Debbie Gibson has been showing up in my personal Facebook feed of late, even though I haven’t subscribed to her, and even though I’ve never been a particular devotee of her music.
This is probably because of demographics. I’m a Gen Xer in my 50s. Debbie Gibson is a pop star from the 1980s. Therefore, Meta reasons that I should be a Debbie Gibson fan.
(And just to be clear about this: I never actively disliked Debbie Gibson or her music. But I was never really part of her target audience, either. She specialized in a brand of pop love songs that were written for 14-year-old girls enduring their first serious crushes. Debbie Gibson’s breakout year was 1988. In 1988 I was a 20-year-old male.)
This morning Debbie Gibson showed up in my Facebook feed wearing a bikini. Now once again it is necessary for me to provide a disclaimer. Gibson looks damn good in her swimwear, for a woman of any age. So there’s no “body shaming” going on here.
But the economist in me has to wonder… What compels a 55-year-old woman who has been famous for 40 years to post bikini photos of herself on social media? That might make sense for an up-and-coming, wannabe social media influencer. But Debbie Gibson, who has been famous since Ronald Reagan was in the White House?
I think it might have something to do with the way media marketing has changed since the halcyon 1980s.
Forty years ago, Debbie Gibson’s marketing cycle looked something like this:
Release an album.
Record a music video.
Appear on MTV.
Do magazine interviews.
Maybe appear on television.
Disappear until the next album.
In the old days, marketing assets were expensive to produce and deliver. Barriers to entry were high. Therefore, marketing tended to occur in high-end, highly curated campaigns.
The internet and social media all but eliminated those barriers to entry. Now everyone, from your local plumber to your next-door neighbor’s daughter, can achieve more marketing presence than would have been possible for Debbie Gibson in 1987. As a result, everyone who hawks their wares online needs to market themselves like your local plumber or your next-door neighbor’s daughter.
There is nothing conspiratorial or sinister about this. Technology and economics are doing their thing.
All of this seems second-nature to anyone under the age of 30. But to those of us who can remember the previous century well, the shift in the media landscape can often be discombobulating. I wonder if Debbie Gibson would agree.
I will never be accused of age discrimination. I find that people of various ages get on my nerves more or less equally, albeit in different ways.
The twenty-somethings with their neurotic cell phone obsessions… the aging Baby Boomers who dawdle and shuffle about… the now-forty-something Millennials who are still trying to be hipsters, as if the calendar had been pushed back to 2005.
And we haven’t even gotten to children and teenagers yet.
The point here is that people of all ages can be annoying, so there is no reason to discriminate against any of them, in a knee-jerk, automated manner.
Bethany Michel, who is now 28, moved to a retirement community in Florida in 2020 to take care of her terminally ill father. This was obviously during the COVID pandemic. Her father subsequently passed away and she inherited the house from him in 2023.
The HOA in Michel’s neighborhood is now trying to force her out, apparently, because she is under the age of 55. The campaign to oust her began three months after her father’s death, when she received a letter informing her that she did not meet the requirements for residency. (Although she was an adult, she was too young for the 55+ community.) The HOA is now trying to evict her with formal legal measures.
Age discrimination is one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination. Often it is directed at those of us who are older.
I will soon turn 58. Every now and then I’ll see the term “creepy old man” tossed about on the internet, on social media or elsewhere. What’s the deal with that? Does anyone seriously believe that a 30-year-old man can’t be creepy? I can show you a lot of evidence to the contrary.
A more systematic, though carefully hidden, form of age discrimination is used in job interview situations. There are some hiring managers in corporate America who don’t believe that people over 50 are capable of learning newfangled things. (Once again, I could provide plenty of evidence to the contrary.)
But there is also an ilk of people over 55 who seek to discriminate against younger adults—especially those younger adults with children.
Many of them live in age-restricted 55+ communities. Such communities are legal under the Housing for Older Persons Act (HOPA) of 1995.
Many of these communities provide exemptions for live-in caregivers. For example, The Villages, a huge retirement community in Central Florida, will allow the under-55 to reside within their hoary confines so long as:
“at least one member of your household is 55 and you are not younger than 19 years old.”
And they’re serious about those under-19-year-olds. The Villages “absolutely” does “welcome children and grandchildren”… to a point. “Please note,” the community’s website informs us, “visitors under the age of 18 are limited to 30 days in the calendar year.”
Unless, that is, the under-18-year-old is a pit bull or a Rottweiler. The Villages is aggressively pet-friendly. The community has many dog-walking paths and parks.
Certain forms of “age discrimination” are both commonsense and unavoidable. We have all been exasperated by the twenty-something who purports to have all the answers to all the world’s problems. Romantic relationships with vast age gaps—even among consenting adults—will always raise eyebrows.
