Janna L. Goodwin's Blog

To get how freaking weird it is that a playful, pagan-adjacent solstice celebration ever existed here, smack in the middle of Natrona County, in the early part of the 20th century—much less that it persists today, nearly a hundred years later—you’d need to understand a little about the community in which it came into being

Casper—a geographically isolated town whose population expands and contracts with its oil economy—is no place for sissies. Its climate is rough on body and soul. Beauty can be found in its cottonwood-lined river and in the vast, rolling plains that unfurl to distant ranges. There may be beauty, too, in the gunmetal bleakness of the cold, howling winter, but you can’t see it when you’re straining against a March gale to make it across the parking lot from the Walmart Supercenter to your Rav4 before your purchases are ripped from your arms or you die1.

The town’s identity is rooted not in nature but in a romanticized cowboy mythos. This can be traced to Casper’s sheep and cattle ranching origins and to the fantasy of Manifest Destiny. Casper’s politics, civic life, social structures, and culture were formed around three refineries and the money, stench, and pollution produced by the ubiquitous extractive industrial complex.

The downtown was once coherent. A postcard image from 1938 depicts architecture typical of the era and the region: hotels, a Western Union, a dance hall, a cinema, a bootery, saloons. Then, throughout the ’70s and ’80s, many of the dignified (or at least interesting) older buildings were torn down—including, to my youthful despair, a stately Carnegie library upon whose front steps I loved to sit reading, my back pressed against a Doric column. A place to daydream. I suppose it simply had to go: Cut that out right now! No pretending you’re in a more charming city!

Around this same time, a stretch of formerly lively, central commercial blocks were replaced with an ill-advised, traffic-calming promenade. A mishmash of low-profile, utilitarian commercial structures, designed for durable mediocrity, came to line the half-deserted streets. They sprawled sparsely along the railroad tracks or river into weedy semi-industrialized stretches that gave way to lower-income pockets: little houses and manufactured homes with chain-link fences, barely holding their own on patches of dirt just down the way from a benonite plant, say, or a John Deere dealership and a drilling supply outfit.

As the redesign meant it now took too long to drive through center city—or to find parking there—people avoided it. Customers and their wallets were sucked away to shopping malls near the edges of town. If their vision was to destroy Casper’s heart, its local business district, decisionmakers did a great job.

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of pretty, tree-lined residential neighborhoods, and Casper has always been inhabited by—in addition to itinerant workers and those who have nowhere else to go—some profoundly civic-minded people. Those who keep the town improving and growing (think brew pubs, great coffee, bike paths, river walks, nice restaurants and little places featuring global cuisine, events venues, cultural and educational institutions) include—but are not limited to—entrepreneurs, educators and administrators, medical professionals, business owners, service providers, tradespeople, laborers, and retirees who contribute their leadership, expertise, time, and energy. The Casper of 2025 is also tethered to the rest of the world in ways not possible or imagined when I was growing up there; the internet and social media have closed distances and created connections and opportunities.

Yet, I press my point: many Casperites are—committedly, if you pay attention to posts you can’t help but run into if you browse the socials—proud of their hardiness, of their I don’t give a fuckness. They can be disparaging of Coloradoans, Californians, New Yorkers, tourists, and other perceived categories of candy-ass effetes. It may not be a hard place to grow up (it was great being a kid in Casper) but it IS hard-nosed. Whimsy is not its middle name.

That there rises a low, blue presence some five miles to the south—Casper Mountain— (technically an uplift, not a mountain) is a blessing, for it gives the town a visual anchor in the swelling emptiness of its surrounding basinlands.

That there are witches on the mountain is something of a wonder.

Neal

Neal Forsling was born Elizabeth Paxton in 1889, to a well-off family in Independence, Missouri. She married a man named David Oglibee, and they started a family. Eventually, the couple separated (uncommon, even shocking at the time). The divorced mother of two filed a claim on 640 acres on the southeastern side of Casper Mountain, where pine and aspen give way to sagebrush and red-breaking cliffs, the view spilling away across a valley to wide, pale plains and far-off ridges.

The story of how Neal got to Wyoming, then to Casper, and how she first encountered the place she’d call home for the rest of her life can be found here, in this transcript of an obscure interview with historian Rebecca Hunt and Neal’s granddaughter, Laura Bjorkman, on the podcast Re-storying the West—a find I somehow managed to scratch up online.

Neal dubbed her homestead Crimson Dawn. I’ve never been up there at daybreak, but no doubt the rust-hued earth glows brightly when the sun first hits it. In 1929, in her one-room cabin, she first hosted a simple Midsummer’s Eve party for her family and some neighbors. She’d invented a cast of supernatural mountain beings—witches, elves, spirits—and built little shrines to each.

Radio was increasingly common in households across the country, but it’s unlikely there was a signal on Casper Mountain. TV was still just a twinkle in Philo Farnsworth’s eye. Rural entertainments included—besides reading—fairs, circuses, dances, local sports; movies, picnics; storytelling, and informal theatre. Neal’s gathering counted as such. The children loved her animated, immersive folklore; the adults did, too.

The following year, she invited more people. Soon, the whole town was showing up. Before modern vehicles, the trip must’ve been daunting. From Casper up to Crimson Dawn wasn’t far in miles—about eight, I’d venture—but on the narrow, rutted mountain track it could have taken thirty or forty minutes depending on the vehicle and the weather.

Costumed witches always greeted arriving guests. There was cider or hot chocolate, a processional, the telling of tales and fortunes, a bit of playful chanting and, as the day ended, a blazing bonfire atop a butte.

I don’t know when Elizabeth changed her given name. In the late ’20s, she remarried—a good guy by all accounts, many years her junior—Jim Forsling, who was still a young man in his thirties when, tragically, he froze to death: his car broke down on his way back to Crimson Dawn after a supply run to Casper.

Now a grieving widow, Neal kept their cabin and lived there in the summers—it was her studio, too; her work hung everywhere—and maintained the solstice tradition, which (remarkably, as I pointed out earlier) still thrives today.

