left and the right gather and hurl invective at each other as if that ever solved anything. I’ve come up with a new mantra (that one of my friends turned into a meme which is now rocketing around various places). Get up. Get dressed. Go out. Do good. After all it’s all any of us can really do. As my career has progressed, I find that the macros I keep in my head for explaining the complex paradoxes of geriatric medicine to patients and the lay public keep getting shorter and shorter. Back in my early career, I would speak for five minutes to older people about the importance of balance and the use of assistive devices in fall prevention. Now I just look at them and say ‘Floor hard. Fall bad.’ At least they remember that.

I’m not quite sure who the highly unqualified and in some cases downright mentally disordered individuals being served up to guide the nation are supposed to appeal to. There is a wing of the modern Republican party, whose most vocal mouthpiece appears to be Steve Bannon who have decided the post War nation state which runs on bureaucracy and a professional civil service is a great evil that must be quickly destroyed. I’d be willing to listen to that argument if any sort of alternative that will allow a nation of 330 million, living in the richest society this planet has ever produced, function in a globalized technocratic world were placed on the table. But they only seem to have thought about the destruction and not what comes after. And this is a problem. Destruction happens quickly. Construction can take decades.

All of the big federal departments impact our lives in a myriad of ways but the two with the most direct effect on me are the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. I occupy a hybrid position half funded by a major academic health system and half funded by the Veteran’s Health Service. Doug Collins, the putative pick for Veteran’s Affairs is a former Georgia congressperson who, on the surface, doesn’t seem dreadful. He has some odd ideas about religion and proselytizing in the armed forces and has sworn his undying loyalty to Trump, but other than that seems rather conventional. The executives that want to privatize the VA system are probably lurking around in some dark corner, but they haven’t been announced for anything requiring confirmation as of yet. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services could be an absolute disaster. He has a distaste for science when not in downright denialism. His beliefs regarding the nature of disease and health seem to spring from charlatans, self-promoters, and bloviators rather than those who have spent their lives actually studying the human body and its marvelous biologic workings and how it interfaces with all the other living things on the planet, especially the microbes.

One of the great marvels of modern American society are the academic health centers that house the nation’s medical schools. These are essentially knowledge factories. Since the 1940s, they have been designed to create new information that has helped us live longer, healthier and more active lives. Compare the average 80-year-old you would have met in the 1960s and 1970s to the average 80 year old you might meet today. (Hint: Dolly Parton turns 80 in about a year). They are large, cumbersome, bureaucratic, byzantine, and frustrating beyond belief, both for those living within them and those that merely deal tangentially with them around health care. (I’m allowed to say this as I’ve been part of that world for more than forty years now). But with every year, they have inched progress forward and we can do things now that would have seemed impossible only a few decades ago: robotic surgery, advanced fertility treatments, turning HIV from a death sentence to a manageable chronic disease. But these institutions are fragile. They require funding from Medicare and NIH to survive and thrive. If the Department of HHS begins to monkey majorly with the ecosystem, it may quickly spiral into disastrous unintended consequences. I can say this with some certainty based on historical precedent. In the 1930s, the most famous, prestigious, and advanced medical school in the world was that of the University of Vienna in Austria. When the Nazi’s annexed Austria in the Anschluss and took over the society, the Jewish faculty were purged. The institution went into free fall and has never been able to return to what it was. It only took a year or two.

I have no idea as to what mischief might be cooking with Medicare. The introduction of Medicare Advantage with the Medicare Modernization Act of 2004 has dramatically shifted a number of trends within the program over the ensuing two decades. We could see the entire program forced into that model or we could see cuts which will lead to rationing of services, or we may see physicians required to take courses in the proper application of essential oils. I’m biding my time and watching which way the winds blow. My planned retirement date is in the spring of 2027. If HHS removes science and evidence in favor of hope and belief, I’m going to be moving that up quite a bit. I will not sacrifice my moral and ethical self on the altar of partisan politics. Stay tuned. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say as things develop. Perhaps that’s another book.

We all know Kennedy’s attitude towards vaccines. I’ve given up fighting people on them. All I will say is that nature and viruses don’t give a damn about your political opinions. If we stop vaccinating our children (and there are parts of the US with worse vaccination rates than sub-Saharan Africa), previously vanquished diseases will come back and eventually we’ll have wards of children in iron lungs. I will have to give him credit for wanting to take a hard look at the American diet and see what can be done to make that healthier. Michelle Obama did the same thing during her husband’s administration to nothing but derision from the Republicans of the time. He’s going to have a couple of problems to surmount though. A healthier diet would require more whole foods, and another branch of the administration wants to deport most of the agricultural labor force that would allow more of that to land on kitchen tables. And then there’s the taking on of the giant food product conglomerates who would rather their revenue streams be left alone. Not to mention the great American public that wants easy access to their Mountain Dew and Funyuns.