But where ordinary social interaction is concerned, we are becoming a bit too precious as a society if we now demand the right to only associate with those who were born in the same decade as us. On the contrary, this is an area where we could all benefit from a little more diversity.
One of my friends at my local gym is a guy named Bob. Bob, who is exactly 30 years my senior, will turn 88 this year. Bob was a well-known college basketball player in the early 1960s. I love listening to his sports stories. I also enjoy talking with him about the way America was during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years.
This doesn’t mean that I now want to restrict my company to people on the verge of 90. I also enjoy interactions with twenty-somethings, much as they sometimes frustrate me. I occasionally get ideas from my twenty-something acquaintances that I simply wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.
At the same time, I enjoy interacting with my fellow Gen Xers, now mostly fifty-something adults who fondly remember what it was like to come of age in the 1980s and early 1990s.
If you spend too much time talking to only Gen Xers, though, you’ll develop a worldview that is a little too cynical and sarcastic. I find that I benefit from deliberately pulling myself out of the Gen X bubble at regular intervals.
This was true even when I was a teen and twenty-something myself. At that time, everyone who was significantly younger than me was literally a child. Most of my age-disparate interactions, therefore, took place with older adults. I enjoyed listening to the Baby Boomers’ stories about Vietnam and the 1960s. I enjoyed listening to my World War II generation grandparents tell me about the 1930s and 1940s. I never wanted to live in an age-restricted bubble.
Back to Bethany Michel and her housing fight. There are photos of the 28-year-old online. She’s blonde and very easy on the eyes. And while I’m perfectly happy with my current next-door neighbors, I would not shriek in horror if Ms. Michel were to purchase their home.
So who, exactly, is so offended by her presence? And why? And why would The Villages want to severely restrict the presence of younger people, as if anyone under the age of 19 will turn into a flesh-eating zombie after 30 days?
As for me, I’d be a lot more annoyed by all the dogs.
I was briefly involved in the Boy Scouts from 1979 to 1980, when I was 11 years old.
I will admit that I was somewhat lukewarm about being a Boy Scout from the get-go. I got involved with scouting at the behest of a friend of mine. We are still friends today, but I have learned not to take his advice on important life decisions.
Don’t get me wrong: I had a great time as a Boy Scout. I made some friends in the Boy Scouts who are still friends today, some 45 years later. (Or well—at least they’re friends on Facebook.)
The things I liked about the Boy Scouts included the merit badge system. Even as a youngster, I liked the idea of diving into subjects and learning about them from the inside out. I earned a respectable handful of merit badges.
My big problem with the Boy Scouts was camping. I never learned to enjoy sleeping in a tent. Nor did I enjoy making complete meals out of Spam and deviled ham.
And as for answering calls of nature out in the woods… well, we won’t even go there.
A Boy Scout who doesn’t like camping? Whoever heard of that?That’s why I didn’t last long in the Boy Scouts.
As a result, I made it only to the rank of Second Class. No Eagle Scout bragging rights here.
The official magazine of the Boy Scouts was Boy’s Life. I would have been a member in January 1980, when the issue below was released.
Boy’s Life contained articles about fishing, camping, and other outdoorsy stuff. There was content about history, and profiles of professional athletes. This was the right magazine for me at that age. I enjoyed Boy’s Life a lot more than I enjoyed the campouts.
I understand that Boy’s Life has been renamed Scout Life, to conform to the new coed nature of scouting. The BSA began admitting girls in 2018. In 2025, the Boy Scouts of America officially changed its name to Scouting America.
There have been other changes, as well. It really isn’t the same organization I was involved in back in 1979 to 1980. I have no official opinion on Scouting America, and I’m much, much too old to be reading Scout Life, anyway.
What Ohio’s school voucher system may have done to the cost of private education
I attended Catholic schools for most of my K–12 years.
I went to a public kindergarten. From first grade through eighth grade, I attended a parish school on the east side of Cincinnati.
I completed my high school education at a Catholic school that was also located on the east side of Cincinnati. (And, as we will shortly discuss, still is.)
I’m not here to apologize for attending Catholic schools. Nor do I have any horror stories to relate. My educational experience was almost uniformly pleasant. My teachers were dedicated, responsible adults. As for my peers—well, high school was high school—but most of them were pretty nice people, on balance.
My public school options were not horrible by the standards of the 1970s and 1980s. But I’m glad my parents spent the extra money to send me to Catholic schools.
But how much money?
When I graduated from high school in 1986, my parents were spending about $1,000 per year on my tuition. That’s about $3,100 in present-day dollars.
