Well, who is she, anyway?

A few years ago I competed for and won the paid position of "guest writer" for the Op/Ed page of the newspaper in my former home town on the Central California coast. After having published tons of boring business and technical material, this was at last a glorious opportunity to write monthly opinion articles on absolutely anything I chose -- without worrying about research or fact verification --- something like today's mainstream journalists. At that time my focus was local politics -- laughably incompetent at best, criminal at worst -- but a few other musings found their place in my columns, which were well received.

Assuming that someone, somewhere, some time on the web will be seeing this, welcome to my little corner of the blogosphere.

I'll admit that I've reached the half-century mark, having grown up at the end of the bland, tapioca world of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration. The cold war may have raged, but the overall excitement of the times warmed all the way to tepid.

The hippie-sixties were just beyond my reach as that was not a culture you could enter without the right passport; a few years older, a few years younger put you beyond genuine citizenship. I think something extraordinary really did happen then -- some world-changing shift, some true evolution/revolution -- but instead of reaching its full flower, it simply sowed the seeds for long-term social changes -- few of which we've yet realized, or maybe few of which we've yet had the sense to link to those years. I suspect the perspective of time will allow future historians to relate positive consequences to those years (assuming, of course, there will BE a future.)

I remember the 70's with hazy nostalgia (I may be one of the few who actually CAN remember those years,) and the 80's and 90's for me were filled with family responsibilities and a management position that wrenched my guts yet finally empowered me, thank God, to opt out of corporate lies, larceny and pressure and work for myself, at home.

Now it's just I, my computer, the wild blue jays and magpies I feed, the mice who live in my garage eating the bird seed (and where one has just died, hidden, bequeathing his olfactory insult to the empty box of D-Con,) and maybe you? Stick around -- this might be fun for both of us.