That’s enough for tonight. I have to get ready to go off to Massachusetts with the cast of Little Women for a few hours. Get some sleep tonight and tomorrow: get up, get dressed, go out, do good.

It’s my page and I’ll post what I want to, post what I want to… Lots of people seem to read the things that show up here when I’m in need of a brain dump and I’d like to remind them that everything that appears here is colored by my thought processes, lived life experiences, inherent biases, educational background, and the phases of the moon. None of it should be taken as the revealed word from on high. I am frequently wrong, am perfectly OK with counter arguments which present ideas or thoughts that I might not have taken into account or of which I might be unaware, and I have been known to change my mind on subjects, especially political ones, over time. When I first became aware of national politics and how our system operates in the 1970s, I would have described myself as a moderate Republican of a type that has been drummed out of the party starting with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. I now cannot think of a single Republican policy on a national level which I can support.

I remain an individual who believes in rationality, expertise, the scientific method, consensus, inclusivity, stewardship of resources for future generations, and strategic use of finances to jump start the solving of problems. I believe that tradition has a place in holding a society together but that tradition should adapt itself to new realities rather than we try to alter reality to fit tradition. I believe that religion is important in grappling with the mysteries of life where science may not yet have the ability to provide answers, but I do not think that dogma should override science or set public policy. There are 330 million of us sharing this country each with our own interior lives and understandings and none of our religious conceptions or beliefs is more correct than any other.

I am saddened to think that a majority of my fellow citizens do not think the way I do, or at least did not cast votes last week suggesting that they think the way I do. But I’m used to being in a minority class. This country has been pulling away of Enlightenment liberal values toward a more authoritarian form of social organization my entire adult life, fueled by a rise in unbridled capitalism that had allowed an enormous percentage of the wealth of the richest society this planet has ever seen becoming more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. I voted for the first time in 1980. There was huge social shift at the time which I could see in my peers. As a freshman in college, when I looked at the upper classmen, they were using their educations to explore, to develop themselves, to figure out how they could use their skills and their privileges for better. As a senior, when I looked at the incoming freshmen, their motivation was how to use their educational opportunities solely to improve their personal financial position and make more money. Perhaps it was the influence of the economic conditions of the 70s and early 80s. Perhaps it was the skyrocketing cost of an education which really started to take off in that period. But I find it unsurprising that it’s my generation (45-65) that really broke for Trump while the Boomers and Silent Generation (65+) did not.

The breakdown in social order of the late 60s fueled the rise of a more conservative Republicanism under Richard Nixon which completely crushed the Democrats by 1972. Nixon, however, overreached in what we now call Watergate and, as the press and the American public of the time still cared about corruption and criminal activity in high office, the Democrats were able to temporarily rebound with Carter in the late 70s. The malaise of that time, in terms of the economy and foreign policy doomed his reelection and in 1980, the Reagan Republicans rode into town.

Reagan and Bush I (pretty much a third Reagan term) would likely have held on to power had not Ross Perot run his independent campaign in 1992 which shifted enough of the Republican vote away to allow Clinton to squeak through. His administration turned out to be well run and the 90s were an economically stable time and he won reelection. He should have been able to hand power over to Gore in the election of 2000 but a combination of an emboldened Supreme Court deciding that the separation of powers no longer really mattered plus some dirty tricks with vote counting in Florida doomed that. Bush II used war mongering to stay in power through two terms but the great recession of 2008 led to enough economic desperation for voters to want to try something else allowing for Obama to win. The Republican machine felt cheated and, starting with the TEA party and the reaction of Obamacare, built the current leviathan that will be very difficult to combat, giving us Trump. A pandemic limited Trump to one term but that was a wounding, not a mortal blow. Reagan/Bush II/Trump is a natural arc towards very specific ends. It’s been designed and executed by the Heritage Foundation and any number of other right wing, well funded civic groups, aided and abetted by a media machine with little respect for objectivity or truth. The left has had no similar infrastructure on a national level. The well organized and financed progressive groups also spend way too much of their time infighting or expending all of their resources on unimportant short term wins rather than working on long term strategy. Clinton/Obama/Biden were helped by specific events that coincided with their initial elections, not by a long term plan. Reaction rather than action.