Tuition at the high school I attended now costs more than five times that inflation-adjusted amount. Tuition at my former high school costs about $15,000 per year. Additional fees bring the total to nearly $17,000 per year.
What the heck happened?
Back in the 1980s, tuition-based Catholic schools operated under market constraints. All private schools did, for that matter. They could charge only what families could feasibly afford. Therefore, they had to keep their operating costs in line.
In the mid-1980s, my high school had two full-time administrators. There was one full-time guidance counselor.
And that was for a student body of about two thousand kids.
The high school I attended now has fewer than half that many students. According to the internet, about 700 students now attend my alma mater.
But, as you might have guessed, my old high school now has more administrators. (In fact, one of my former classmates is the Director of Admissions there.)
I’ve also noticed that the school has gone on a building spree in recent years. When I was a student there in the 1980s, we all used more or less the same facilities that my mother and her classmates had used in the 1960s. (My mother was a 1964 graduate of the same school.) Our accommodations were comfortable, but not luxurious. (And when you’re 15, 16, or 17 years old, who really cares about plush surroundings, anyway?)
But now every alumni newsletter from my former high school seems to feature some new building project. I was last inside the school for an alumni activity about a decade ago. I could barely recognize the place.
So…what the heck happened?
Government money is what happened.
Ohio has a program called EdChoice, aka a “voucher system.” In Ohio, families can receive up to $8,408 in voucher assistance for private high school tuition.
If half of the students at my alma mater are receiving the full EdChoice stipend, that would mean an annual influx of about $2.9 million. Give that much money to any group of educational administrators, and they’ll spend like drunken sailors on shore leave.
There are two sides to the school voucher debate. The first is that school vouchers siphon money from the public school system. While that issue is well worth considering, an equally serious problem is that school vouchers can artificially inflate costs at private schools. I know—because I had a quite satisfactory educational experience at a private Catholic high school during the mid-1980s for about a fifth of its current, inflation-adjusted cost.
Government money, I should note, is not the only type of external funding that can inflate costs. I’ve noticed a sharp increase in the cost of glasses and eye care over the years. (I’ve worn prescription lenses since 1978.) A few decades ago, insurance companies were not involved in routine eye care to the extent they are today. Now they are, and the costs we all pay have risen concomitantly.
You’ve no doubt had the experience of receiving a $1,600 bill for some routine medical test. Why do these tests cost so much? Because, in most cases, an external insurance provider will ultimately be paying the bill.
Whether that insurance provider is the government or a corporation is immaterial from an inflationary standpoint. Third-party insurance payments tend to weaken the market constraints that would otherwise keep prices in check.
So do school vouchers, it seems.
Meanwhile, public education funding is in a perpetual mess here in the Buckeye State. Many of the local districts do not have regular bus service. Each year, there are rancorous debates over school levies and property taxes, which fund public schools in Ohio.
These are problems that we did not have in the 1980s. Granted, I was not a homeowner paying property taxes in 1986, but I don’t remember my parents complaining about the property taxes they shelled out. (Nowadays, everyone in Ohio grouses about how high their property taxes are.) Nor was there ever a problem providing school buses for both public school kids and parochial school kids.
I reiterate: I am not a foe of Catholic schools. On the contrary, I’m both a fan and a beneficiary of them. But they were a lot more affordable—for both parents and taxpayers—before school vouchers came into the picture.
EdChoice is not a panacea for parents. If a family receives the full $8,408 in EdChoice assistance for tuition to my old high school, that still leaves about $8,600 out of pocket. That’s an inflation-adjusted net cost of nearly three times what my parents paid in the 1980s.
There is a cashier at a nearby grocery store where I regularly shop. She is an avid reader of my books.
This woman (I’ll call her Beverly) is probably in her mid-forties. Like me, she has spent most of her life in Ohio.
Beverly subscribes to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, and she reads most of my books through KU.
The other day, I asked Beverly if she did much reading on non-Amazon platforms such as Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo.
Beverly gave me a perplexed look.
“Why?” she asked, honestly surprised by the question. (She had never even heard of Kobo—or, at best, was only vaguely aware that it existed.)
I grew up in an era when the retail book market was wonderfully distributed and diverse. We had Waldenbooks and B. Dalton in the local mall. There were independent bookstores throughout the eastern Cincinnati suburbs where I lived. There were also at least two bookstores serving the University of Cincinnati, which I attended in the late 1980s.
When the brick-and-mortar superstores Borders and Barnes & Noble came to Cincinnati in the 1990s, the retail book market consolidated somewhat—but not all that much. There were still no online book sales, and the market was large enough to support multiple retailers.
That’s the way I prefer things to be. But as is so often the case in the twenty-first century, I find myself out of step with the times.
