Secondhand Time

I’m back to reading something serious now, after my side foray into a silly satirical murder novel. Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets is an as-told-to history of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, and it is just devastating. I’m about two thirds of the way through it, and I can’t stop thinking about how much the Russian people have suffered and lost; and how much suffering and loss they have inflicted. Russia has been an experimental laboratory for all of the worst economic and government systems that humankind has dreamed up - Tsarism and serfdom, Soviet communism, unbridled dog-eat-dog capitalism combined with totalitarian dictatorship - the Russians have endured it all, with pretty much the same results - a very small group of ruling elites live in relative safety and comfort and a vast underclass spend their entire lives struggling to keep body and soul together. 

*****

In Secondhand Time, people who lived under Soviet rule tell their stories of life under Soviet communism and life in the immediate aftermath of its collapse. The stories are mostly hair-raising and heartbreaking. And almost everyone is a victim, and not a perpetrator. Only one or two of the storytellers admit or even touch on the truth, which is that Stalin didn’t kill millions of people on his own. He had help. People arrested, interrogated, tortured, imprisoned, exiled their fellow citizens, and then they collected their paychecks and went home. Many of those people themselves then ended up in interrogation cells or on trains to Siberia - or dead. It seems relevant to me that no one was safe, even the people who thought that they were in Stalin’s good graces. It seems that some people should look at history, and not just in Stalinist Russia but in the United States from 2017 to now, to see how loyal a dictator is to those who are loyal to him. A personality cult is a dreadful thing. 

*****

One of the reasons why I stress about politics is because I know how much of my identity and my worldview are tied up with my American-ness. I have no idea who I am, nor where I fit in the world if I’m not an American. And I think about how being an American means something more than being born or choosing to live within the physical borders of the United States. And I also think about how fragile it all is, how easily a shared national identity with shared ideas and beliefs, even among people who disagree, can just disappear. 

This is what happened in Russia, not once but twice in one century. The country that Russians knew in 1910 was completely transformed by 1920, and everything that people believed was no longer true. The country that Russians knew in 1988 or so was completely gone by 1998, and people my age, who had grown up immersed in Soviet communism and who believed in the dignity of the worker were all of a sudden in a country that glorified cut-throat capitalism, where no one cared about politics and everyone cared about real estate and expensive cars and designer clothing. It all happened so fast, leaving a whole generation completely disoriented and alienated from their country and even from their own children who didn’t share their frame of reference. As one woman told the author, the Russia of her youth had been a country in which people boasted about their working class roots, where it was a point of great pride to be the child or grandchild of a miner or steelworker or collective farmer. In the new Russia of extravagantly wealthy oligarchs, noble ancestry came back into fashion and people started looking for their familial connections to Tsars and Grand Dukes. 

*****

Almost all of these stories are those of regular working people, not the famous or powerful, which makes the book that much more interesting to me. Maybe Alexievich wasn’t able to make connections with prominent people to ask them to tell their stories. Or maybe she did ask, and was refused. Or maybe she just prefers ordinary people. “It never ceases to amaze me how interesting everyday life really is,” she writes. This is true everywhere, I think. I never get tired of looking at people doing their work or driving their cars or just hanging around. I never get tired of routine everyday life and mundane everyday things. 

*****

Some of Alexievich’s storytellers are furiously angry at their fellow Russians, especially their children and grandchildren who no longer respect the generation that fought the Nazis and put cosmonauts in space. But some are less willing to judge their countrymen and women too harshly for their sudden shallow preoccupation with possessions. As one woman says, ”The people have suffered enough…now they go shopping…They like everything colorful because it all used to be so gray and ugly.” The longing for beauty in a country of scarcity is a repeated theme. In one story, a woman tells about how her sister had learned to knit well enough that she could sell some things to the relatively wealthy people in their village. The girls were hungry all the time and when a customer paid for her shawl, she went out and cut some flowers from her garden and gave them to the girls as a present. The woman says that this unexpected gift of flowers was a turning point for her, a moment when she realized that maybe other people could see her as something other than a dirty, scrawny street urchin, and that maybe she was meant for better things. Because someone saw her as capable of appreciating beauty, maybe that meant that she was worthy of it. It’s a beautiful and hopeful moment in a book filled with dreadful, despair-inducing stories. 

*****

Toward the end of Secondhand Time, Alexievich interviews one of the “winners” of the post-Soviet Russian economy. A single woman in her 40s with one daughter born of a liaison with an older married man, she is proud of her wealth and success and openly contemptuous of the new capitalism’s many victims. “I hate people who grew up in poverty,” she says, “their pauper’s mentality; money means so much to them, you can’t trust them.” She boasts of being a predator, a “huntress,” completely self-reliant and free of entanglements with any other humans other than her beloved daughter. It’s all very Ayn Rand-ian, and it’s easy to hate this woman but it’s also easy to see the fear that drives every word she says. “I don’t like the poor, the insulted and humiliated,” she says. No one is safe in the brutally exploitative new Russia, and she knows that if she lets down her guard for one second, she could find herself among them, among the ranks of the poor, insulted, and humiliated. 

Humiliation is another consistent theme throughout these stories. It seems that the Russians who lost everything during the early post-Soviet years felt shame even more than anger at their sudden change in circumstances. A scientist ends up cleaning bathrooms in the Metro, or an engineer finds herself selling odds and ends at a makeshift kiosk, and their biggest fear is that they’ll run into someone they know, even though so many Russians were in the same boat. They all seem able to live with the material deprivation and uncertainty about their futures, but the loss of status is unbearable. 