What now? I may be grieving on some level but I’m not withdrawing with Edward under the office supply shelves and licking my wounds for the next four years. There’s work to be done. I can’t undo the election but I can get up, get dressed, go out, and do good in the world. And that’s what I am planning on for the foreseeable future. There are people who are likely to be hurt by new policies and laws. I can help care for them, one at a time. (That’s always been my motto for my medical career – save the world one patient at a time). I can shine a light on injustice and make sure it is seen for what it is. I can contribute my skills together with others to help create alternative ideas and ideals. I can take inspiration from the wonderful African-American community among whom I live and who have been repeatedly denied full participation in our society for four hundred years now and still live, love, create and have lives filled with joy. I can keep on writing now that I’ve figured out how to do it. Given that my books and essays have been critical of the incoming administration in the past, I shan’t be in the least surprised if I am eventually suppressed or deplatformed and, if I am, I’ll take it as a badge of honor.

I’ll probably write a bunch about politics the next few months as it’s occupying my mind. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped working on my other projects. I’ve just found it healthy these last few years to do these brain dumps. I would start writing a Politically Incorrect Cabaret but I’ve gotten too dang old. Any twenty or thirty somethings out there want to pick up that torch? The moment is right.

Like everyone else in the country, ad a good fraction of the world’s population as well, I am working through my reactions to the results of this week’s election. I am not surprised by the Trump victory. I had prepared myself for that weeks and weeks ago as while I found Kamala Harris a fine candidate, I was unsure of her electability. I am surprised by the decisiveness of Trump’s victory with a commanding lead in the popular vote as well as the electoral college. He was unable to win the popular vote in either 2016 or 2020 so I am still puzzling out why he did this time around. I’ve read dozens of opinion columns with pundits of various political stripes pointing fingers at all sorts of bogeymen but my guess is that Occam’s razor will leave us with the simplest answer. This country has always been and remains a patriarchy. It’s baked into our cultural DNA.

Our culture derives primarily from the British colonists who crossed the Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries. People do not pull up stakes and undertake a difficult voyage fraught with the privations of travel at the time if their lives are going well. It’s the dispossessed, the endangered, the family that sees little hope for their children with the status quo, that are willing to make that sacrifice. (The same motives that are driving immigration northward from Latin America). The outgroup in the 17th century were the English puritans and related continental religious groups who rejected the empty pomp of the established state churches and came for religious freedom – The Congregationalists to Massachusetts, the Quakers to Pennsylvania etc. Their austere interpretation of religious doctrine and its role in public life infused the new world with a patriarchal world view, a culture of self denial, and the famous puritan work ethic. This way of seeing and doing things spread from the early metropolitan areas of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia to the rest of the country as a formal union of the states created a national identity. (There are a few outliers – New Orleans, having developed from French/Spanish/Creole culture has a completely different set of mores from most of the rest of the country, most easily seen in the toleration of public drinking).

While we didn’t exactly relegate women entirely to the status of chattel, we certainly circumscribed their lives and made them dependent on the existence of their men folk in ways that the women of Saudi Arabia would recognize. Women were not granted the right to vote until 1920, 72 years after the famous Seneca Falls convention where the leading women’s rights advocates of the day met and drafter their strategies for empowering women politically. Women were not allowed financial independence from men until the mid 1970s when they were finally allowed to open bank accounts and have credit accounts in their own name. They could be legally raped by their husbands until 1993. They still have not achieved full bodily autonomy.