A few months ago, I took a handful of my ebook titles wide, meaning that I removed them from Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program (which requires exclusivity) and made them available through Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.
This past week, I decided to remove those books from wide distribution and place them back into Kindle Unlimited. That decision was based on sales data, as well as further analysis of broader market trends. One factor was the overwhelming cost competitiveness of Amazon’s Kindle devices.
As a result, seven of my titles will be returning to Kindle Unlimited. This process should be complete by the end of the month. It is taking longer than I expected because several of Kobo’s international bookseller partners have been slow to delist the titles, and I cannot enroll them in Kindle Unlimited until they have been fully removed from those sites.
These are the titles that will be returning to KU over the coming weeks. You can find all of them on my Amazon author page:
In the mid-1980s, I became a rabid fan of Stephen King. My fandom started with a random confluence of events, as so many things do.
My sophomore year of high school, I had a job manning the checkout desk at my school’s library during my study hall period. So I had plenty of exposure to books. One day, I happened across a paperback copy of Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.
The novel had been made into a two-part television miniseries five years earlier (1979). I had seen the miniseries, and it had creeped me out. I remembered enough about the miniseries to know what the novel would be about, but not enough to ruin the book for me.
I was instantly hooked. I blazed through ‘Salem’s Lot in only a few days. After that, I checked out every book in the school library that was written by Stephen King.
When I exhausted the school library shelves, I turned to the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton stores at the local mall. This was in the mid-1980s. By this time, Carrie, The Shining, Cujo, and Christine were already published.Rose Madder, The Green Mile, and 11/22/63 were still years in the future.
Teenagers are natural-born fanatics. During those years, I was a fanatic of Stephen King’s work in the same way that I was a fanatic of the music of Rush and Led Zeppelin. During the remainder of my high school years, I read Stephen King’s novels and short story collections with a dogged, joyful determination. I wanted to read everything he had written to that time. (And given Stephen King’s prolificness as a writer, there was a lot to read even then, in the mid-1980s).
By the time I graduated from high school in the spring of 1986, my dedicated reading had more or less caught up with Stephen King’s prolific writing. But a few months later, Stephen King had a new novel out, and it was widely billed as the writer’s magnum opus.
I looked forward to the book weeks before it came out.
The “it” I’m talking about is It, Stephen King’s mammoth horror epic. The book was released on September 15, 1986. I purchased my copy that very same day. I know this, because I preordered the book from the B. Dalton’s at my local shopping mall.
I remember starting the book while on a break at my university library. (I attended Northern Kentucky University in the fall of 1986.) To say that I was in an anticipatory mood would be a gross understatement. Here was 1,138 pages of new fiction from myfavorite author.
Original hardcover dust jacket for It, 1986
What followed was one of my first experiences in youthful disillusionment (Many more were to follow, of course; but those are other episodes for other essays). It dragged. The novel contained too many subplots, too much padding, and a long, saggy middle.
What I loved about Cujo, Carrie, and the short stories in Night Shift were King’s fast pacing, narrative discipline, and literary economy. Most of these early works were written when Stephen King was still establishing himself as a writer, and was therefore subject to marketplace competition.
By 1986, though, Stephen King was already a celebrity writer. His short story “Trucks” had been made into a movie that summer, Maximum Overdrive. King was frequently interviewed, and widely known as “the Master of the Macabre”. He had even done a television commercial for American Express. In 1986, American pop culture was still characterized by scarcity and monolithic names. In popular fiction, King was one of those monoliths, alongside big names like Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy.
Stephen King on the cover of Time magazine, 1986
No discussion of It would be complete without mentioning the book’s controversial sex scene—what amounts to an orgy among its adolescent characters.
As a mature adult in 2026, I am supposed to get in a high dudgeon about the potential exploitation issues involved here. Back in 1986, very few adults did. There were some raised eyebrows, sure; but no public outcry greeted It, not even among members of the religious right. They were too busy lobbying to get Playboy and Penthouse banned from 7-Eleven.
But there was another factor in play for me, at the time. Keep in mind that in the fall of 1986, I was barely 18 years old myself, and only a few months out of high school. I was much closer in age to the members of the Losers Club than to the novel’s middle-aged author. Did my youthful age place me adjacent to something exploitive? Was I somehow a victim in all of this, too? Teenagers of the 1980s were not programmed to ask such questions.
Even at that age, though, I sensed that something was odd about this scene in It. I remember wondering if, perhaps, Stephen King had been drunk or high while writing this scene. (In light of King’s subsequent revelations about his substance abuse struggles during this period, my speculations may not have been too far from the mark.)
The sex scene involving the adolescent members of The Losers Club may or may not have been exploitative. It was, however, inappropriate and unnecessary, and definitely jarred me out of the story.