Witches of the Wild West

According to scholar Audrey Watters, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough—a touchstone of early twentieth-century pagan revival—was one of a few books Neal had brought with her to the mountain. Its influence still glimmers in Crimson Dawn’s bonfire, its sense of thinned boundaries between worlds, and its partly tongue-in-cheek divination rituals. Neal’s Shrine of the Heart’s Desire nods to Midsummer’s associations with love and luck… and, as in many European tales, the stories and rites of Crimson Dawn feature witches and fairies who cross into human life (although Neal reversed the traditional character of witches: hers are guardians of the mountain: stern at times; never wicked).

She understood the cultural weight witches carry—from Salem to Oz—and folded that tension into her stories. One of her creations, for instance—the Cardinal Witch—supposedly fled seventeenth-century Italy after being persecuted as a “wise woman,” echoing the histories of herbalists and midwives maligned as threats.

Casper kids, teenagers, and young adults vie for the chance to play roles. Or maybe that has changed; maybe today, it’s not considered fun or cool. IDK. But for several summers when I was an adolescent—thanks to my friend Julie Street, who lived on the mountain—I was thrilled to be Undine, the Homesick Sea Witch. Decked in blue and purple tulle with a netlike shawl and seashell headdress, I darted, along with my costumed friends, between pines, appearing and disappearing for the delight of the crowd. Tomboy, yes, but I liked flitting around feeling magical.

Neal dressed as a witch during the festival but never claimed the identity outside solstice. She knew precisely the line she walked.

After her death, that line wavered. In 1989 and 1990, Sonlight Ministries—an evangelical group—protested the festival, calling it forbidden witchcraft. They attempted to shout down Neal’s daughter, Mary Martin, as she led the procession, marking the first real challenge to the tradition. But their protests fizzled quickly; most Casper residents rejected the idea that Crimson Dawn was satanic. Interviewed attendees described the celebration as “simple,” “pure,” or “just stories.” Even clergy framed it as mythic entertainment, not a spiritual threat. The controversy evaporated, leaving the event more firmly rooted than before. Organizers did, however, make small symbolic shifts: One year at least, the celebration opened with the Lord’s Prayer in Indian Sign Language, meant to honor multiple heritages.

Solstice

Neal had long distanced her ritual from “barbaric” ancient practices, insisting her witches lived in stories, not creeds. Solstice observances worldwide mark the rhythms of the planet. On Casper Mountain, where winter overstays its welcome, the solstice truly feels like the turn toward warmth. Neal’s early gatherings were partly celebrations of nature and of survival.

Across the country, solstice festivals have grown dramatically—Burning Man being the biggest example cited by Watters. Burning Man began as a small fireside ritual on a beach in San Francisco and grew to tens of thousands of attendees. By contrast (and by design) Crimson Dawn has remained local and intimate. The site can’t handle huge crowds, and the community seems uninterested in turning it into a big spectacle, although tourists and other visitors are welcome.

Festivals give rise to what anthropologist Victor Turner calls communitas—moments when hierarchy dissolves, and people share an uncommon unity. Crimson Dawn effects this beautifully: mountain residents, town families, New Age wanderers, longtime friends, and first-time guests from all over the country and world walk the same trail, laugh at the same jokes, and warm their hands at the same bonfire, sharing a sense of participation in a traditional observance that is both playful and meaningful; otherworldly and grounded; sacred and profane, and somehow soul-enlarging.

Crimson Dawn endures because the community keeps it alive. The Crimson Dawn Association maintains the shrines, costumes, museum, and archives. Volunteers pour the hot chocolate. Even Casper locals who’ve never attended might tell you—with a serious expression and a wink—that the mountain is haunted.

Sanctification—and the defiance of classification—as resistance

Crimson Dawn is a place, a collection of stories, and a tradition. It is also a testament to the power of creativity, and an improbable site of liminal truce between witches and cowboys, pagans and pioneers, ecology and extraction.

Wyoming’s frontier mythology centers on land. Neal wove landscape and geology into her tales: yellow stones signaled the Topaz Witch; green minerals became “witch jade”; a glittering mica cave housed the Cardinal Witch. In that sense, Crimson Dawn fits: it feels grounded, frontier-ish, yet is gently subversive.

Neal criticized the development creeping up the mountain; Watters writes that she joked the witches hated the bulldozers. Still, she never blamed the people themselves. Through her fairy-tale frame, she conveyed ecological truths without igniting political backlash. In 1973, when civilization threatened Neal’s haven, she took action. On her eighty-fourth birthday, she deeded one hundred acres, including her cabin and shrines, to Natrona County. The stipulation was that the annual Midsummer festival had to continue, and her cabin must become an interpretive center. If her wishes were not honored, the land would revert to family.

Crimson Dawn thereby became both preserved land and public park. The county added an interpretive trail and turned Neal’s cabin into a pioneer museum in 1980, offering tourists a cleaner, safer narrative.

Perhaps because of that—what Performance scholar Richard Schechner called undecidability, a refusal to adhere to established categories—Crimson Dawn often slips between the cracks of official Wyoming tourism, which prefers cowboys, mountain men, and rodeos. As folklorist Dan Ben-Amos writes (quoted in Watters), myth is treated as true, legend as possibly true, folktale as untrue. Crimson Dawn, labeled a folktale, is considered harmless fantasy, even as it subtly challenges long-held frontier stories about gender, power, and piety.

Media coverage has followed that ambivalence. For years, newspapers ignored the event, then sensationalized it with talk of ogres and trolls—figures nowhere in Neal’s canon. Only when the site became a monument did journalists at last adopt the language of “legacy” and “legend.”

Neal Forsling was an uncommon person and an improbable historic figure: artist, divorcée and single mother, homesteader, Depression-era survivor, airplane mechanic (during World War II), and fantasist, she resembled a modernist heroine more than a pioneer matron.