Patriarchal attitudes, especially as filtered through Victorian mores, have created a culture of idealized feminine purity which still infiltrates so much of what we do without thinking. The white wedding dress and veil and the giving away of the bride, the double standard in regards to sexual behavior and slut shaming, the idea that women and girls need to be protected from the harsher elements of life. When our culture ventures out of these unwritten rules, punishment is quick and severe. When Alfred Kinsey published ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human Male’ in 1947, it was a cultural sensation and he was lauded for demystifying the subject. The intelligentsia all read it for titillation if for no other reason. When he published ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human Female’ a year or so later, there was outrage. How dare such filthy things we said about wives, mothers, sisters, daughters. His career and research never recovered. When pop music in the late 70s was taken over by singers and creators who were predominantly female, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community, the culture responded with ‘Disco sucks’ and a quick elevation of straight male hard rock bands. (Dressed mainly in outfits from the Atlanta Eagle, courtesy of the influence of Rob Halford of Judas Priest). When then First Lady Hilary Clinton came up with quite reasonable solutions to the problems in the American health care system, she had to be laughed off Capitol Hill. Then there’s the sad tale of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Whatever the reason, patriarchy or other, we have the result that we have. The Democrats are too adult to march on the Capitol brandishing AK-47s and pooping on congressional desks so we’ll have a peaceful transfer of power (although I have the feeling that Biden has prepared for this moment and has a couple of tricks up his sleeve after the Supremes basically declared the president above the law). January 20th will roll around and we’ll be off to the races again. Just a reminder – when dealing with authoritarians – believe what they tell you. We will get at least parts of Project 2025. I hope the worst parts will become mired in constitutional challenges. We are likely to get a cabinet and senior government filled with sycophants rather than individuals of talent and capability. This may speed up my retirement plans. I’m not sure I can function in a health system guided by Joseph Ladapo and RFK Jr. (Between the pandemic and the aging of the boom, it’s already in crisis and that’s not the team that’s going to be able to shore it up). How much of the immigrant pronouncements are rhetoric and how much will be acted upon I simply don’t know. Rounding up and deporting tens of millions of undocumented individuals is possible (Nazi Germany showed us that – just take a look at the story of the Hungarian Jews). All I can say is if it begins, do not let it happen under cover of darkness and behind closed doors. Find out and publicize exactly what goes on in detention centers. Even a partially successful mass deportation will decimate the agriculture, construction and hospitality sectors. There will be no nursing assistants in nursing homes so you’ll have to take grandma in. Tariffs will cause price spikes so be ready to forego those cheap and readily available consumer goods. If we withdraw from NATO, forget that European vacation. Those with American passports may not be welcome.

What am I not going to do? I am not going to cut people with differing political ideas completely out of my life. I am not them. I don’t know what combination and culmination of personal choices has allowed them to select as they have. I will be polite, but I am likely to give them a wider berth and share less but I will not be an absolutist. That leads to an even wider divide in society and it’s wide enough already. Plus, politics are a funny thing. Things can change much faster than you might think. When I lived in California in the 80s and 90s, it had a Republican governor and a very conservative state house. In 2008, California voters passed Proposition 8 which made gay marriage illegal. Just a few years later, Windsor and Obergefell changed all of that and just this week, California voters passed a state constitutional amendment enshrining gay marriage as a right. It only took sixteen years for everything to change, not 72.

As the Chinese curse proverb goes – May you live in interesting times.

I think I need a drink.

It’s getting late on election day. The polls are closing and now we wait. I don’t know about turn out nationally, but locally it’s a good deal higher than it has been for some time with long lines at some polling places. I got up and voted prior to heading in to work, arriving about 7:45 and it took me about 45 minutes to wind my way through the line to collect, fill out, and deposit my ballot. I haven’t a clue what will happen tonight, but whatever it is, I’ll be getting up tomorrow and going in and taking care of patients because that’s what I do and that’s what’s really important – people helping others rather than trying to destroy them in pursuit of temporary political power.

I also see the spinal surgeons tomorrow in regards to my cervical spondylosis which has been causing spasms in my left shoulder girdle for the last six months. I have no intention of actually having surgery on my neck as I can deal with the pain and I haven’t had any functional issues, but I think it’s wise to know all of the alternatives. My guess is I’ll end up with some physical therapy and traction. The only issue will be trying to figure out how to fit in some physical therapy appointments into my already overly crowded schedule.

I was supposed to be at Little Women rehearsal this evening but illness in a key team member caused a quick adjustment to the rehearsal schedule and I am not needed. I thought about taking myself out to dinner and a movie, but decided instead to stay home and do some writing, catch up on progress notes, and go to bed early. I’m a bit fatigued after this weekend. As I didn’t have anything specific on the schedule, I raced over to South Carolina on Saturday to see Frank Thompson as Mortimer Brewster in a production of Arsenic and Old Lace (it was a bucket list role for him) and raced back on Sunday. It would have been relatively uneventful but in my throwing things into a duffel for the overnight, I somehow forgot to pack my CPAP and therefore slept very badly Saturday night. That combined with twelve hours of driving has left me a little bushed.

It has been some years since I last saw Arsenic and Old Lace produced on stage. I had forgotten what a singularly odd play it is – a farcical comedy about mass murder with galloping insanity, spoofing of religion and the police, and various 30s horror movie tropes thrown in for good measure. There’s nothing else quite like it in the American theater cannon. It still works with all the grisly humor played for laughs leaving the audience giggling at highly inappropriate subjects, similar to Sweeney Todd, although many of the references, while au courant for 1941, have fallen into obscurity. There are few under the age of sixty who will understand a joke about Judith Anderson. I don’t remember the last time it was produced locally (probably the South City production I saw about fifteen years ago) but I can think of a number of members of the theater community who would be perfect for various roles. I’ve aged out of the juicer roles myself and would probably have to settle for one of the lonely old men in the cellar.