Forty years after the publication of It, Stephen King is still writing novels and I am still a fan.
Nowadays, however, I tend to read his work more selectively. King’s novellas and short stories are as engaging for me as ever. I often skip his longer, doorstop-size novels. I struggled to get through The Outsider, 11/22/63, and Fairy Tale.
Likewise, my early, teenage attempts at writing fiction were thinly disguised attempts at imitating Stephen King. But after all these years, and so many books of my own, I don’t sense much of King’s influences in my own work anymore. (I will, however, forever admire the stories in his first collection, the aforementioned Night Shift (1978). Every one of those stories is a gem.)
Stephen King is now almost 80, and I’m, well…a lot older, too. I hope King has many more years of writing ahead of him. I can’t promise to read all of his novels, but I’ll always show up for his short story collections.
Brett Arnold of Yahoo! is distinctly unimpressed with the latest, endless installment in the Star Wars franchise:
“‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ is easily the worst Star Wars movie, but even calling it a movie feels like giving it more credit than it deserves. It’s a feature-length episode of streaming-era television, and boy, does it look and feel like it. It’s uncinematic in pretty much every way, from the drab visuals to its repetitive structure that lacks the storytelling heft needed to make the jump from TV to film. Say what you will about ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ or the prequel trilogy; at least they’re movies!”
Reading the above, I feel a little like the lead singer in the J. Geils Band, who discovered that his high school sweetheart had been turned into onanistic fodder for a girlie magazine:
Star Wars was amazing when it first came out. I can say this with certainty because I was there at the beginning.
It was the summer of 1977 and I sat with my dad in a cinema in northern Kentucky as the very first Star Wars film began.
I was nine years old.
I will soon be 58.
I’m sure you caught the irony. That was almost half a century ago.
The last Star Wars movie that was really necessary was Return of the Jedi in 1983. I remember watching The Phantom Menace in 1999, sixteen years later. It didn’t feel like Star Wars.
Since then, the movies have only gotten worse. It’s obvious that Disney is just milking the Star Wars universe as one of its few reliable cash cows.
Star Wars was great! But it’s time for new science fiction stories and fresh space operas.
I have a new release: Family Secrets. Here’s what it’s about (Amazon description):
“When a Cincinnati businessman connects with a distant cousin on Facebook, he agrees to stop by the man’s remote rural property on his way home from a business trip.
The visit should have lasted thirty minutes.
Instead, he finds himself trapped in a doublewide trailer deep in the woods, drawn into the disappearance of a local girl, and forced to search a dark pond for a body that may—or may not—be there.
But something else is moving through the woods that night.
Something ancient and hungry.
Family Secrets is a supernatural mystery/thriller inspired by regional folklore, nightmares, and the eerie landscapes of the Midwest.”
This is the second book in a new series I’ve created: Uncanny Ohio:
“Uncanny Ohio is a series of atmospheric supernatural tales set in southern Ohio, in and around the Cincinnati area. Traditional ghost stories and urban legends with a strong regional flavor.”
This was a natural move for me. Many of my supernatural stories are set in southern Ohio, and take inspiration from the ghost stories and urban legends that I absorbed as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s.
Family Secrets is currently enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.
Ted Turner passed on May 6 after a long, busy life. While his enterprises were numerous, he is best remembered for the Cable News Network, aka CNN, which launched on June 1, 1980.
Most of us did not get CNN right away. Even middle-class households were slow to adopt cable. Americans really did believe that we could exist with access to only four or five television stations in those days.
My parents purchased a cable subscription with CNN included in 1982. For many years, CNN included a partner channel called CNN Headline News. The idea was simple: all the major headlines in thirty minutes.
CNN has become controversial in recent years, depending on one’s political sentiments. President Trump has repeatedly referred to the network as “fake news.” Early on, CNN was mostly apolitical and mostly dedicated to reporting the news in an objective manner. There were no significant controversies like that back then.
On the contrary, pretty much everyone believed that there was something amazing about CNN. Prior to that, if you wanted to watch the news, you had to tune in right around dinnertime. The local news ran from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m., and the national news ran on each major network afterward.
Either that or (gasp!) read the newspaper. Most Americans had longer attention spans in those days, and actually didn’t mind reading the newspaper, but that’s another topic for another day.
I watched CNN sporadically during the 1980s, but I was a high school kid for most of that period. My CNN obsession began in 1989, with the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing. About a year after that came the first Gulf War. For both events, I was tuned in to CNN multiple times throughout the day.
Bad things happened before CNN became common in American homes. There were wars, government scandals, and troubling international events like the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981.