I’m so glad to have met Neal when I was young, and grateful to have taken part in her solstice celebration for at least a couple of seasons. While I never knew her well—only as the woman on the mountain; the artist and storyteller whose imagination gave rise to one of Casper’s most unlikely, enduring, and unifying annual observances—I remain in awe of her today.

Notes

Sources: Flora Neale is my fictional version of Neal. She’s a character in my novel, Cowboy State (Blydyn Square Books, forthcoming 2027). Hoping to add depth and color to my depiction of Flora while honoring her original, I went a-Googling Neal Forsling, hoping somebody had written stuff about her.

Many have. Neal herself wrote Crimson Dawn: The Story of the Casper Mountain Witches. Karen Snyder created her documentary, A Woman to Match a Mountain, in 2008. Historian Rebecca Hunt—who was the Crimson Dawn storyteller until recently, and who is a trove of information ranging from the intimate to the larger contexts— has woven stories of and by Neal into talks and presentations and is working on a book; I had the pleasure of interviewing her a couple of years back.

Audrey Watters’ scholarship—upon which I’ve drawn heavily in this post— illuminates Neal’s biography and the meaning of her work in ways that converge beautifully with the currents that run through my novel. She closes her thesis with Lucy Lippard’s observation that “every place name is a story,” and that land without stories becomes invisible. Crimson Dawn has become one of the places, one of the stories through which Casper in all its dimensions becomes visible and better knows itself.

Crimson Dawn Park and Museum Facebook page here

Further viewing and reading

“A Woman to Match a Mountain (Documentary film). Directed by Karen Snyder, 2008. [Independent production]. Reviewed here

Forsling, Neal. Crimson Dawn: The Story of the Casper Mountain Witches.
[Glenwood], [1980].

Harris, Michelle. “On Wyoming’s Casper Mountain, the Crimson Dawn Witches Appear Every Midsummer’s Eve.” Atlas Obscura, 19 June 2023.

Hunt, Rebecca. “Casper, Wyoming.” WyoHistory.org, Wyoming State Historical Society, https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/casper-wyoming. Accessed 13 Dec. 2025.

Restorying the West Podcast. Restorying the West, https://www.restoryingthewest.org/podcast. Accessed 13 Dec. 2025.

Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Rev. and expanded ed., Routledge, 2003.

Watters, AudreyVanderford. Pagans & Pioneers: Celebrating the Summer Solstice in Casper, Wyoming. 1999. Master’s thesis, [University of Oregon].

Yeah, yeah, you big guys, back off: in my lifetime, Wyoming wind has in fact knocked me off course; blown my actual shoes off my actual feet; landed me on all fours and flung my flailing self across icy roads and down embankments. Not exaggerating. ︎

Last night I got to eat the perfect sandwich.

From the way it was put together1 to the first bite—and from the first to the last— it lit every lantern along the cold, dark way home; it kneaded every knot from my braced and twisted muscles; it bathed me in nostalgia, love, and, yes, hope. Forgive me if I’m overdoing it here, but my friend: if a mere sandwich can not only sate but warm, comfort, and uplift, think what we can do—or rather, what we already do—for one another in small ways all the time.

Every year before Thanksgiving, I run around like Mrs. Dalloway (we generally feed anywhere from twelve to twenty-three guests, all family and close friends) making sure there are enough coat hangers, napkins, plates, glasses, silverware, bottles of wine and alternative beverages, ice cubes, places to sit and converse, centerpieces, and so on. That’s my job; Michael does the cooking. All the cooking.

Regardless of the numbers expected, my nervous system reacts like we’re hosting a banquet for dignitaries or top-tier celebs and I’m the Majordomo. I obsess with the same intensity, the same sense of purpose I’d feel if Barack and Michelle or Dolly Parton or Robert Downey Jr. had told me they’d be stopping by. It’s not that I want to impress— I don’t care about that— but Michael and I both want everyone to feel welcome, at-home, well-cared-for, and to leave no one stranded in the loo with an empty cardboard roll and nowhere to turn.

I was never much of a girly-girl, and from childhood on was patently uninterested in being the perfect hostess or even in owning any dishes. Until my thirties, in fact, I never had the space to throw a party. I shared modest living quarters with fellow actors or some mix of students, musicians and dancers or other random roommates found through mutual acquaintances or classified ads. We’d gather, but in ways that were mutually understood to be college dorm-or opium den-casual: bring your own snack and beverage; no socks or shoes required; sit or pass out on the rug. Hosting does not come naturally to me. It’s a skill I acquired late in life.

Twenty-five or so years ago, I finally grasped that for me, theatre would never pay medical bills, provide financial security, secure a decent retirement, or allow me to be taken seriously in any social group consisting of adults who’d made more realistic professional choices: those with mortgages, children, automobiles, health insurance, and savings accounts2. It’s not about the house or the Roth; it’s not how much or what you have (I had things, too: a futon, a sleeping bag, several part-time jobs, debt, and a chronic stomach ache I couldn’t afford to have diagnosed or treated); it’s about quality of life. But money—by which I mean lack of it—had started to interfere with that.

I know many theatre professionals who did not take the same off-ramp I did and who have no regrets. Theatre is a practice of constant challenges, growth, and discovery, and in no other artistic pursuit does one make so many intimate, lifelong friends or learn so much about human history, literature, psychology, culture, and oneself; in no other pursuit does one co-create such beautiful, ephemeral stories for the delight and edification of others. Theatre gives you an astonishing skill set and is a proud career if you can sustain it. I could not.

I stopped auditioning, stopped writing grants. I went to graduate school, bought property, married a grown-up, and started a new career.

In what, 2008—coinciding with a move to a bigger home—I started truly appreciating the ritual aspects of holiday gatherings (even small talk, once a source of bemusement if not irritation, has important social functions, as I now know). I came to recognize and treasure that not only do Michael and I have friends who feel like family; we have family who feel like friends. I loved that we finally had a great room and guest rooms and a big, long table. I came to both dread and look forward to the holidays precisely because we could accommodate a throng. Things can go wrong—hosting is a risky business—but things can also go right. Children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, parents and grandparents and other loved ones can sleep over; everyone can mingle, catch up, enjoy the food, play games, laugh with and at each other, and as it always happens, completely trash the place.