Covid is still very much out there. It’s not at the 1/40 Americans infected that it was this summer, it’s more like 1/120 Americans currently has a case. Vaccination rates with the current booster remain low. I saw a statistic today that bothered me. Only 15% of currently employed health care workers have taken advantage of the most recent booster since it became available a couple of months ago. For the most part, it’s mandatory that health care workers receive flu shots. Both UAB and VA employee health start chasing me every October until I get one and I won’t be allowed to work in patient care until I can either prove my adherence or provide a medical reason why I cannot be vaccinated. No such rules have come down for covid boosters. I’m not saying that they should necessarily, but I find it interesting to compare and contrast.

The big issue is not acute covid infections. For the most part, between vaccine and natural immunities we’re doing pretty well at keeping ourselves out of the hospital. The issue is the long term complications of long covid which has somewhere between a 3 and 10 percent chance of occurring after even mild cases. Long covid significantly raises the chance of chronic respiratory illness, heart disease including heart attack and congestive failure, stroke, and dementia. For those in my generation who are starting to see the dementia belt approaching, keeping up to date on covid immunity is probably statistically the best thing you can do for yourself to stave dementia off.

One of the essays I’m toying with is something along the lines of ‘We Will All Have Long Covid’. If we are so lack luster at taking preventive steps, have significant chances of developing the issue, and enough time passes, by the 2030s we may have an enormous burden of what should have been preventable chronic disease above and beyond that brought by the aging processes of the baby boom (now fourteen months away from turning eighty). I sit and ponder these things and start flipping calendar pages and calculating my retirement date again.

I am not raising my blood pressure by watching the election returns tonight. I can do nothing about them and it’s not like I won’t find out. I’m sure to be beaten over the head with the result tomorrow morning when I wake up and open my computer. Good night and good luck.

Ghost cat Edward remains a ghost cat. He’s moved out from behind the dryer, and also abandoned his hole under the spare leaf for the dining room table. He seems to have taken up semi-permanent residence in the bottom of the office supply closet. I check to make sure he’s breathing. Leave him some kitty treats and make sure there’s food and water in his bowls and that there are signs of litterbox use. He may decide to emerge at some point. He may decide that life is better hiding under a shelf with a large box of legal envelopes next to the paper cutter. And given the mass hysteria gripping the land eight days prior to the election, he may have the right idea.

So far today, I have received three e-mails and six text messages begging me to contribute to a national political campaign. I don’t watch commercial TV so I am spared the barrage of television advertisements. I tend to get my political news from a number of national digests that repackage AP, Reuters, the WaPo, NYT, NPR, and various other major dailies. My take aways are as follows. Is there actually anyone who has not yet made up their mind regarding whom they support in the presidential race? I think the mythical undecideds that the last minute push is chasing is a huge waste of money, which various consultancies and media companies are all too happy to accept. The Democrats great weaknesses are an inability to communicate how national policies will translate into actual effects for the majority of the population, especially regarding kitchen table issues such as the spike in housing, energy and food costs which have increased far beyond the ability of most wages to keep up. Combine this with the usual circular firing squad tactics and ridiculous ideological purity tests and there’s no way to shift middle America. The Republicans great weaknesses are a candidate whose behavior is, at best, reprehensible and who seems to be in the early stages of cognitive decline, and a replacement of seasoned politicos with fantasists who think that truth comes from belief rather than the other way round. I may crawl into the closet with Edward and remain there until long after election day. Somebody come in the morning and leave me pastry and coffee rather than kitty treats though.

The rehearsal process has started for Little Women. We have six weeks to whip it into shape. After a week of music rehearsal, the songs are starting to come together. We start blocking this next week. Now that I’ve had some time to study the script and score, I’m not as worried about it as I was. Everything I am being called on to do is well within my wheelhouse. I don’t have anything theatrical set for winter/spring as of yet but there’s likely to be some push on writing projects so it may be best if I do not overload myself too much. I always say that and then someone offers me a part I want to do or a show I love or the chance to work with others in the theater community whom I sincerely admire and we’re off to the races again and I’m running around trying to make sure that all the parts of life are evenly balanced and I’m in the right building at the right time on the right day. I can see myself coming down with an early dementia and singing show tunes while making house calls and trying to do histories and physicals on the stage crew at the theater. I have found, in my senior life with many years of experience under my belt, that showing up is the most important part of the task. If you do that, you can usually wing the rest.