Although I was a kid then, I don’t believe that most American adults ignored national and global problems. There was, however, a commonly held belief that attention was best directed closer to home. Plenty of Americans were dismayed at Nixon’s corruption, or Carter’s bumbling, but there was generally less outrage about the news.
Maybe this was because there were fewer news broadcasts to consume. (And this was long, long before the internet or social media). This made faraway events, including events taking place in another American city, genuinely remote.
It’s also worth noting that in 1980, almost all American adults of childbearing age were married. Most had children. Their personal lives were full and demanding.
This is another way in which 2026 is far removed from 1980. Nowadays, only about a third of young American adults are married, and even fewer have children.
Perhaps that makes it easier to sell them on the notion that the news is more important than their daily lives, that events in Washington DC are more urgent and pressing than events taking place in their living rooms.
Sadly, for all too many Americans in 2026, that is genuinely the case.
I was born in 1968. I did not go to school with a single boy named Ryan.
Thirty-odd years later, I was in the workforce. I met a lot of younger men (born in the mid- to late-1970s) named Ryan.
This was odd. Where had all these Ryans come from? And where had they been before, during my childhood, teens, and twenties?
The mid-1970s surge of boys named Ryan is an example of how generational naming patterns can turn on a dime. From the 1950s through the end of the 1960s, the following male given names were much more popular for newborns in the United States:
Mike/Michael
David
John
Mark
Scott
Steve/Steven
Kevin
Jeff/Jeffrey
The sudden (and relatively short-lived) increase in American babies named Ryan can be partly attributed to two factors: the popularity of the actor Ryan O’Neal (1941-2023), and the debut of the soap opera Ryan’s Hope in 1975. So if you’re an Xennial man named Ryan, it’s likely that you owe your name to a soap opera. The popularity of the name Ryan tapered off in the mid-1980s, right around the time that the soap opera’s ratings started to decline.
My name, Edward, was uncommon among boys my age. I was named after my father. Over the years, I have heard various explanations for the reason my father was given this name. None of them are entirely satisfactory. Edward is certainly not a family name for our clan, in any meaningful sense.
When I was a kid, I would sometimes meet adults who delighted in telling me about Mister Ed, the 1960s sitcom that featured a talking horse of the same name. They would then imply that I might have been named after the sitcom’s eponymous equine.
Despite my youth, I was quick to disabuse them of such notions. (Oh, the traumas that children had to endure at the hands of adults, before the advent of the “self-esteem” craze.)
My mother was born in 1946. She was named Linda—like more than a million other women born in that era. Linda was a much overused name during the Baby Boomer birth years. Linda was, in fact, the second most popular name for newborn girls during the 1940s, according to the Social Security Administration’s online database.
Throughout my life, I have met many Boomer women named Linda. I have never, so far as I can remember, met a woman my age or younger named Linda; but I don’t doubt that they exist.
When I try to think of any Linda who doesn’t have Baby Boomer associations, the only one who comes to mind is Linda Barrett, the fictional sexpot of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).
But once again, there are Baby Boomer connections. Even though Fast Times at Ridgemont High is regarded as an early Gen X movie, the movie’s director, Amy Heckerling, born in 1954, is solidly in boomer territory. (Heckerling is closer in age to my parents than to me.) I think it’s safe to say that the name “Linda” belongs entirely to the Baby Boom generation.
The most popular girls’ name in the 1940s was Mary. Mary was my maternal grandmother’s name. She was born in 1922. I have never met a woman my age or younger named Mary, either. I have met some Mary Jo’s who were born in the 1960s and 1970s, but never a plain old Mary. Once again, I am sure that they exist; but they are comparatively rare.
Kayla is a girl’s name that came out of nowhere in the 1990s. One never encountered the name when I was a kid. I began meeting Kaylas around 2010, just as the first girls given that name were reaching early adulthood. I have nothing against the name Kayla, but what’s wrong with its more traditional analog, Katie?
Among Gen X girls, Jennifer is the most popular name, hands down. Jennifer was already becoming popular when I was born, in the late 1960s. But Jennifer really surged in popularity in the early 1970s. It is the most common name for American girls born in that decade.
This is why there are so many 50-something women nowadays named Jennifer. Jennifer Aniston (born in 1969) is just one drop in that vast ocean of Jennifers.
I went to school with more Jennifers than I can count. Later in life, I met many more who were just a few years younger than me (born in the first half of the 1970s).
I seem to have been surrounded by Jennifers from the very beginning. My mother informed me that when I was a newborn, the couple living in the apartment unit next to my parents had a two-year-old girl named—lo and behold—Jennifer.
The girl had especially wide, blue eyes. She was also fond of staring at adults, according to my mother’s telling. My mother therefore nicknamed her Jennifer Big Eyes. Over the years, Jennifer Big Eyes has come up in conversation from time to time.