*****

I wasn’t sure where I was going with this, because as much as I read about Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, I still don’t know a darn thing, certainly not enough to write anything coherent. But one thing I know is that a bad system is always propped up by lies. I thought about this as I watched the Vice Presidential debate. “The rules were that you weren’t going to fact check” (translation: “I was told that I would be able to lie with impunity”) was the big takeaway for me. Yes I know that all politicians lie or exaggerate or stretch the truth or shape the truth to fit their agendas blah blah blah. And I know that the lines are now blurred between truth and lies because of the 24-hour news cycle and social media and AI blah blah blah. But there’s a difference between a person who tells a lie and a person who doesn’t understand or care about the truth. And you can spread lies with or without the aid of the internet. Stalin did an excellent job of making people believe that up was down and right was wrong, using only the technology available in 1937. 

*****

Secondhand Time is on the NYT and Guardian lists of the best books of the 21st century, and deservedly so. It’s unlike anything else written about post-Soviet Russia, and it’s a beautiful book. But I’m very glad I’m finished with these stories of collapse and upheaval and lawlessness and desperation. For now, at least. 

Autumnal

I didn’t do very much this recent holiday weekend (except to attend the very first meet of the college swim season, about which I will soon have much to say). I’ve been out of sorts. I used to love election season, especially the presidential election, but it’s just upsetting now. I’m trying to stay optimistic and to remember that polls aren’t always reliable, but still - how is this close? HOW? 

For the past two weeks or so, I've been both immersed - drowning really - in social media and political news, and it's too much. I'm stressed right out. I've also been reading a book of true stories about the fall of the Soviet Union, told by the people who lived through that time, which was of course absolutely dreadful for people without money and power, which was almost everyone in the Soviet Union. This book is another thing about which I will soon have much to say. Stay tuned. Preview: It's a great book, and I'm so glad I'm finished reading it. 

It might be time to read something a little more upbeat, but maybe not quite yet. I went to Barnes and Noble on Sunday and bought a copy of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, her graphic memoir. This is another book that I would normally never read - my interest in comics begins and ends with Charles M. Schulz and Lynda Barry and Roz Chast. But something about the cover appealed to me, and I had a gift card. I’m a few pages in and I’m absorbed in the story but the pages are so densely covered with text and visuals that if I paid full attention to the illustrations, it would take an hour to read a few pages. 

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe I should slow down a little bit and think about reading a book, and not just finishing it. And maybe I should turn off the news and put down my phone and go outside, and that's exactly what I'm going to do right now because it's 4:45 PM and my workday is done, and I have at least an hour of autumn daylight. After a walk, I'm going to make some chili. And after I make chili, I'm going to turn on the TV, because the Capitals are playing the Golden Knights, and it doesn't matter who they're playing because Capitals hockey makes pretty much everything better, even fall and winter. Even Donald Trump can't ruin hockey and college swimming and a brisk walk with a good playlist. 

Very secure...

I had to change a password yesterday. It’s a password for a system that I use daily so I’ll remember the new password after a few days of daily log-ins, but I just hate to change a familiar password. It's a disruption. It throws me off my game. 

The system rejected my first attempt to create a new password because it recognized it as an old password. “We’ve seen that password too many times before” the pop-up message read. Who’s “we,” I thought? Who’s seen it too many times? Not me, I tell you what. I’m very happy with that password. I like it just fine. In fact, it’s one of my very favorite passwords, which is why I keep trying to recycle it. Here’s an idea, Mr. Enterprise Solution: Suppose you let me decide when I’m tired of my password? 

The system didn’t like my second attempt either. “Choose something harder to guess.” Harder for whom, genius? If it’s hard for some hacker in the Caucasus to guess then it’s going to be dang-near impossible for me unless I write it down, and if I have learned anything in decades of yearly cybersecurity training, it’s that writing a password down is not a good idea. 

I finally came up with a new password that was acceptable to the very discerning password approving software or whatever it is, and bonus: The new password is hilarious. I cracked myself up with that password. I’m still laughing. I'm going to laugh my silly head off every time I log in now. 

Then I remembered that I had done the very same thing a few years ago in another enterprise system, and I laughed and laughed until the next day when I couldn’t remember the number and special character combination that accompanied my hilariously funny password, and I had to start all over. Determined not to let this happen again, I wrote down a hint for the new password (which is pure comedy gold I assure you). This is what it’s come to. I need a password for my password. It's a great system. Very secure. Very mindful. 

Murder and memoir

I just finished reading two very odd books. Well, it’s more accurate to say that they were odd choices for me. But they’re also rather odd in and of themselves. I chose these books because I like the author as a political commentator and TV personality and when I found out that she had written some books a few years ago, I decided to read them. 

The author is Molly Jong-Fast, and these books, published years ago, are Girl (Maladjusted), a memoir of life as the child of a very famous author; and The Social Climber’s Handbook, a novel. 

The latter, based on my cursory review of a review, was what I expected would be a satire of New York 21st century finance bro society, and it is. But it’s violent, too, and much more violent than humorous or satiric. Think of The Devil Wears Prada with a little bit of American Psycho and a lot of Bonfire of the Vanities, and you’ll have an idea of what Jong-Fast was trying for but did not quite accomplish with this book. 

The Bonfire influence is clear - Jong-Fast’s male characters think of themselves as Masters of the Universe, and Sherman McCoy’s name is dropped frequently. The American Psycho influence is clear, too, with heartless, wealth-obsessed characters who seem to care about nothing except real estate, fashion, expensive cars and travel, the right handbags, the right shoes and jewelry and art, blah blah blah. I’m sure the shallow materialism that Jong-Fast is trying to depict here is based on something real but even in 2010 or so, the late 90s / early 21st century socialite with a Birkin was a tired trope of the satiric New York chick lit genre. 

And speaking of New York chick lit (such a terrible term but sometimes you have to use icky jargon to make a point quickly), there’s a small element of that present here too. The book’s title is (misleadingly) reminiscent of chick lit classics like The Nanny Diaries or Bergdorf Blondes or The Devil Wears Prada. The cover, however, hints at something quite different. The blonde woman in the perfectly tailored LBD in the foreground is holding a knife behind her back, and the pen and ink rendering of NYC (against a background that is purple, not pink) resembles an Edward Gorey drawing. The title says frothy romance blended with satire blended with Jane Austen-like observations of the manners and customs of very wealthy and very shallow young New Yorkers, but the cover cautions the reader to expect some mayhem. 

