I write this post upon turning 58. To be precise, my 58th birthday is August 9.
This birthday marks a peculiar milestone. I have now reached an age at which I can remember my grandfather.
I passed this milestone with my father decades ago. My parents are only twenty-two years my senior, so I can remember my father at the age of twenty-nine.
But my grandfather? My grandfather was a World War II veteran who experienced the Great Depression. He was truly from a different time.
And yet… my grandfather, born in October 1921, turned 58 in October 1979. I was in the sixth grade then; but I remember late 1979 quite well.
***
This is the point where many people would suggest that fifty or perhaps even sixty (since I’m very close to that milestone too) is the new thirty—or perhaps the new forty. I’ll spare you such bravado. 60 is not the new 30 or the new 40. 60 is 60. And 58 is 58.
That said, I’m relatively fortunate insofar as my health. I’m a lifelong runner and weightlifter, and I’m in reasonably good shape. I’m not going to say that I don’t feel my age at all. But I feel it, I suspect, less than the average man my age.
***
The real problem with reaching this age is not that one feels old, but that the world feels old. I miss times that were more to my liking (even if they were less technologically convenient). I miss many people who are no longer here.
We all eventually reach the stage where the past becomes more important than the future. I suppose I have reached that point. This doesn’t imply a death wish, a state of despair, or a complete indifference to the present or the future.
It does, however, mean that I’ve become a temporal foreigner. I can operate in this era—for the most part—but if I had my choice… I would be somewhere else. Or sometime else.
I suspect that this is part of the normal process of aging. An indifference to the future prepares one for the inevitable day when one will no longer be part of the present. At 58, my journey is more than halfway over. I don’t expect to live to age 116, after all.
I’d like to stretch it out just a little bit longer. But whether that “little bit longer” means three years or 30 years, I’m already grateful. I’ve been blessed with a very good life—better than most.
Wherever you find yourself on your journey, I wish you happy trails, even though it’s my birthday we’re talking about. That’s another thing about being this old. Birthdays are kind of old hat now, too.
Today Vietnam vets are older men in their seventies and eighties. But when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, Vietnam vets were young middle-aged men in their thirties and forties.
When I was very young, Vietnam vets were still in their twenties. I was born in 1968, so I have no direct memories of the Vietnam War. I do, however, remember its immediate aftermath. It was a common topic of conversation in the mid-1970s. In those days, the war—as well as the political and social turmoil of the 1960s—were very much in recent memory.
Movies about the American War and Vietnam began to appear in the 1970s. These include Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter. Although Taxi Driver is not technically a movie about the Vietnam War, its central character, Travis Bickle, is a disturbed Vietnam War veteran.
And this was the common “meme,” to use an internet-age word: the disturbed Vietnam War veteran. In film and literature, Vietnam vets were often portrayed as brooding, volatile individuals.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that the American Vietnam War experience began to be portrayed with a bit more nuance. The release of the Vietnam War film Platoon, a commercial and critical success, portrayed the Vietnam War as a complex situation in which American soldiers often had to choose the least bad option. As the 1980s concluded, portrayals of Vietnam vets became far less simplistic, more diverse, and more respectful.
I would never attempt to write a novel about the Vietnam experience itself. But I did include a Vietnam vet in my Gen X coming-of-age novel, No Sure Thing. The novel is primarily the story of Paul Nelson, a 19-year-old University of Cincinnati student. But Paul’s mentor, Ron McNab, is a 42-year-old Vietnam vet. (No Sure Thing is set in 1988.)
I would describe the character of Ron McNab as half-fictional. Throughout my formative years, I met many Vietnam vets who shared their experiences with me. Several of them became an inspiration for Ron.
Soccer was regarded as a somewhat newfangled sport when I was an adolescent and teenager in the first half of the 1980s. If you were a soccer fan, people might have suspected that you were going out of your way to be different or “special”.
I once asked my uncle if he ever watched soccer. “Well,” he said wryly, “soccer might be all right if you were a European.”