My evolution to the woman you see before you today—the one with the spray bottle and dust cloth in her hand; the one plumping cushions and moving that vase from the end table to a closet shelf so it doesn’t get knocked over and make someone feel bad when I totally should’ve foreseen how precariously it was situated—was not inevitable, but it was inexorable. I matured. I took on new domestic and familial responsibilities (some of them traditionally gendered; others not) and came to enjoy executing them. Some people get a charge out of pulling off a great meal (Michael); I, with my dramaturgical leanings, sometimes like staging an event; creating an inviting space to hang out in.

As Thanksgiving Day begins, I rise early. I attempt to human-proof the premises. For instance, I duct-tape the edges of tablecloths up under the table so an inattentive child or hapless older guest won’t stand to stretch or leave the table and accidentally pull the whole show down onto their lap. I happen to be preturnaturally3 attuned to potential catastrophe4 so I also tape socks to the casters on our dining room chairs lest my ninety-three-year-old parents innocently lower themselves to a chair and wind up on the floor. For my sock-taping method, which involves rubber bands, electrical tape, and Michael’s socks5 —backchannel me.

By ten a.m., I have turned my attention to affordances and conveniences. I run to the store multiple times, as every list I make leaves off something important, e.g., limes for drinks, seltzer, or band-aids in case someone needs one. No one ever has. Our after-dinner round of Spoons inevitably generates a lot of noise, but I am the only person who has ever come close to injuring herself: I propelled myself like Charles Woodson across the dining room table to intercept the last spoon before Milo got it (which I didn’t anyway and could have broken a rib).

During the meal, I cruise, checking to make sure everyone has what they want and need, picking up anything that has fallen to the floor that might be a slipping or tripping danger6, opening or closing windows if I see someone shivering or perspiring; adjusting my dad’s hearing aids while he is wearing them, that sort of perfectly normal thing.

As a consequence of wandering around, I often eat only half of what I put on my plate. Then, I get distracted by bussing. I’m not saying I’m harried or hassled; I’m not. Our friends bake, bring, and cut the pies. They even whip the cream. Some Thanskgivings, I only wash or dry a few dishes because my brother or someone else takes that on. What I’m saying is, the occasion is lovely and collaborative, I just don’t eat much is all; I’m kind of on duty the whole time. I don’t have to be; just am.

Later, when digestion has turned fullness to an incomprehensibly renewed interest in food—when it’s leftover time—rarely if ever do I jump in and claim bits of turkey for myself because either I’m not hungry when everyone else is, or I completely forget what a hot commodity it is. By the time I get around to thinking, I’d love me a day-after-Thanksgiving turkey sandwich, there is no turkey left. This has been true if not every year then at least mostly.

This year, I whined a little bit (off to the side, to Michael) and without telling me, he surreptitously slid a couple of wings into a plastic container, which he hid in the back of the fridge, recovering it yesterday after we’d said our goodbyes to the family and found ourselves alone.

In a gesture so sweet it nearly brought me to tears, he managed to glean enough meat for a sandwich.

Unlike Ross Geller (with whom I know you are drawing comparisons) I don’t want lettuce or mayo on my sandwich, and I refuse to even say the m-word he uses to describe his secret ingredient. Me, I like white bread (toasted), turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce, and a bit of onion.

OMG. Everything about it. I’m not saying it’s Proust’s madeleine; the sight of it, the scent, the taste triggered no childhood memories or seven volumes (only nineteen paragraphs) but ir did make me feel like kittens and puppies inside; like sitting before a cozy fire on a winter’s day; like being seen and taken care of.

And then, the flood came: for that and for all things good, for my husband; for family, friends; for all the people who help me and all of us get through our days… for first responders; for nurses, physical therapists, and doctors; for baristas and waiters; for the guys who keep our city streets repaired; the people who repair roofs; the handymen and women who solve our problems big and small; the people who assume leadership roles and exercise their duties with insight, inspiration, and responsibility… for the inventors; the entertainers… for the mothers and fathers; the siblings, aunts and uncles, step parents and grandparents; for all the good neighbors; for the plumbers and sanitary workers and the security guard at the store we shop at… for all the invisible and visible kindnesses… the bartender; the stylist; the organizers of community events…for the joys and the pain; for our capacity to absorb loss and grief; for those we miss; for those we know and love, and for those we do not… the gratitude continues to pour forth.

Now that’s a good sandwich.

With tender affection ︎That described nearly everyone my age, and I came to observe that a person is not de facto boring or dead inside merely because they’re conscientious and stable. ︎Some would say insanely ︎See my memoir, The End of the World Notwithstanding, for proof ︎Don’t mention that part to him, please ︎ Did you know a simple grape can cause serious injuries? ︎

I was looking forward to watching it—the new documentary about UAP (UFOs, for you old-school True Believers) and secret government programs and all that stuff— especially after seeing an interview with its director, Dan Farah, on the Halloween episode of Real Time With Bill Maher.

Now first off, I like Bill. He’s funny (funny being top of the list, really, when someone is a professional comedian), smart, and a critical thinker with a biting wit. He does fumble at his zipper and touch the tip of his nose a bit much, but those are minor affectations or tics, forgivable. If he’s out-of-the-box on topics you and I are not allowed to discuss in any way but the Approved Way (he is) and outspoken in his opinions (he is) he’s also refreshing in his willingness to push back against a tide of moral righteousness, and surprising in his capacity to raise objections even while listening carefully to what his guests have to say. I trust him.

So when he said he’d seen the film and that he was all in, I paid attention. Bill believes the filmmaker’s thesis and the film’s subjects. Reported sightings of UAP have increased in the past eighty years (hard to refute, as the term simply means the phenomenon observed has not yet been satisfactorily explained, and easy to accept since explained things in the air have increased enormously in that time; surely, one might be mistaken for the other from time to time).