But I didn’t expect any such thing because I read the Kindle edition and hadn’t seen the cover design, and the very cursory review that I barely glanced at did not mention that the main character is a serial killer, so the first murder took me by surprise. I went in thinking that I was about to read a sharper and funnier version of The Devil Wears Prada. But it’s actually a bit of a bloodbath. 

I’m not opposed to a literary bloodbath now and then, but it has to make sense. This one doesn’t really make very much sense, although you can easily see why Daisy chooses her victims. That’s part of the problem, really. The reader sees the murders coming from a mile away, and we also never hear a word from the victims. We know when Daisy is about to murder someone, and then we know when that person is dead, but we don’t know anything about the murder itself other than a cursory mention of the method. And it’s not that I want a graphic description of pain and gore - that is really just the opposite of what I want. But I do want to know about the encounter between the victim and the murderer. I want to know what they said to one another. Did Daisy tell her victims what they did to offend her? Did they beg for mercy? Or did she just sneak up and attack them? I have no idea. And I don’t really care that much because Daisy is not a very interesting character, and it’s just not a very good book. 

One thing I have found as a reader is that if you want to write about the rich and their preoccupations, you have to have a little bit of compassion for them, even the worst of them. To write about your characters’ human failings, you have to recognize their humanity. The Social Climber's Handbook mostly fails to do this, because every single character is absolutely vile. Even the children are repellent. In a comic murder novel, you should at least have some amused though horrified respect for the killer. Even when you know that the victims are way overdue for a catastrophic downfall, you should also be able to pity them when it actually happens, just a little bit. And even if you know that the killer will never be caught, there shouldn’t be a lot of loose ends left hanging. The ending of a novel about a murdering socialite doesn’t need to be morally satisfying but it should at least be tidy.

As I said, I like Molly Jong-Fast very much as a political writer and TV personality. She comes across as both brilliant and wise, and she also projects warmth and kindness that I can’t believe are fake. Maybe that is why this novel is just not very good. Maybe you need a certain amount of cruelty to write a good satirical novel about a murderous Upper East Side socialite. 

*****

Girl (Maladjusted) is a memoir. I actually read it first, and I'm glad I did because if I'd read The Social Climber's Handbook first, I probably wouldn't have bothered with this one. Jong-Fast wrote Girl when she was in her 20s, which is actually a fine time to write a memoir of youth because people in their 20s remember their childhood and teenage years with detail and immediacy if not perspective. 

A lot of this book reads as juvenilia. The young Jong-Fast was very obviously trying for a cynical and wise but flippant voice that she mostly achieves, but it comes across as inauthentic - more on why in just a minute. She’s much harder on herself than you might expect a young memoirist to be - she depicts herself as whiny, spoiled, and manipulative, and maybe she was but probably no more so than any other girl her age. Teenagers can be whiny and spoiled and manipulative but they're mostly lovely and hilarious. I know this because I've owned my own teenagers. 

The arch, hyper-ironic, world-weary young person in New York tone is alternatingly funny and annoying, and more of the latter than the former. But just as I started to write this whole book off as the self-involved prattling of a literary nepo baby, Jong-Fast would drop an amazingly beautiful and truthful observation about her life or her family, and you know right away that she’s neither cynical nor spoiled and solipsistic. Her compassion for humanity, almost absent in The Social Climber’s Handbook, is on full display here. Molly Jong-Fast was probably lovely and hilarious as a teenager. 

Flannery O’Connor once said something about a talent for writing not being the same as a talent for writing anything. Flannery wasn’t right about everything, but she was right about that. Molly Jong-Fast is not a novelist, but I’ll be first in line to read her commentary, and I’m all in if she writes another memoir. 

Milestone

Parenthood milestone unlocked: I am now the mother of two people in their 20s. My youngest son was born at about 12 or so in the afternoon on October 1, 2004: 20 years of Lego and SpongeBob and Star Wars and Marvel, rabid sports fandom, plans and schemes and adventures, baseball, championship swimming, trumpet playing, junk food eating, lounging, friendship, lifeguarding, coaching, hilarious observations, and just generally being a delight to be around. Happy Birthday to our youngest, and many, many more. 

Helene

This is an untitled document, and it shouldn’t be. I started writing something yesterday, and I even titled the document because the thing that I was writing about was a vague and unformed idea and I knew I’d forget about it if I didn’t write it down in some form. Today, I find that my most recent Doc is untitled, and blank - not a word. And just as I thought I would, I forgot what it was I was going to write about. 

So let’s talk about the weather, shall we? It’s been raining for five straight days here, and by the time Helene gets her fat ass out of here, we’ll likely have had ten straight rainy days. It hasn’t rained hard, really, and we’re not seeing thunder and lightning and gusts of wind, but a low-pressure system is hanging over us, and after it makes its exit this weekend, Helene’s remnants will take its place. 

Do I have any right whatsoever to complain about the weather when Florida and Georgia and the Carolinas are taking a hard beating today? No I do not. Will I complain? Yes I will. It’s too much rain. It’s too much gloom. Everything looks dingy and blah. The whole world feels damp. Moss is going to start growing on my furniture any day now. The deer and the squirrels keep looking at me as though waiting for an invitation inside. It’s a mess. 

*****

It's the next day now, Saturday September 28. It rained hard overnight and was still raining at 7 this morning when I woke up. Now it's just overcast and foggy and warm and densely humid. I can't tell where the sun is because it's shrouded in layers of clouds on top of mist on top of fog. 