Jennifer Big Eyes would now be, I would guess, in her early 60s. I don’t believe my mother ever knew her full name. I have no idea where she would be nowadays, or if she is even still alive. After that many years, anything is possible. But I do hope that Jennifer Big Eyes is still out there somewhere, and that she is doing well. One more Gen X Jennifer among so many.
A married woman in the suburbs develops a sudden and inexplicable interest in graveyard photography. Her husband wonders what’s going on with her.
But what secrets is her husband hiding?
Such is the setup of Involuntary Deeds, my new supernatural/psychological horror novella. The novella is set in Clermont County, Ohio, about twenty miles east of Cincinnati.
Involuntary Deeds is presently available on Amazon. It will be rolled out to the other major retailers (Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Apple Books) in the coming weeks.
Amazon description:
Some crimes don’t stay buried.
Pam Vance never cared about cemeteries—until the day she couldn’t stay away from them.
What begins as a strange new hobby quickly turns into something else. An obsession. A need to photograph graves she’s never seen before… places she feels drawn to.
Her husband, Robert, knows something is wrong.
Then the warnings begin.
The ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier appears to Robert with a message he can’t ignore: stay away.
But Pam won’t stop.
Because one grave is calling to her—that of a sixteen-year-old girl who died in 1991. A death long forgotten.
But not by Robert.
As the past closes in, a truth buried for decades begins to surface—pulling the living and the dead toward a confrontation that can no longer be avoided.
‘Involuntary Deeds’ is a novella for fans of classic ghost stories in the tradition of Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and E.F. Benson.
In the spring of 1986, many Americans were following events in the Soviet Union. The new man in the Kremlin was Mikhail Gorbachev, a young (by Soviet standards) leader who was eager to reform the Soviet system. Gorbachev also sought better relations with the West.
I was a senior in high school in 1986. I was interested in the Soviet Union, too. I was old enough to remember the final Cold War tensions of the late 1970s and early 1980s: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the downing of KAL 007. But now, a new world seemed to be in the making.
Then, on April 26, there was a major nuclear accident at Chernobyl, in an area of the Soviet Union then commonly known as “the Ukraine”.
The Kremlin tried to cover it up (of course). The Kremlin had covered up similar disasters in the past (including one at a biological weapons facility in a remote part of the USSR). But this was too big to conceal.
Chernobyl would be in the news for months—years—afterward. The problem still hasn’t gone away completely.
In retrospect, the Chernobyl disaster (which sprung from Soviet ineptitude) was the first sign that Western optimism about the USSR in the mid-1980s was misplaced.
Forty years have passed since then. The former Soviet lands are still the source of mostly bad news. Case-in-point: the war between Russia and Ukraine, now in its fifth year.
It is not quite summer, if you want to get technical about it. Summer will not officially begin until Sunday, June 21, 2026.
We are still in April. The schools won’t let out for another six weeks.
But the mercury here in southern Ohio will hit 85 degrees today. That’s close enough for me.
The above is one of my early short stories, “The Wasp”. I wrote it back in 2009, and it was first published in my short story collection, HAY MOON AND OTHER STORIES.
This is very much a summertime story. It’s also based my lifetime loathing of wasps. I can handle spiders, snakes, and other creepy-crawlers (to a point, anyway). I love honeybees.
But I absolutely despise wasps.
As the old German proverbs goes, “God made the bee, but the devil made the wasp.”
In the 1980s, there was no social media and no dating apps. We didn’t even have email.
If you wanted to meet someone new, there was usually only one way to go about it.
You had to approach them in person, and strike up a conversation.
Below is a scene from NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988. In the scene below, the main character must jump through numerous hoops to meet an attractive young woman:
NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988
CHAPTER 43
Since my hand had previously been stamped, I had little trouble gaining reentry to the Casablanca Club. I walked by the doorman as if I owned the place, flashing him a glimpse of my left hand. He gave me no trouble this time.
Once inside, I got another break: there was no sign of Lance Corporal Evans or his fellow marines.
But where was Sergeant George Tuttle, fearless defender of the law in Cincinnati “for more than thirtyyears?”
Maybe I would get lucky there. Maybe the cop had called it a night, or (more likely) been drawn away from the Casablanca Club by other police business.
I only had to walk around for a few minutes before I spotted her: the young woman from the Tangeman University Center. The pretty blonde who had caught my attention that day.
She was standing by herself at the edge of the nearest dance floor. Where were the other young women she had entered with, the ones I had assumed to be her friends? Was she meeting a guy here?
I didn’t know. And in that moment, I didn’t care. It was full speed ahead.
“Hi,” I said, when I got within speaking distance.