Knowing we’re not alone, and that knowing what the government knows—that UAP tend to hover around nuclear sites; that they can mess with our weapons; and that they appear to be technologically far ahead of us—is important, maybe more important than anything else. That’s the filmmaker’s message, and Bill Maher agreed.

I rented it the day it came out. And I watched The Age of Disclosure with the sinking feeling I’d heard it all before. By the second half, I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to answer any of my questions.

Serious people (who have provided photographs of themselves in uniform, or holding guns and looking into the distance, as proof of their seriousness) claim they’ve been deep inside Top Secret government programs. One guy (only one) alleges he’s seen with his own two eyes “non-human” bodies that were recovered from Roswell. Could those bodies have been, I don’t know, ape bodies? Bear bodies? Dog bodies? Were they made of tree limbs? Is there any possibility of a hoax? I’m not doubting his earnestness, but if a five-year-old can run into the kitchen and vividly describe every detail of the dead bird she discovered behind the garage, can’t a grown-ass man give us a decent image of what he saw lying on a Top Secret gurney in a Top Secret underground government laboratory? But all he can say is “non-human,” as if those words alone speak volumes. Another guy has been close enough to UAP that he’s had “biological effects.” Could he be more specific? Did he get a headache, or did a tattoo of a Xenomorph appear on his liver? Did he grow an extra toe? That’s classified.

What you mainly learn in the documentary is that the government keeps things from the public. I mean duh.

And this is my main takeaway: there are no knowledgable, insider women—no female alien specialists or spaceship experts or Legacy Project alums—worth interviewing The viewer gets quick clips of Kirsten Gillinbrand, Nancy Mace, and (if I recall correctly) a female pilot with a first-person sighting of something she couldn’t explain, but apparently all military intelligence regarding UAP is tied up in xy chromosomes and testosterone. It’s a way dude-heavy film. Make of that what you will. I found it distracting in the same way it would have been distracting if ninety-nine-percent of the subjects interviewed were White. Which, come to think of it…

In conclusion, The Age of Disclosure left me wondering: Are we talking about ET in that Roswell ship, or the Blob? Is there a single woman or Person of Color involved in the secretive boy-club machinations of deep government? What exactly is a “space-time bubble” and how is it different from “what the fuck do we know?”

Boot’s season is coming! reads the ad. Get your winter boot’s at our Early Bird Sale.

I feel sick. Angry. What has happened to us?

This is not the country in which I was raised—a country where such a thing would have earned you a ruler across the knuckles of your typing little hands. As it should.

I wonder what the copywriter was thinking. Perhaps she whispered to herself, I’ll just stick an apostrophe in here. It looks more polished.

Or maybe she got it right, but an ambitious editorial assistant—who spent the entirety of elementary, middle, and high school texting her BFF Alessandra—decided, at the last minute, Oh, this needs one of those dealie-bobs before the “s.”

Did anyone actually think boot (singular) possesses the season?

Was it the Social Media Director who hit SEND without proofreading?

Who do we blame when this kind of thing happens? Who? Whom? Whom. Whom do we blame?

Fine, I’ll admit it: my outrage reflects my own guilt, my shortcomings. I, for instance, suck at who/whom and commas. Yes, there are probably things wrong with this post. Nobodys’ perfec’t.

Which brings me to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a group of old friends.

We sat with sandwiches and lagers on a patio around a big table. It was a blindingly golden autumn afternoon. Everyone was in a fine mood. Hard not to be—the unseasonably warm weather acted, along with the beer, as a euphoriant.

Talk turned to politics, as talk will. We’ve entered an era when rules such as “no politics in polite conversation” belong to the quaint past. Political talk is welcome now, but the polite conversational thing to do in 2025 is to tacitly agree that this— disgust and fear over what’s going on out there —is what we, the gathered Good People, all think and feel. Unspoken: do not express a nuanced opinion or a fresh take on a subject that is obviously decided and closed.

That afternoon, my companions reiterated things they’d read recently on the blogs we all follow. Nothing new, original, or insightful was added; nothing disrupted the group’s nodding concurrence that the world is going to hell, that America sucks, and that it’s the fault of racists, the rich and powerful, white men, and Republicans.

The assembled are all folks I like and respect; I believe the warmth to be mutual. The vibe, however, was such that voicing disagreement with anyone’s comment—or even questioning the premises of certain statements or proposing a different way of looking at things besides flat-out party-line agreement—seemed a terrible idea. Like loudly farting or spilling your beer all over the table on purpose.

I feel defensive enough right now—sitting here with my hot tea in a nice, safe room—to want to emphasize my lifelong allegiance to the Democratic Party.

Moreover, if called to trial, I could provide paper evidence (I saved the programs) of years of sketch comedy in which I and my fellow comedians excoriated the same kinds of bad guys and unjust policies and practices we Lefties still heartily deplore today.

Back then, of course, it was Ronald Reagan we opposed who, along with his spendy, ERA-hating wife, I would welcome contrasted with the bulbous, predatory fat cat we have at the helm today.

Back then we protested military hawks, Rocky Flats, Dow Chemical, and the oil industry (not the defunding of medical research and the arts, or trampling human rights, or shooting at boatloads of people, or tearing down an entire wing of national-legacy architecture while the government is shut down). Other than the specific atrocities, same kind of thing.

Believe you me, on that ten-by-twelve-foot stage at Jeffrey’s Bistrot in Laramie, Wyoming, we (The Ad Liberation Front, we called ourselves) showed the world (or at least our thirty-four audience members) the hilarious side of evil while spanking George H.W. Bush so hard.

I’m just saying, I have bona fides.

Here’s my apostasy: what I long for today in conversations with people whose minds I appreciate is civil disagreement. Debate. Or maybe just surprisingly fresh takes on topics that have become as entrenched and hardened as ruts of the Oregon Trail.

I remember—maybe you do, too—in days of yore lively, stimulating back-and-forths in which the expression of differing perspectives was cause for excitement, at least among thoughtful and open-minded conversants.