I'm in the back seat of my car, on Maryland 200 heading toward I-95 North. We're driving my mom to the Maryland House to meet my brother, who will drive her the rest of the way home. If criminal gangs are out here trafficking cantankerous old ladies, then the FBI definitely has its eyes on us because we do this every six weeks or so. Maybe we should vary our routine a little bit. Maybe we should make my mom wear a disguise. 

*****

It's been quite a week. My mom is kind of falling apart, and it's hard to see. It's hard watching your parents fall into decline, even if they weren't the greatest parents. And it's hard to be an almost old person watching a truly old person and dreading your own eventual decline. That's why I walk and swim and climb stairs and lift weights and do stretching and strengthening exercises every day. I'm in training for old age. 

*****

My mom likes to watch old movies and TV shows, especially British comedies. We let her commandeer the TV when she's here so I don't see much news, which is probably best considering that there were three men executed, two of whom were very likely innocent of the crimes for which they were condemned; combined with catastrophic Old Testament weather combined with an election that’s close even though one of the two candidates is a criminal, an unrepentant liar, a creepy misogynist and sexual predator, and a stone-cold racist who is also clearly out of his ever-loving mind. How is it close? How? 

And that’s just this week, and just his country. Compared to world events, my mom is the picture of health. Compared to world events, my mom is in great shape.  

*****

It’s Sunday now, and we’re going to a little afternoon football watch party. I don’t care about football at all, but a party might be just the thing. I know everyone who will be there, and it will be nice to eat snacks and drink wine and talk to my friends. Maybe I’ll even watch a little bit of the game here and there. It’s raining again, so we’ll be inside. 

All politics IS local

I am a person with few enemies. I’m very friendly despite being almost pathologically introverted, and I don’t talk shit about people, and I don’t look for trouble, and I try to be helpful whenever I can. I like most people, and most of the people I know like me. I think so, anyway. I could be wrong. 

But everyone has an enemy or two. Everyone has that one person (or many people in some cases) with whom they just don’t click. I’ve lived in my neighborhood for almost 20 years and I get along with almost everyone here, except for two women with whom I have had repeated disagreements and misunderstandings about one thing or another. The blood is just bad now, and I don’t even try anymore. I don’t even worry about it. I run into these women from time to time and I say a polite hello and they say a polite hello, and then I get out of there as fast as I can so that those bitches can talk about me behind my back. I never talk about them behind their backs, of course, unless writing about them on the internet counts as talking behind their backs. 

Last week, I was out for an evening walk, and I saw one of these women coming toward me from the opposite direction. She wasn’t after me or anything, she was just out minding her own business, taking a walk with her husband. But she saw me just as I saw her and it would have been awkward to the point of rudeness for either of us to change directions or duck around a corner to avoid the other. I sucked it up and prepared for a stiff exchange of pleasantries with my foe. I’m sure she braced herself, too. 

And then just as we were in polite hello striking distance, a thought occurred to me. “Hi (name and name),” I said. “Did you guys see that debate?” LOL, as if they’d have missed it. 

Were you thinking that politics was the last thing I should have mentioned? In most cases you’d be right. In a normal awkward need-to-make-small-talk scenario, I wouldn’t have touched that debate with the proverbial barge pole but in this situation, it was the one safe topic. 

Ironic, is it not, that politics is the go-to low-risk conversational opening gambit with a person with whom my relationship is strained to say the least? But I’ve known this couple for a long time, and I knew where they stand. She and her husband, both retired lawyers in their early 70s, are old-school liberals and very politically engaged. They planned their week around that debate, and I knew that this was one topic that I could bring up and be pretty much certain of an overwhelmingly positive response. 

And I was not wrong. “Oh my God, did we ever,” she said gleefully, “and she wiped the floor with him.” 

“I know,” I said. “It was awesome.” 

Something crossed her face just then, very quickly. I think that maybe she had thought that I was a Trumpity Trumpster, and that she expected a very different reaction to her initial reaction, and that she was maybe a little disappointed that she didn’t get that reaction. But then, having established that we were both on the same side in this election (again, I already knew where she stood or I’d never have brought it up in the first place), we spent the next 15 minutes of waning daylight gleefully recounting our favorite moments. We both agreed that the Vice President was this close - THIS CLOSE - to calling Donald Trump a mothereffer, and we applauded her instinct to do so. We mocked Donald Trump’s sad attempt to turn “I’m speaking” into a gotcha moment (I wish that Kamala had chuckled and said “Good one, sir”). And we agreed that the cat and dog eating moment was alternately horrifying and hilarious, but of course that was before a week of bomb threats and school closings made clear that it was not hilarious, and not even slightly funny. 

I know for a fact that this woman dislikes me (or at least she did) - a lot - because people have reported back to me. It’s not my imagination. But after a few minutes of debate talk, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she invited me out for a girls’ night. We bonded, I think. We buried the hatchet. If you listen to the news media, then this election is the most divisive in American history, but in my neighborhood, Harris vs. Trump is bringing the people together. Happy days are here again. 

Three hours

 “Will he go for three hours, do you think?”

“Yeah, I wonder that too. I mean he’s almost 75. I’d be off that stage in 90 minutes but we’ll see.” 

That was my husband and me at dinner on September 7, just before our fourth Springsteen concert together. We saw him in 2009, 2012, and 2016; and he bought the tickets for this tour in mid-2023. Health issues forced Bruce Springsteen to reschedule his late 2023 shows, and we held on to the tickets. 

It was a perfect clear Saturday night at Nats Park, after a cloudy afternoon with little bursts of half-hearted rain. We took the Metro Red Line from Glenmont to Fort Totten and then switched to a Green LIne train to Navy Yard. 45 minutes from door to door, and that included driving to the Metro station, parking, buying a new fare card because I left my fare card in my wallet which I didn’t have with me because I was trying to carry as little as possible in my tiny tiny tiny Nats Park-compliant bag, waiting for the train, changing trains, and waiting for the second train. When Metro is good, it’s very very good. We strolled along First Street with all of the other happy concert-goers, feeling sorry for all the people in their cars, driving around the neighborhood looking for parking. 