She turned toward me. I thought I detected a flash of recognition.
“You go to the University of Cincinnati, don’t you?” I asked.
Strictly speaking, this was a lame question with an obvious answer. The Casablanca Club was located a few blocks from the university, and we were both of university age. Probably half of the patrons here tonight were university students.
But few lines uttered by young men to young women in bars and nightclubs are brilliant. This wasn’t Toastmasters. Nor was I making an argument before Dr. Blevins. I was willing to improvise.
She smiled, but seemed at a loss for words.
“I think we may have spoken briefly in the Tangeman Center. That day you were looking at all the Armed Forces displays.
“More like I spoke briefly,” she said. “The proverbial cat seemed to have gotten your tongue.”
“There are no cats on my tongue now.”
This had to have been the most awkward line a man ever uttered to a woman in a bar. But it did the trick. She laughed.
“I’m Kim,” she said.
“I’m Paul.”
We talked for a few minutes more. I learned that she was a marketing major…common enough at the University of Cincinnati.
This was actually working, I suddenly realized. There was none of the awkwardness and fumbling that I’d felt when trying to talk to Tara and Courtney.
The difference, of course, was that the attraction with Kim was mutual, rather than one-sided. I therefore didn’t have to talk her into anything. All I had to do was go with the flow, be moderately assertive, and not say anything stupid.
But I was also conscious of Scott, who would right now be waiting for me in my car. I was also aware that in my very presence here, I was defying police orders, and breaking a promise I had made to a sergeant in the Cincinnati Police Department.
“I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Kim, but—”
“But now you have to go.”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Call it intuition. Or maybe that you seem an awful lot like someone in a hurry.”
“I am in a hurry,” I confessed. “My friend is waiting for me at my car. Before I go, though: would you give me your phone number? I’d like to call you sometime.”
She smiled. “That’s usually what people have in mind when they ask for someone’s phone number. They want to call them sometime.”
A few minutes later, I was walking toward the main entrance/exit of The Casablanca Club with Kim’s phone number in my pocket.
She had written it on one of the club’s cocktail napkins, along with her last name. She was Kim Jones.
I was feeling on top of the world, more or less. Wait until Scott heard about this, I thought triumphantly.
I was outside in the parking lot of the Casablanca Club, almost home free, when everything unraveled.
“I thought you’d learned your lesson,” an older male voice declared. “But I guess I was wrong about that, wasn’t I?”
NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988 is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play and Apple Books.
You all know me, or a version of me: I’m one of those stick-in-the-mud older/middle-age people who refuses to upgrade to the latest version of whatever operating system happens to be relevant.
I do this for the reason that most older people are skeptical/cautious: experience. In 2009, Microsoft destroyed my PC with an automated upgrade of the Windows XP operating system. Trust us, Microsoft said. Enable those automated updates. And I, like a fool, believed them.
I’ve since become a Mac user. Apple has yet to outright destroy any of my devices with an upgrade. But they’ve rendered several of them less usable, slower, or buggier.
I’ve therefore adopted a policy over the last five to ten years: one operating system per device. (This isn’t as radical as it sounds; I upgrade my devices at reasonable intervals.) My expectation to the tech companies is: Get it right the first time.
I purchased my iPhone 16 Plus last spring. The factory-installed iOS was 18.
I was planning to keep that. It worked. Then I read numerous online reports from the “techies” about how essential it was to upgrade. Iranian and Russian agents could exploit my current iOS, hack my phone, and steal all my data.
So I upgraded to iOS 26.4.1 last week. I’ve got a fancy new “liquid glass” display, and lots of new emojis that I’ll never use.
But CarPlay no longer works. (CarPlay worked perfectly, every time, on iOS 18.) YouTube videos freeze and error out. These are both documented flaws that have been discussed on Reddit and in other online venues.
Two observations from all this. First, this demonstrates yet again that our over- reliance on digital technology is a weakness as well as a convenience. I know young people who can’t read a map, write in cursive, or maintain their composure during a voice call, all because they’ve been hobbled by reliance on tech. But what happens when the machines glitch?
Secondly, I’m disappointed at Apple’s shoddiness. I’m an indie author, and I feel guilty if I release a $4.99 ebook with a handful of typos in it. But most of us paid close to a grand for our iPhones. Apple is a $350 billion company. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, earns $74 million per year in total compensation. Am I asking too much, when I humbly request that Apple not break CarPlay and destabilize YouTube when they release an update that I am told I must have?
I’m sure—or no, scratch that—I hope that Apple will eventually fix these bugs, along with the other ones I have yet to discover.
In the meantime, I wish I would have listened to my old guy instincts last week, and stayed on iOS 18.