My editor/publisher (who is becoming coauthor on the next series of books given the way they are developing) as all sorts of ideas regarding the material that became The Accidental Plague Diaries (and which I continue to dash off at uneven intervals – you’re reading today’s variation on a theme now). It seems to include websites. interactivity, artificial intelligence, and new publishing models. I don’t understand half of it. I’m letting him figure all that out. All I know how to do is write. I’ve told him tell me what you need an essay on and I should be able to get it to you by the end of the week. I’m fine if it becomes a living document with clickable links, and AI pulls from the historical record but I’m not the guy who’s going to figure that all out. I may have grown up four or five blocks away from Bill Gates but I did not get his programming skills. Must have been something in the water in our part of Laurelhurst. That being said, we may be beta testing some things in a few months and I will direct my readers (all six of you) at that time to read some things and try some stuff out.

The essay I am working on at the moment involves how the pandemic has changed our perceptions of time in various ways. It’s something I have noticed as being pretty universal among my friends and acquaintances. The accurate assessment of time and past and relative order of events has taken a blow due to two plus years of disruption in all of the usual orders and patterns of our lives. Whether we like it or not, evolution helped condition us to live with a certain rhythm of life, dictated by seasons and seasonal rituals, all of which went to hell in a handbasket in the early 2020s. I think becoming untethered form those cycles has had some rather profound effects. I’m not going to write them down today. I’m still working out my ideas and I want you all to have your interest piqued regarding the next writing project. (It does not yet have a title.)

I haven’t done a Covid update for a while so I took a look at the latest numbers this afternoon. We seem to be coming out of the summer surge. Test positivity rate has been dropping from over 10% to about 6% this past week. Waste water surveillance shows less virus. Deaths are under 600 a week nationwide (mainly in elderly and chronically ill individuals but there are still cases of robust healthy young people catching it and dying in ways that they did early in the pandemic). The updated Covid booster has been available since Labor Day. To date, about 30% of senior adults over 65 have been boosted. The general adult population is not racing out for their boosters though. They’re at about 13% boosted. Pro tip: the best reason to stay up to date with boosters is not to prevent the disease but to prevent long covid which can be disastrous. Even mild cases can turn into long covid in some individuals but the vaccine data shows remarkable protection against these complications.

There are still a large number of people opposed to the vaccine on philosophical grounds. I believe in bodily autonomy so I never argue with people about it. I will just take my chances with a vaccine with a documented complication rate of about 1/100,000 over a disease that killed one out of every 250 people in the country and has the possibility of crippling me every time I come down with it. But that’s just me.

It’s the calm before the storm. Or perhaps I’m in the eye of a hurricane. (Trivia of the day: hurricane is one of four Arawak words still in common use in modern English – the other three are canoe, hammock, and barbecue.) I suppose if one were to calibrate one’s speed of travel exactly and could follow the correct course, one could always remain in the eye of the hurricane and be relatively safe from the winds and the rain. But that seems rather impractical for most of us as we aren’t exactly nomads in this day and age. And so we get warming gulf waters and the effects of Helene and Milton (shortly to be joined by Oscar if I read my weather news correctly). I’ve heard from all of my friends in the Asheville area and everyone is safe but the extent of the disruption to basic infrastructure such as water and sewer and electricity and telecommunications will require years to repair and restore. Not to mention the number of major roads which have essentially ceased to exist, making it difficult to get the crews and equipment to where they need to be.

I’ve been going to Asheville intermittently for decades. My first trip was in 1992 when Steve and I did the first of several cross country jaunts so he could work on the Spivey genealogy and peruse records in various Appalachian courthouses. I spent more time in the 90s then I care to think about flipping through microfiches of birth and death records and property transfer deeds. There are two clans of Spiveys in the US. The lowland Spiveys who originated in Virginia in the late 17th century after emigrating from the British Isles. These were the Spiveys with money. Then there are the mountain Spiveys from the hollers of Appalachia. Steve did a great job tracing all the blood lines down finding that they all converged on three brothers who settled in the Asheville area (Buncombe county NC) around 1770. Where the three brothers came from is a bit of a mystery. Spivey could be Scots-Irish or it could be an Anglicization of the Czech Spivak. (Some branches of the family had a legend that the Spiveys were originally from Bohemia so that would fit). Try as he might, he could find no record of them prior to 1770 tax rolls. The grandson of one of the brothers, WIlliam Spivey, lived just outside of Ashville from about 1840-1930 and ‘Old Billy’ was apparently a local fixture to the point that the hill on which he lived is Spivey mountain to this day. In the 1990s, Steve found a number of distant cousins in the Ashville area who had known old Billy when they were young which makes you realize just how young the country is in some ways. My grandparents were born 1894-1903 and I have a couple of great-grandparents born in the 1850s. That’s pushing two hundred years ago.