When we arrived for the show, very early, an older (than us) couple were in the seats directly behind us. Very lovely people but extremely gregarious. Very talkative. Outgoing to a degree that I just cannot understand or cope with for extended periods of time. We chatted with them, meaning that we listened and nodded and threw in a few appropriate remarks at appropriate opportunities, for about an hour. And then just when I thought that I couldn’t handle any more interaction with these preternaturally friendly humans, the stadium lights went down and the stage lights went up, and the crowd began to roar. It was 7:40 PM, exactly 10 minutes past the scheduled 7:30 PM start. 

Our seats were on the club level. The section itself was a normal section, not a corporate box, but it felt fancy walking through the glass doors from the cement concourse to the carpeted club section. It was much more pleasant buying drinks in the indoor lounge area than from a concession stand. And the bathrooms in that section are SO MUCH NICER. 10/10 would recommend. 

*****

My first Bruce Springsteen concert was in 1984, during the Born in the USA tour. Even if you never attended a Born in the USA tour show, even if you weren’t alive in 1984, you probably know what Bruce wore on stage that night - faded blue jeans, a white t-shirt, a bandanna. People throw around the word “iconic” to describe all manner of garments and outfits, but this look was truly iconic according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines “icon” in several ways, including this: “a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol.” The blue jeans and t-shirt and bandanna were truly a representative symbol of American rock and roll. So was Bruce himself.  

He was in his 30s then, and incredibly energetic, constantly in motion, a live wire. I don’t remember very much about that show (except that my ticket cost $19 and my t-shirt cost $10) other than a story about Bruce’s father, an old-fashioned conservative who was relieved rather than disappointed when the Army rejected his son, keeping him out of Vietnam. I’m sure he told that story at every show. Stories are part of the performance. But it was still moving. 

*****

40 years later (almost 40 years to the day - I looked it up and the Philadelphia shows were in mid-September, just as I had remembered), Bruce is still very energetic, but more restrained, more dignified. He still wears jeans, now paired with a button-down shirt, a vest (also fully buttoned) and a tie. His hair is very short. His clothes are perfectly tailored. He looks very GQ now, very natty. He also still looks very rock and roll, but elder statesman rock and roll. There’s nothing edgy about his persona now; nothing rebellious or punk about his look or demeanor. His appearance and comportment on stage make clear that he knows exactly how important and legendary he is, and that he has neither the need nor the desire to come across as young or of the moment. He has nothing to prove. 

But even though he has nothing to prove, he was still on stage for three hours, playing mostly his own standards, everything from “Badlands” to “Tenth Avenue Freezeout” to “Promised Land.” The mostly but by no means exclusively older crowd sang along, roaring approval as each familiar intro played. I’d already planned to pretend that I couldn’t hear them if our very gregarious new friends in the row behind us insisted on chatting with us during the show, but thankfully they stopped talking and sang along with the music. 

When we arrived at 6:15 or so, the friendly couple were among the very few other people in our section. The field had already begun to fill up, though - there’s no assigned standing position and latecomers with field tickets end up way in the back, far from the stage. The man tapped me on the shoulder (this man touched me at least 5 times, and managed still not to creep me out). Pointing to the standing room area on the field, he asked “Do they stand the whole time?” 

“The whole time,” I said. “Better them than us, right?” Laughing, we all agreed that people our age (50s) and people their age (early 70s) have no business in a mosh pit. People in the stands didn’t really stand and dance, so they wouldn’t block the view of seated people behind them, and Nats Park security didn’t allow dancing in the aisles. The only place where you could dance all night was in the standing room area on the field. 

Until the encore, that is. At a Springsteen show, the encore is actually like a second show. When the stage lights went down, I expected a five-minute break, so I ran to go to the restroom, and ended up missing most of “Born to Run,” because the encore started almost immediately. I could still hear, though, and I’ve heard “Born to Run” probably 200 times at least, so it’s OK that I missed it. 

During that encore, which went about 30 minutes, all of Nats Park was a mosh pit. Everyone was on their feet, dancing and singing along to “Born to Run” and “Thunder Road” and “Rosalita.” Bruce sang “Well tell him this is his last chance…” and the crowd finished for him. It was Rosalita’s dad’s last chance to get his daughter in a fine romance, because the record company had just given her suitor a big advance. There are few songs more fun to sing along to in public than “Rosalita.” The famous band introductions happened in the lead-in to “Tenth Avenue,” which featured huge photo and video backdrops of the late Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici. The band left the stage a second time, and then Bruce returned on his own and performed “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” and then the show was over at just about 10:40 PM. 

Our friends had already gone home - they missed most of the encore because they drove to Nats Park from Springfield, VA and wanted to get ahead of the traffic. I’m sure they hated to miss the last few songs, but they probably did the right thing because by the time we got out of the stadium, the streets were already gridlocked with cars filled with people trying to get back to Maryland and Virginia. The Metro station was also very crowded, but the crowds were orderly and calm, and everyone got on their trains. 

Bruce Springsteen will be 75 very soon, so it’s not unreasonable to wonder how much longer he can do this. I mean, I’m not quite 60 and I’m wondering if I should be out here dancing at concerts and buying $50 t-shirts. Between Metro and t-shirts and drinks and dinner and the tickets, we probably spent $800 on this concert. Middle class people like us can spend $800 on a night out or we can put two kids through college. We probably can’t do both, at least not often. But a Bruce Springsteen concert is a special-enough occasion that it’s worth the money. If it does turn out to be his last tour, I’m glad we were there. 