You could get shook up, get your feelings hurt and your mind blown within minutes, and sometimes be inspired by hearing something that departed from the script.

I don’t see the point of getting stuck in any way of thinking or talking about issues—especially if other reflective, reasonable ways of thinking and talking are sidelined, ignored, or even vilified because they don’t align with the manifesto.

I never said so aloud because who knows how my objections would have been taken? Fraidy cat? I guess. Anyway, below is the gist (not transcript; gist) of that recent conversation—the one lit by the afternoon sun of an October day, all of us intelligent, curious, articulate people (even if it’s hard to tell in this rendition):

Trump is terrible.
(Everyone murmurs assent.)
What Trump and the Republicans are doing is going to be the end of democracy.
(Everyone murmurs assent.)
ICE is out of control. People—citizens, hard-working, taxpaying immigrants—are being pulled from their homes, workplaces, and schools—unjustly, with no hearing, no due process at all; families are being pulled apart—
(Everyone murmurs assent.)
—and Trump is militarizing the police—
(Everyone murmurs assent.)
—and conservatives are rolling back women’s rights and protections, same-sex marriage, and environmental protections—
(Everyone murmurs assent.)
—but there’s a march coming up next month, and I’m going.
(Everyone murmurs assent.)

Now you’re thinking, Yeah, all those things are true—so how come you aren’t alarmed?

To which I respond: this reflection isn’t concerned with my being alarmed or not. It’s concerned with how we talk with one another about the world today.

We’ve all heard of and been warned about groupthink. I remember discussing it back in tenth-grade Honors English (we read dystopian novels that semester). I found it scary and stifling and kind of horrific.

When I read an article served up by an algorithm that knows my likes and dislikes better than I do—an algorithm designed to make the stories it presents to me the only stories I can see—and I become enraged by that article, am I thinking for myself? Am I thinking for myself when I wring my hands with like-minded others over what is assuredly only part of a larger picture?

Am I Good because I hate all the categories of person my friends hate? Or because I say Amen! to the opinions of those friends? And I mean, not even amen to their ideas—only their opinions because who, among my very smart friends, ever says I have an idea! or Here’s a different way of looking at that, or Hey—what if we could appreciate the whole situation from another perspective? Hardly anybody. What we do tend to say is some version of Isn’t XYZ awful?

But Isn’t XYZ awful is not an idea; it’s not really even a thought and certainly not your own thought. It’s just an easy thing you can say that everybody is supposed to agree with.

People don’t often converse to change things. We converse to connect, to reinforce belonging, to solidify our status within a social group, to hold court, to persuade, for entertainment, and for countless other reasons, among them to let off steam. Commiserating, like gossip, can not only provide a necessary outlet for frustration but also reinforce social bonds and even spark activism. Condemnation of leadership and of those whose values or practices differ from ours is profoundly human and profoundly social, as is the expectation of concord. Still we can’t forget how to disagree, or refrain from speaking our own thoughts and insights that maybe run counter to the approved narrative.

So here’s one humble suggestion for those of us who love our friends but also hunger for diversity of perspectives. It shouldn’t have to come down to just you, bravely blurting out some controversial insight or mild objection to someone else’s run-of-the-mill critique of society, then watching the love fade from everyone’s eyes, replaced by distrust.

It could be an overt, collective decision:

Hey, gang, let’s take a few risks. Let’s absorb a few uncomfortable or challenging perspectives, listen to each other, ask where we’re all coming from, and follow up awkward silences with laughter and curiosity. Let’s accept that we learn nothing by nodding, by avoiding any potential conflict of views. How about that, all of us? Can we try it?

Oh, you’re thinking about the specific personalities in the groups you frequent—this one never listens; that one gets bent out of shape; this one comes across as domineering; that one hates conflict so much she’ll simply stop coming. You’re foreseeing a fiasco? I get it; I do. Let’s agree: disagreement isn’t for everyone, on every occasion. And what I’m envisioning just isn’t realistic; it feels scary. Nobody wants to be that person who says What if we try talking to each other THIS way, not THAT way? But I had to put it out there.

And now, I shall seamlessly bring it back around: Don’t you agree that apostrophes in the wrong place signal the downfall of language, not to mention society? Everyone here thinks so.

Michael and I—neither of us possessing more than the average person’s love of music—found little in A Complete Unknown to dislike and much to appreciate. For me, it was a re-immersion in the folk music scene of the mid-sixties; it was the music; it was the spot-on portrayal of a supremely gifted, frustratingly obsessive nonconformist, a poet and performer who was probably the most interesting persona, if not person, in any room.

Using a well-known lyric from the subject’s opus in the title of your biopic injects the earworm before anybody has even seen your movie. It’s brilliant. From the moment I first saw James Mangold’s film advertised a while back, I had the chorus of Like a Rolling Stone running on a loop in my head. I never learned the verses; I skip through those parts, my imagination filling in the gaps with squeezed vowel sounds and the occasional, contemptuous cry of Didn’t you? Anyway, it got to be too much. Under the theory that you have to hear the song to get rid of it (that was my reason; Michael just wanted to kill a couple of hours on a quiet afternoon) we went to see A Complete Unknown at a funky little movie house in Ft. Collins while on a short holiday vacation last week.

On our drive back to Denver, in the mood, we listened to Dylan. Michael, an accommodating deejay, played The Times They Are a Changin’ and With God on Our Side even though (I think) he prefers later stuff like Maggie’s Farm. To me, Maggie’s Farm is tuneless, repetitive, and abrasive (isn’t that the point?). I know: many Dylan fans think of it as one of his best songs.