So Steve and I spent time in Asheville as ground zero for the hillbilly Spiveys. I suppose it served me well years later when I had my contract with the United Mine Workers Funds and would spend a week a quarter in Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia. If you haven’t been to that part of the world, the topography is interesting. The mountains aren’t terribly high, but they are incredibly steep and separated from each other by very narrow valleys and chasms caused by water running off into streams and rivers. You live in the few places where the river valleys have created relatively flat land. This is why Helene’s floods were so devastating. Trillions of gallons of water was dumped in a small geographic area very quickly. The ground was saturated by prior rain storms so the water all raced down into the river valleys which, being confined, led to rapid rises and flooding. And, as all of the population lives in the stream and river valleys the infrastructure was carried away as well.

Tommy loved Asheville as well and we would usually go about once a year. He loved the river arts district, Biltmore village and, of course the Biltmore estate. He wasn’t too keen on the house, finding it highly impractical, but he loved the winery and we usually came home with a case of assorted in the back of the car. I haven’t been back since Tommy’s death. I haven’t really had cause to. And now I’m not sure if I ever will. I want to remember it as it was, rather than as what it will turn itself into. I have the same feelings about Maui after the burning of Lahaina. If I go back to Hawaii, I’ll probably hang out in Kailua-Kona. It’s not a Sondheim quote coming to mind but a Kander and Ebb one. ‘Somebody loses, and somebody wins. One day it’s kicks, then it’s kicks in the shins. But the planet spins and the world goes round and round’. And because of that, we live in cycles of constant change. Human nature is one of inertia, of trying to keep everything the same – but that’s a losing strategy. The best thing any of us can do is work on our resilience and adaptability because none of us has any real control over much of anything.

It’s calm around here because it’s a weekend without a barrage of deadlines hanging over my head. Added to that, the weather has been gorgeous. It’s Alabama fall meaning cool mornings, rapidly warming up to the 70s and, most importantly, not a trace of humidity. Yesterday morning, I toddled off to the Avondale Park amphitheater to see Opera Birmingham’s annual children’s opera (An adaptation of Dvorak’s Russalka into the Little Mermaid story, lasting about 45 minutes). Children’s opera at the amphitheater has caught on the last few years and there were lots of preschool and early elementary tots wearing their Ariel outfits and playing in the bubbles, and occasionally trying very unsuccessfully to sing along. But for the most part they paid attention and this is how you build new audiences; get them while they’re young and convince their parents they want to see La Boheme for date night. The amphitheater shows are a happy accident of Covid. The venue has been there since the 30s but has been relatively neglected and underused in recent years. In the spring of 2021, when indoor performance of opera was not yet possible, Opera Birmingham did an abbreviated Pirates of Penzance there (I was one of the policemen) and it was a huge success, being one of the first music theater offerings locally in over a year. The venue is outdoors, family friendly, easy to get to, and it became natural to put the children’s opera there in subsequent years. So not all Covid changes are necessarily bad.

I thought about getting out on my newly renovated terrace and doing some work, but the first thing that needs to be done is for me to finish spray painting my patio furniture, a job that was interrupted two years ago when the terrace refurbishment from hell got underway. I just didn’t feel like that kind of exertion (I think I’ll hire some teenagers of my acquaintance who need extra money) so that will wait for another day. But I did get a hundred pages read in my book for book club, a number of things written, a start on this years CME, completed all of my progress notes and still had time to laze around this afternoon. But I don’t think this languid pace is going to continue.

Rehearsals begin on Tuesday for my next theater project (The 2005 musical version of Little Women which originally starred Sutton Foster). Despite my lobbying for Beth, I have been cast as Mr. Laurence, Laurie’s grumpy grandfather from next door. Once again, aging up for the stage. I’ll probably have to grow out the white whiskers and look a little weird for a bit. I’m looking forward to it. It’s a cast of ten, most of whom I have known for years and usually, with a cast that small, it’s easy to bond and become an ensemble with minimal perturbations. Then there’s the writing projects. My publisher is working on a grand plan which would include websites, ebook editions, audio editions, republication with updated material, and a second trio of books which we’re referring to as the Four Horsemen series, the first of which looks at how Covid changed things. (Spoiler: What didn’t it change?). How and when I’m supposed to write all of this without the enforced seclusion of a pandemic and shutdown I’m not sure but something should come of it. I’m putting my faith into his planning. I just hope there’s some ROI.