I fought the law

I got pulled over by the Navy police on Monday morning, for the second time this year. The first time, it was because the rental that I was driving while my car was in the shop turned out to have expired tags. They inspected the car from top to bottom, and then sent me on my way after advising me not to drive on the base with an unregistered vehicle again. I teleworked for the rest of that week. The Navy doesn’t play. 

On Monday, which also happened to be my birthday, I drove on to the base as usual, made the usual wide right turn at the stop sign to drive past Walter Reed, and then heard the sirens. I looked in my rear view mirror and saw the police car and knew immediately that I didn’t need to ask for whom the siren was tolling because it was tolling for me. I pulled over right in front of the hospital, turned on my flashers, put the car in park, and waited. 

I waited for seven minutes, and nothing happened. I know that you’re not supposed to get out of the car when the police pull you over but I had started to wonder if I’d mistaken their intentions, and they weren’t telling me anything, so I opened my door and started to step out and heard an amplified voice ordering me to stay in my vehicle. Hands in the air, I shouted “I just wanted to make sure you had pulled me over. Did you pull me over?” Yes, they had pulled me over. I had no idea what they were waiting for until the second police car pulled up. Back-up - that is what they were waiting for. I texted my husband, and then texted my boss and coworkers to let them know that I’d be late for our 0800 meeting. One of my coworkers texted back: “Stay calm!” Lol. Has he met me? I was already freaking out, and by the time the second police car pulled up, I was shaking like I had Lalo Salamanca’s bail money piled up in my trunk. 

All’s well that ends well. They let me off with a verbal warning, after a slightly sarcastic reminder that there is another stop sign at the left turn onto the road that leads to campus (I KNOW!) and I went on my way, careful to count to three when I came to a full and complete stop at that stop sign. Did they notice that it was my birthday? No one said “Happy Birthday” or anything, but it’s right there on my driver’s license and after almost 20 minutes of sitting in my car pretty much surrounded by police vehicles, I had expected at least a ticket if not a first-hand look at a Navy brig. So maybe they noticed that my date of birth made Monday my 59th birthday and they took pity on me. I’m glad. Because I’m pretty sure I also got a speed camera ticket on Connecticut Avenue earlier that morning, making this an already unreasonably expensive commute. And I’m sure I wouldn’t survive on the inside. 

Doomsday reading

First, a correction of my earlier comments about the ending of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. While not exactly a happy ending, it was not an altogether sad ending. I would describe that book’s ending as “fitting.” 

Full disclosure - I had not quite finished the book when I was writing about it. I counted my chickens when they hadn’t yet hatched. 

*****

Right after I finished T and T and T, I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which I had never read before. And then I started on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which I’m still reading, but almost finished. 

Both of these are great novels, the former a classic that is part of almost every literature curriculum (I have no idea why I never read it before last week) and the latter a newer classic published in the 90s that has gained a wide readership thanks to the internet. It was a critical mass book for me; one of those that enough people whose opinions I trust have mentioned as worthwhile that I finally started reading it. 

Aside from being great novels, these books are both grim and even terrifying (especially Parable). Slaughterhouse Five is about the bombing of Dresden and its lifelong impact on an American POW who survived because he was held in an underground slaughterhouse. Parable of the Sower is about the total breakdown of civilization and depicts a dystopian future United States in the years 2024 and beyond. As the story begins, the first-person narrator, Lauren Olamina, is a teenager living with her family in a relatively secure walled community surrounded by chaos and extreme poverty and even more extreme violence. You know within a few pages that the chaos and violence are going to penetrate the walls and that the Olaminas and their neighbors' situation, already precarious, is going to deteriorate. And - spoiler alert! -  it does. People do everything that people can do to other people when there are no social structures and no consequences; and Lauren’s fear is compounded by a hyperempathy disorder that causes her to feel others’ pain when she sees it. And she sees a lot of pain. 

You might wonder why I am even doing this to myself, and you would not be alone in asking this question. Why am I doing this to myself? And why are Kurt Vonnegut and Octavia Butler doing this to me? That last question is easy to answer, actually. Both of them just wrote about the truth as they understood it. Kurt Vonnegut actually did survive the bombing of Dresden; Slaughterhouse Five's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is a fictionalized version of Vonnegut himself. And although Octavia Butler didn’t experience a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles hellscape, it’s not hard to imagine that in such a scenario, the rich would remorselessly exploit the poor and that the strong would relentlessly abuse the weak and that people would rape and torture and kill for any reason or for no reason at all. Octavia Butler might not have seen or experienced the things she writes about in Parable (God I hope she didn’t) but she didn’t make this stuff up, either. It happens all the time. 

Books aren’t always supposed to be easy, for either writers or readers. Fiction can’t always be a pleasant escape, even when it’s page-turningly compelling, which Parable of the Sower certainly is. Reading about suffering and atrocity feels like facing it a little bit, like not turning my back on all of the actual real people who have endured such things. That’s why I do this to myself. 

*****

All the same, though, I do hope that Lauren Olamina and her band of refugees will wind up safe and prosperous on Bankole’s farm. I’m near the end of the book, and I’m almost afraid to find out. 

Seasons

It’s Monday, September 2, 2024, 9:45 AM or so. I’m normally at work at 9:45 on a Monday morning but today is Labor Day, my very least favorite holiday. 

The pool will open for the day in about two hours. For the first few hours, it will be a normal pool day, with the adult swim whistle blowing at 45 minutes past the hour every hour. It will be more crowded than usual, of course, because holidays are free guest days, and everyone will want to get their last swim in. But by 5:30 or so, the occasional swimmers and the families with very young children will have cleared out, leaving the last few hours to the serious pool denizens. The lane ropes and the rope that marks off the diving well will be gone. The lifeguards won’t bother with the last two adult swim whistles. There will be simultaneous games of knock-out, sharks and minnows, and water polo with lounge chairs as goals. It’ll be fun, but a little frantic. And then as it’s getting dark, the final whistle will blow and pool summer will be over. And I’ll feel a little bereft and sad for a few days, but by next week at this time, it’ll be fine. It’s nice to have seasons, even when your very favorite one has to end. 