I get it. The medium is the message, the message is the message, and angst, hostility, and social criticism can be (and often are) powerfully expressed through music. I was young myself—for a long time—and, as a nascent performer of original work, went through a period of sneering at my audiences as I railed. Comedy was my format, so railing was thinly disguised as raillery… against Reagan; Rocky Flats; corporate greed; white, suburban complacency; environmental criminals; and the whole, sordid rest of it. Thank god there is no shortage of imperfection in the world; where would youthful aggression find targets? Today, I cringe at my naive conviction that the mythical, functional, middle-class citizen—he who has accepted his physical condition, adapted well to life in human society, accomplished things, contributed to his community, earned his dinner and a place to live; who can pay his bills, and afford a ticket to see my (or Dylan’s) show—isn’t worthy of respect or admiration, but is, rather, dull with sleep and in need of being shocked awake (by morally superior teenagers, electric guitars, screaming, and insults disguised as Truth).

Like every other arrogant college student seduced by left-wing discourses, I was energized by the imperative to make the world a better place. Like my peers, I was good at identifying popular issues and complaining about them as if I’d discovered them myself, adamant about the right and wrong of things while understanding neither intricacies nor convolutions. I embraced the so-called countercultural without recognizing the extent to which it and I had become mainstream. Like my peers, I thought only iconoclasts—belligerent poets, musicians, artists, and proud activists–could see and had answers to the world’s problems.

And, like my peers, I eventually came to grasp the complexities of politics and foreign policy, the nuances of history, the vicissitudes of society, growing less certain, more empathic, and less judgy with each gray hair that sprouted on my head or, let’s face it, chin. One big aha! moment came when I realized that not for anything on earth would I agree be the President of the United States. If I were somehow accidentally elected to fulfill that role and do that job, I’d jump right off the first cliff I came to. Complain? Sure! Criticize? You bet! Take on a position of responsibility for decisions affecting hundreds of millions of people? Nuh-uh.

Dylan wouldn’t have had a stage to perform on, or anyone gathered to listen—no one to “needle” as he once put it —had he not been raised into public awareness and promoted like crazy by the selfsame music industry he censured, and by the audience members whose tastes he cultivated (and benefited from) before flouting them. Dylan was indebted to all those who helped create him as a public figure; who recorded and distributed his music, who sold and bought his records; who paid for tickets (and traveled) to his concerts, where they perhaps expected to be entertained, gratified and delighted to hear beloved songs sung by their revered poet, not to be upbraided, edified, or dismissed.

The kid with the guitar who walked into Greenwich Village a nobody was made a superstar in some part through his talent and determination, and in some larger part by the cultural ethos and economic machinery into which he bought and in which he has fully participated. Dylan rose to success and celebrity not by humbly playing for small crowds gathered in local pubs, but by climbing staircases built by others onto stages others provided him. There, like so many artists privileged to attain the pinnacle, he stood—a self-styled outsider, looking down at the rest of us; at our expectation of a comfortably familiar set list, at at our insistence that he remain fixed in the first, youthful bloom of his talent, ever folksy —and he all but spat. Maybe it was that, or maybe he was clearing his throat, or both. Certainly Dylan (unlike most luminaries who have attained his stature) fully understood the precariousness of his position and wrote about it, notably in the movie’s titular song.

A Complete Unknown, I think, communicates, extraordinarily well, the tension between artists and patrons; between renown and those whose attention bestows it; between the entitlement of celebrities and their indebtedness to fans. It also captures the covert narcissism that characterizes all public figures who claim—from center stage, beneath the spotlight—to hate the spotlight. Dylan, at least in the film’s rendering of him, recoils from veneration while cultivating a godlike mystique. A Complete Unknown is what he strives to (famously, intriguingly, impossibly) be. That complexity, in the hands of an excellent writer and director, and an excellent cast, makes for a compelling story and a good movie. The songs don’t hurt.

Somewhere around Longmont, Michael put on Joan Baez’ Diamonds and Rust, pithy and poignant in the lingering spell of the movie, and as haunting as ever. He then surprised me with Tom Lehrer—who saw the whole 60’s folk and protest scene, if not specifically Dylan (who was both the consummate folk-singer/protester and in a league of his own), from a completely different perspective. Lehrer’s take never grows old. If you don’t remember The Folk Song Army, here it is, and give it a listen, too.

We are the folk song army,
Every one of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice
Unlike the rest of you squares.

There are innocuous folk songs, yeah,
But we regard ’em with scorn.
The folks who sing ’em have no social conscience,
Why, they don’t even care if Jimmy Crack Corn.

If you feel dissatisfaction,
Strum your frustrations away.
Some people may prefer action,
But give me a folk song any old day.

The tune don’t have to be clever,
And it don’t matter if you put a couple extra syllables into a line.
It sounds more ethnic if it ain’t good English
And it don’t even gotta rhyme.

Remember the war against Franco?
That’s the kind where each of us belongs.
Though he may have won all the battles,
We had all the good songs!

So join in the folk song army!
Guitars are the weapons we bring
To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice.
Ready, aim, sing!

As we passed through the outer suburbs, Michael hit play on a live version of Arlo Guthrie’s shaggy dog, Alice’s Restaurant, which playful teasing abated—twenty minutes later, when we were pulling into our garage—only long enough to satisfy the powerful craving to sing along (for god’s sake, please, if you’ll only stop talking and let us!) with that compelling, elusive chorus. When at last it rolled around, we were right there, twanging.

But, when I fell asleep, it was Dylan lulling me to sleep; Dylan accompanying my dreams; Dylan, all night long.

PS. If you can’t get enough of Lehrer and his take on youthful protesters, here’s another good one.

I’m behind on this little series. It was initially going to be three posts about divisive discourses and how they impact our daily experiences by tainting how we see one another. That expanded into an exploration of conflict and meaning-making, but then, I found a working copy of this—which I started last year when teaching a freshman class on communication in relationships.

A student came to my office wanting to know if I had suggestions for what makes a good conversation, generally speaking. It was easier for me to think of communicative behaviors that make for an awkward, unpleasant, or otherwise aversive experience. Can I please give you that list? I asked, because I wanted to; it’s amusing to go on and on about what’s wrong with the world, and this seemed like a clear invitation to do so.