I fully grasped my uncle’s sentiment, even if I didn’t entirely agree with it. In that time and place, there were only three sports that counted: football, basketball, and baseball.
I ran track and cross country in high school. While no one regarded the running sports as aberrant, no one cared much about them, either. I don’t remember many spectators at our track meets—even when our team was doing well.
My high school got its first boys’ soccer team while I was a student there. The team did quite well, as I recall, winning a state championship in 1984. This was appreciated, of course; but the soccer team still played second fiddle to the football team in the fall athletic season. No one saw this as a great injustice or irony. It was just the way things were.
Soccer has become far more popular in the four decades since then. But it has become popular primarily as a sport that Americans play—not watch. And most of the Americans who play soccer are of student age.
Consider the numbers. The Super Bowl routinely pulls in 123 million to 128 million domestic viewers in the US. Even a World Cup final match struggles to pull in half that… in the US, that is. Globally, about 1.5 to 1.8 billion people follow the World Cup. American football, by contrast, has almost no bounce beyond US borders.
I have never been much into watching other people play sports. (Another thing about the US: our passion for spectator sports has risen in proportion to our obesity rates. But that’s another essay.) My personal disinterest, coupled with my indifference to soccer as an American, prejudiced me against watching the 2026 World Cup. I wasn’t against it; I just didn’t care.
And then I started watching—just to see what all the fuss was about, at first. Somewhat against my will, I got hooked. By the final match between Spain and Argentina, I was a moderately enthusiastic World Cup fan.
I discovered that there are some things about soccer that I particularly like. For one thing, it is one of the few remaining sports that a normal-sized person can play at a professional level. Pro basketball is now a game for people who are almost seven feet tall. I’m only 5’10”. I simply can’t relate to pro basketball. But the average World Cup soccer player is very close to my height.
Soccer is a fast-moving game. This is a quality that it shares with hockey. One cannot watch a soccer game with half one’s attention. One must either focus on the game, or focus on something else. The action is simply that engrossing.
I know that some Europeans can become rabid partisans of one team or another. Riots at European soccer venues have been a well-documented phenomenon for years.
I’ll probably never attend a match in person and I’d certainly never riot over the outcome of such a contest. But by the end of the 2026 World Cup, I was enthusiastically rooting for Spain. There were too many instances of poor sportsmanship on the Argentinian side, while the Spanish team struck me as a class act.
Soccer will probably never be as popular in the USA as pro football. The NFL is simply too entrenched in the American psyche. But pro soccer now has at least one new American fan. I’ll almost certainly watch the World Cup in 2030, and probably some additional tournaments in the interim.
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 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.
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.
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.
Read NO SURE THING in Kobo Plus. Also available for purchase at Amazon, Google Play, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble
No Sure Thing: a Gen X coming-of-age novel set in 1988 is now available in Kobo Plus.
Kobo Plus is Kobo’s version of Kindle Unlimited. I’ve been moving some titles in there on an experimental basis.
Kobo Plus, like Kindle Unlimited, will inevitably be swamped with trashy, sexually explicit romance novels. (Unfortunately, that’s probably already the case). But at least Kobo Plus does not require exclusivity. So I’m willing to give it a try for now.
No Sure Thing, like the title suggests, is a coming-of-age novel in a distinctly Gen X setting. While the novel is not autobiographical in any significant way, many of the characters and conflicts presented therein are based on people and situations that I observed myself during the 1980s. So it is authentic, if nothing else.
While there are several “love plots” in the book, this is not a romance novel in any traditional sense. If that’s what you’re looking for, look elsewhere.
But not all of the teen movies of the 1980s followed the traditional romance script. Consider the endings of Risky Business and The Last American Virgin. These were much more disillusionment plots than by-the-numbers romance plots (even though the romance element was heavily used in marketing both films).
Fast Times at Ridgemont High, despite the sex and comedy, also had several unmistakable disillusionment plots: Stacy learned the consequences of reckless sexual experimentation; Brad learned the pitfalls of hubris.