Transition

Have I mentioned before that I hate the end of summer? Well I'm going to mention it again. I hate the end of summer. It's only August 24, so we still have a week or so of official summer (which ends on Labor Day) and almost a month of meteorological summer, but we're taking a kid back to college today, and that's the end of summer as far as I'm concerned. 

It's actually warming up again, and we'll have a few days of summer weather now, after a preview of fall that had all the fall lovers in a tizzy of pumpkin spice excitement. They had to know that it wasn't going to last but their time is coming soon enough. We'll all be wearing sweaters and crunching through leaves and buying pails of chrysanthemums for our front porches. But at least we'll have hockey. At least I'm not dreading the election like I was a few months ago. And I like wearing sweaters, NGL. It’s not so bad, I guess. 

*****

We dropped our son off at Marymount yesterday. The car was packed to the rafters and  traffic was kind of dreadful, but the move-in went very well. Five boys are sharing a suite with two double rooms, one single room, two bathrooms, and a living/kitchen area. It’s still very dorm-like, though, with white walls, wood-framed windows, vinyl floors throughout, and heavy, all-but-indestructible wooden furniture. Two of my son’s roommates are swimmers; one is his freshman roommate, with whom he will  share one of the doubles. The other two boys were assigned to the suite at the last minute, and had not arrived when we arrived yesterday. 

After the “how was your summer, so good to see you again” reunion with the other families, we did the things that parents always do when they’re moving kids into a dorm room. We made beds and washed dishes and helped to organize the little cabinets. The boys hung pictures and arranged memorabilia. They put down a big area rug in their living room, and arranged the table and chairs and sectional couch pieces. They set up their TV. They moved things back and forth, trying different arrangements. 

It’s the second year at college for all of them but the first year that they have something close to an apartment, and it was fun watching them arrange and decorate and personalize their space. Each of the boys brought their own things to hang or display, and they’ll each have their own private bed and study and dressing areas. But they also brought dishes and supplies and food to share. They will share a TV and games (board and video). They are already negotiating chore-sharing and neatness standards. Their common area now has a cheerful rug on the floor, throw pillows and blankets on the couch, a dartboard, and strings of festive Christmas lights. It’s a cozy, welcoming place. They made a little home for themselves, and they seemed delighted with it. And I’m delighted for them. 

*****

Today’s the official first day of class for both of my college students and for public school students here in Montgomery County, Maryland. After a few days of fall temperatures last week, the summer heat has returned, reminding all the PSL weirdos that it’s still summer, at least for a little while. I went swimming yesterday in a pool that had chilled down considerably after a few nights of temperatures in the 50s. It was hard getting in but once I was in, it was almost fine as long as I didn’t stop moving for a hot second. It will warm up throughout the week, and it’ll probably be just about perfect for Labor Day Weekend. 

I thought, mistakenly, that summers would feel slower and less rushed now that our kids are grown and we’re no longer all-in swim parents. But this summer flew by. Even our August vacation, just over three weeks ago now, seems like ancient history. The older you get, the faster life goes by, I guess, and nothing faster than my beloved summer. 

During the summer, I get to come home from work and go swimming, and then make dinner and clean up the house and do whatever else I need to do, while the freshness of the water and the coolness of slowly drying wet hair stay with me all evening. I can do this four more times this summer; and assuming no thunderstorm disruptions, I’m going to be swimming after work every night this week. Fall has its own little joys, but I’m going to wring out the last few drops of summer. 

Vacation reading (with meandering and spoilers)

I’m always trying to stay ahead of the book list, because one day, I’ll publish it in January. It’ll happen. Maybe even next year. 

I read four books during my recent vacation; or rather, I read 3.5 books because I didn’t finish the fourth one until later. I always read a lot during my vacation, because I can. Thanks to the temporary loss of my Kindle, happily recovered a few days later, I read Murder on the Orient Express, the only book on the beach condo’s bookshelf that didn’t actively repel me, and it was delightful. I might read a few more Agatha Christies, just for fun. I have no interest in American murder mysteries, but British murder mysteries are a different thing altogether. 

On the first and second days of our vacation, I read Anne Applebaum’s newest book, Autocracy Inc.. It’s a short and very well researched explanation of autocratic governments in the 21st century, which are far more concerned with accumulating and keeping wealth for the autocrats and their friends and families and henchpeople than with any particular political ideology. Ideologically, as Applebaum explains, autocrats are all over the place, from the far left of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro to the far right of Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But ideology is secondary to money in an autocratic regime, which exists to hold on to its power and to further enrich itself. With money comes a firmer grasp on power, and the power enables further accumulation of money. In the autocratic countries that are still within the traditional world political order, the autocrats become wealthy by legitimate means in markets manipulated and regulated to favor their interests. In pariah countries, the money is outright stolen, or gained through criminal enterprises - drugs, human trafficking, arms sales. 

One of the biggest differences between dictatorships in the 21st and 20th centuries, as Applebaum writes, is not so much the utter disregard for truth as the lack of concern about world opinion that seems to be a defining characteristic of 21st century autocrats. As she reminds us, dictators used to at least lie about their motives and to try to convince the world that their people were better off than the citizens of free countries. Now, not only do dictators do whatever they want - steal, kill, stifle the media, rewrite election laws to solidify their grip on power - they don’t care what anyone thinks, at home or abroad. They don’t care about their “position on the world stage,” if that even means anything anymore. 

Just as I was wondering if there was any hope at all in a world in which the powerful can operate with near total impunity, Applebaum also reminded me that we do still have ways to save our own democracy, and to pressure the dictators to change their behavior. Laws that punish individuals and companies that do business with autocratic thugs, and enforcement of existing laws and sanctions, can make a huge difference. Anne Applebaum has been writing about dictators for a long time, and although she is realistic and clear-eyed about our tenuous grasp on freedom and democracy, she’s also optimistic. 