Thank you to all of you who have expressed interest in telling your Covid/Pandemic story as part of the new book. We’re slowly figuring out interviews and topics. You’re not forgotten. If anyone has a particular change they have noted in society, behavior, public policy, healthcare or anything else they think I should explore, let me know and I’ll take it under advisement. I have figured out some of the themes but there are more out there.

Going to watch a movie for MNM and then heading out to dinner with my travel agent for a post mortem on South America and starting to think about what the major 2025 trip should be.

I’ve been reflecting on life choices the last couple of days. I do that every once in a while. Wonder whether I’ve chosen the correct road through the yellow wood and if where I am is inevitable or if I had made a wiser choice at some point in the past I might be at some greater apogee of achievement. And then I think I’ve actually done OK by myself. The career has been relatively successful, I have a full life full of interesting activities and people, I have things to look forward to and (according to my quarterly statements), I need not panic about my finances yet. I suppose I have the mindset of those of us who belong to Generation Jones – that micro generation born 1957-65 who are nothing like the older boomers and not quite Generation X. Always Jonesing for something more and never quite content with what we have.

As far as a quick update goes, the medical work life is fairly placid. I’m a little tired of people taking a stupid pill before paging me or sending me a portal message but I can usually put on my professional demeanor and answer even the most inane questions with a quiet rationality. (Yes, you may take more than one pill for nausea a day if you’re still being bothered. It says so on the bottle. No, you need not worry that your cholesterol was a little high at the age of ninety-four. High cholesterol is linked to premature cardiovascular disease, a condition not possible at your stage of life. No, I cannot stop the ambulance that dad called for mom and reroute it to a different hospital.) Every month that goes by is a month closer to retirement. I just have to keep reminding myself of that.

My publisher and I have worked out a structure for the next book. It’s going to be a look, from five years on, at how the pandemic and Covid has changed us. It will be divided into a number of themed chapters, each looking at a different social aspect of the pandemic and what has ensued. There will be an introductory essay laying out the theme, a longer essay talking about the specifics of the pandemic, and an interview with an individual whose story of their experiences with the pandemic illustrates that change. If we can keep to schedule, we should have it done shortly after the new year.

I have a request of all of my readers. We will need about fifteen interviews/stories/narratives of people who were affected in some way by the pandemic or its aftermath. If you have an interesting or unique experience or know of someone who has or would just like more information, drop me a direct message. We would particularly like to talk to someone who had a major hospitalization, a long covid experience, a business that failed, a business that changed in some fundamental way, an experience of being trapped in a place during the shut down that made it difficult to get home, or anything else that might make compelling reading. We have a half dozen lined up and need more. I’ve written drafts of some of the essays and I may put them up somewhere for beta readers and comments.

Covid numbers are down (only about 1/80 people you meet are currently actively infectious compared to the 1/40 that was prevalent earlier this summer). They do, however, remain somewhat higher than they were a year ago and we’re still losing about 1,000 people a week nationwide to the disease. If annualized, this brings the death toll to roughly the same magnitude as breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, and motor vehicle accidents. (All between 42,000 – 52,000 deaths a year in the US). Will we have another surge with winter weather? It’s still unknown. The newly formulated Covid booster is now widely available. (Most insurances are paying for one annual Covid booster, two if you’re over age 65). I had mine a month ago. I really have no interest in enjoying long Covid which is the major risk factor for most of us.

I sang tonight with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra chorus which joined together with Samford University’s A Cappella Choir and Orchestra for a brief program of music from the opera world. It’s been a while since I’ve done some serious singing. The voice lessons are helping a lot but I’m still having a lot of trouble when things go above an E-flat. Someday… Rehearsals for my next show start in a couple of weeks. Can’t really post anything about that yet. I have signed the contract but the theater hasn’t officially announced the cast list. Let’s just say it will keep me off the streets in November and early December.

Hurricane Helene made a mess of Appalachia last week and now Hurricane Milton threatens to make a mess of the Tampa Bay area this week. We used to come together in times of crisis and make sure our fellow countrymen were OK and helped them through the difficult times. Now I see bald faced and easily disprovable lies circulating for partisan political advantage everywhere I turn. When scoring political points becomes more important than helping those in need, there’s a serious sickness in society – and it seems to have infected even religious institutions. There are days when I want to retreat into my condo, lock the door and shut everyone out other than the door dash delivery person. And I don’t think it’s going to get any better the first week of November, no matter who wins. I fully expect it to actually get worse. Maybe it is time to let it all collapse and see if younger generations can pick up the pieces and build something better.

If I had a lawn, I’d be yelling at kids to get off it. I suppose I’m entering my geezer phase.