As noted above, No Sure Thing is available at all the major online bookstores.
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.
My maternal grandfather, born in 1921, grew up in rural Adams County, Ohio. He told me so much about that time and place, that I sometimes feel as if I lived it all myself.
“Hay Moon” is a short story set in rural Ohio in the summer of 1932. My grandfather never told me a story like this, filled with supernatural forces and the undead. But his real-life accounts of his childhood years helped me add a realistic flavor to the tale, if I say so myself.
You can listen to the story here, or on my YouTube channel (where you’ll find lots of additional audio content).
NO SURE THING has a new cover. The setting is a modified image of the University of Cincinnati campus, which I attended in the late 1980s.
Who should read NO SURE THING? You’ll enjoy this book if you fondly remember teen and young adult movies of the 80s. The book is based on a number of ideas I’ve been kicking around for years, but it really crystalized when I rewatched Risky Business, the 1983 film that made Tom Cruise a household name.
People occasionally ask me what I like in the way of poetry. When this happens, I hem and haw around, and try to change the subject. I might suggest the lyrics of Neil Peart, the drummer and chief songwriter for the Canadian rock band Rush.
But that’s a non-answer. Neil Peart mostly wrote song lyrics, which are distinct from—though closely related to—poetry that is meant to be read from a page, rather than performed as music.
The sad fact is: a lot of contemporary American poetry is not very good. Regular readers will know that I’m fond of trashing the twenty-first century. But the decline of English-language verse began far back in the last century. By the time I was born (1968), English-language poetry was already in decline.
Most of it seems to fall into one of two camps. At one extreme, there is sappy love poetry that imitates the late Rod McKuen. At the other extreme, there is slam poetry, which devolved from the rantings of Allen Ginsberg.
But not all is doom and gloom. Richard Wilbur (1921-1997) was a twentieth century poet who wrote verse as the English language gods intended it to be written. That is: with discipline and structure, and focused on concretes rather than abstractions.
Here’s a sample of Wilbur’s classic poem, “Advice to a Prophet”:
“When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?…”
That is great stuff. I loved these lines when I first read them, back in the mid-1980s. And I love them still.
I briefly met Richard Wilbur in 1987, when he was a guest speaker at Northern Kentucky University, where I was a student. I was already a moderately enthusiastic fan by this point. I asked him a question or two during the Q&A session— probably dumb questions. But hey, I was nineteen years old at the time.
I really miss the music culture of the 1980s, especially MTV.
And John Mellencamp was one of my favorite solo artists. His commercial breakout album, American Fool, came out in 1982, just as I was entering high school.
Mellencamp was atypical in an era of polished arena rock and heavy synthesizers. Both his songs and his persona had a distinctly midwestern American vibe.
The singer hailed from Seymour, Indiana, less than two hours from my home in Cincinnati, Ohio. My dad grew up in the same general area of the Hoosier State. Perhaps for this reason, I found Mellencamp’s music relatable. (On the other hand, I could never relate to the worlds of David Bowie or Ratt.)
The attached video is for the single “Cherry Bomb”. It was released in 1987, and included on the album TheLonesome Jubilee. The music video features plenty of vintage footage from the 1960s and early 1970s. I don’t know if these video clips are from Indiana, but they sure look like Indiana, back in those days.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the interracial couple featured in the video. John Mellencamp has never been shy about his (progressive) politics; and we can be sure that this was a deliberate choice.
I remember 1987 like it was yesterday. (I was nineteen.) In 1987, a young interracial couple in a music video was not as shocking as it would have been twenty years earlier, and not as ho-hum as it would have been twenty years later. And certainly not the cliché that it would be now, almost 40 years after the music video for “Cherry Bomb” was made.
In 1987, this was something that people would notice, without being either outraged or inspired by it. Mellencamp was not being “brave” or ground-breaking by presenting this in 1987. But he was making a statement.