*****

I wanted to read a companion piece to Autocracy, Inc., so I downloaded Twilight of Democracy. And then I lost my Kindle for a few days, and had to turn my attention to a murder on a luxury train from Istanbul to Paris in the years leading up to World War II. Murder on the Orient Express is one of the best-selling novels of all time, and I was familiar with the basic premise but I had no idea how it was going to turn out, although I did have some guesses, which turned out to be partly correct. And just as I was about to read the final whodunit chapter, my Kindle appeared in the cushions of a chair in which I had not even sat, and so two mysteries were solved in the same day. I learned exactly who killed the vile Mr. Ratchett, and then I started another Anne Applebaum book. 

Anne Applebaum wrote Twilight of Democracy amid the craziness that was 2020. The book begins and ends with parties, at the beginning of the then-new 21st century and the end of the pandemic, if it ever actually ended, because I know at least 10 people who have had COVID this summer but I digress. 

2020 seems like a long time ago, and like yesterday, simultaneously. One of the defining features of that year was the way in which so many people just lost their minds, and apparently, this was not unique to America, though it was probably worse here thanks to you know who. In Poland, the collective mind-losing seems to have started earlier. Applebaum writes about family divisions and broken friendships resulting from politics, and pinpoints those divisions to conspiracy theories around the Smolensk plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski. I won’t even try to recount the details but to boil it down to oversimplified basics, conspiracy theorists claimed that the plane was deliberately targeted by assassins, aided and abetted by Kaczynski’s political opponents. I don’t know a thing about modern Poland, but I know all about once-reasonable people adopting conspiracy theories as truth, and defending their beliefs with religious fervor, and turning their politics into a cult. 

*****

The years since 2017, and more so the years since 2020 have been a challenging time for the idea of truth. We might have expected that advanced technology would make it harder for people to tell lies and get away with it, and in some ways that is true. You can’t really fake a resume anymore. You can’t claim to be a Harvard graduate or an Olympian or a war hero unless you actually are one. Factual claims about one’s life and background are very easily proven and disproven, thanks to the Internet. 

But of course it’s very easy to fake evidence to support a false claim that someone said or did something, and it’s also very easy to alter evidence so that it “proves” whatever claim you want to make or supports whatever “truth” you want people to believe. Even smart people can be easily fooled by clever deep fakes and sophisticated image manipulation. Stupid people are even more easily fooled.

By the way, I’m not saying which one I am, because it varies. Sometimes I’m brilliant and sometimes I’m a fucking moron. Just keeping it real, because I always keep it real.

*****

I remember reading some Christian apologetics essay that points out a key reason to believe in the claims of the faith, that reason being that the early Christians and many martyrs since have gone to their deaths rather than recant their faith. The argument here is that a person might be willing to die for a belief that isn’t true, but they won’t do so knowingly. People won’t risk their lives for a lie that they know to be a lie. It’s a pretty solid argument, but I don’t think it holds up given the bloody history of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st. 

Although maybe it does hold up. Taking Nazis and Communists, for example, because the 20th century is always my default frame of reference - many millions, of course, genuinely believed in these causes and died accordingly. But others, I would suggest, government officials and military officers and politicians, supported Hitler or Stalin for reasons of convenience, and believed, incorrectly, that their positions in the government or the party or the upper echelons of society, would protect them from the wrath of the despots. Some believed that they could play both sides against the middle, faking devotion to the Nazi or Soviet cause while simultaneously exploiting the true believers and protecting their own power and their own self interest. The gulags and concentration camps were populated with plenty of those people, lots of whom went to their deaths having once supported lies that they knew to be lies and only realizing their mistake when it was too late. 

*****

Yes, I know that Trump hasn’t sent anyone to a concentration camp. Yet. But the Hitler and Stalin analogies are still apt here because they illustrate the phenomenon by which certain unprincipled or cowardly people convince themselves that they can get in bed with the devil and still wake up clean and safe and well-rested. And no matter how many times they see those who have gone before suffer the rude awakening find-out moment after the reckless fucking around, they believe that they are different, that they will be fine as long as they are useful and loyal. In the FAFO lifecycle, the FA phase is always a lot more fun than the inevitable FO phase. That’s free advice to JD Vance, who probably won’t heed until it’s too late. Hey JD, give Mike Pence a call. He can fill you in. Maybe he can hook you up with a competent barber, too. 

*****

See what happens? I was supposed to be talking about books, but I got distracted. Don't say you weren't warned, though, because the disclaimer is right there in the title. Caveat emptor. 

But let’s get back to the vacation reading: Two non-fiction books, two novels. One classic novel, one contemporary novel. A few weeks before our vacation, I bought a Kindle copy of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow because antisemitic “pro-Palestine” (scare quotes intentional) influencers mounted a boycott campaign against its author, Gabrielle Zevin, for no discernible reason other than that she is Jewish. Having bought it, I had to read it, and I’m glad I did, because it’s very good. I went in not knowing a thing about it, and I was very surprised to find a novel about video game designers so absorbing, because this is a topic in which I have absolutely no interest. But of course, the video game industry is just a setting, a way for Zevin to tell a story about two brilliant young people and their decades-long on-and-off friendship, and their place in the time in which they lived, that being the waning days of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. I’m not finished with this book yet but I have an idea of how it’s going to turn out, and I have a further idea that it will end very differently from how I want it to end, because I always want a happy ending. 

SPOILER ALERT. Not a happy ending. But the tragedy was foreseeable, and so we don’t have another Ian McEwan Atonement situation on our hands. I’m not mad at Gabrielle Zevin. Ian McEwan, on the other hand, remains on my list. I can't stay on message to save my life, but I can hold a grudge until the end of time.