Sure, he agreed, but I also want your thoughts about the characteristics most good conversations share. Assumed good intentions, mutual curiosity, listening, taking turns, warmth and humor, collective interest in moving beyond gossip and the mundane, the shared capacity to thoughtfully take in, and respond to, perspectives that differ from one’s own. These, I tossed off without needing to think much about them. They’re important to me, but I wouldn’t claim they’re universally important. Those are my dos, I said. Now, about the don’ts—

Don’t interrupt? my student interrupted, with an eagerness implying he had somebody specific in mind for whom he’d designed this particular episode.

I couldn’t concur. If it doesn’t repeatedly shut another speaker down—or prevent them from expressing a complete thought or finishing a story—cutting in can be friendly. It can keep the ball interestingly in play. Once in a while (say, with monologuists who are ten minutes into their impromptu solo performance and just warming up) it’s necessary. Plus, while some cultural norms interpret interruption as rude, others expect it as part of the natural music and rhythm of talk. Better to think of it as context-dependent. Yes, awareness of the frequency of one’s interruptions and their effect upon others in the conversation is important, but one need not refrain from ever interrupting. Clinical psychologist Michael Karson has written (here) and been interviewed (here) on the subject, and comes down on the side of (I’m paraphrasing) “It’s not a good idea to make don’t interrupt a rule.” I like Michael Karson’s take on things, which is one of several reasons I married him. Anyway: emotional intelligence is key—not only to interrupting appropriately, but to being in a conversational space with others and helping, rather than hindering, the free exchange of information, wit, ideas, arguments, complaints, insights, and intimacies.

My don’ts take the form of three illustrations, or maybe they’re more like descriptive allegories, I don’t know.

Hali1 is an acquaintance, a friend of friends. I’ve been around Hali many times, and each time, I’m less glad to see them. The first time we met, they seemed at first to be charming, easy to be around, and entertaining. An hour into the encounter, we were all still sitting at the table, our coffee cups long-empty and our butts sore, being entertained.

That is, three out of four of us had been relegated to the role of passive audience. Hali hadn’t relinquished the frame of the conversation once. They seemed to believe that if they stopped running things—proposing new topics every couple of minutes, asking question after question after question (not waiting for responses) and telling anecdotes—no one else would pick up the slack. Of course, the rest of us hadn’t had a breather to think of what we might like to suggest or say. Hali never backed off to allow a moment or two of thoughtful silence wherein someone other than they—the self-appointed conversational leader—might offer an observation or insight, deepen or change the subject, or just reflect upon what had already been said. Subsequent exchanges involving Hali over the years have proven to be equally obliterating and exhausting. While Hali may be smart, lively, and interesting in small doses, I’ll never know, because they’ve never allowed me to experience what a small dose might be like. I don’t hate Hali—they’re harmless—but I sure dread having to be in the same room with them.

George2, a member of the same defunct friend group (we drifted apart geographically, but had already drifted socially) is Hali’s opposite, and I wonder if they didn’t systemically co-create each other. George rarely said a thing, and it wouldn’t have occured to him to come up with a subject to engage others. He’s so passive that, if conversational energy flags, rather than taking on any responsibility, he drifts away, his eyes glazed. He looks at his mobile phone, or stares past those present. We put up with George because he was talented and could be hilarious, but what may have been introversion or anxiety read as relational apathy. Why would I want to work as hard as I did to find ways to connect with George when he had no interest in connecting with me?

There’s no way to avoid tone-deafness in a cosmopolitan world where any given group is likely to include people from different family cultures, different economic and educational backgrounds, with different expectations, boundaries, political views, and invisible health issues. The best we can do (while still managing to be spontaneous and to express a smart, free, playful, and honest self in social settings) is to be aware that our lives probably differ in significant ways from the lives of someone else with whom we’re engaging. Karl, a relative, can’t seem to stop himself from making racist and homophobic comments even though he knows (and appears to genuinely like and respect) the several members of our family and extended circle who are not straight or white. But that’s not exactly what I’m getting at. Rather, this: Luz3 —a co-worker of mine in a long-ago, different life—always took up a lot of space when conversing, which was conceptually fine. Unlike Hali, she didn’t seek to control the frame with a barrage of demanding questions or long stories about herself, but Luz bragged, hyperbolized, and used superlatives about everything. Her childhood was amazing; her wife and their twin sons were exceptionally gifted; their dog the best dog in the universe. Luz also couldn’t feel ambivalent about a person or a phenomenon: she hated X, loved Y, used to love Z but now hated them, and didn’t everyone agree? The tone-deaf aspect of this conversational behavior was that it put everyone in the room in the awkward position of having to profess to admire the purported qualities of anyone/anything Luz extolled (even listeners whose dog was a piece of shit, or whose childhood had been less than nice, and even those of us who neither hated nor loved in such extremity). Also, what can one say when you’ve just explained how your job, friends, family, and life are extraordinary?

My understanding of what makes a good if not great conversation (see paragraph 3) is a not set of direct antitheses of the behaviors that can ruin a conversation (to recap: failing to allow others their own conversational rhythm; throwing out topic after topic without providing any reflective space for the topic to grow into a thoughtful exchange; interrogating others; imagining that one is the central character in the conversation, rather than a co-participant; signaling boredom without attempting to join or to propose a subject of likely interest to others; posing or showing off–especially when interlocutors may have had very different backgrounds or life experiences; demanding that others agree with one’s statements; not listening). Good conversations are more than the absence of don’ts or the presence of their opposites.

Of course, I don’t always hit my own goals for being a good co-conversationalist. I tend to check out during lengthy episodes of small talk, even when others are working hard to make it worthwhile. I’ve never been one for shooting the breeze, not since I was a kid. My tolerance has increased with my adult understanding of the social function of chitchat, but still.

I may miss noting that a topic has not yet run its course or expired, and throw out a whole new prompt before realizing I’ve interrupted an enjoyable flow.

I’m hard of hearing, and sometimes when I miss enough words here and there, I give up and start feeling sleepy.

But, my flaws aside, there’s nothing I love more than a conversation in which everyone present is attentive, listening, sharing the space, having ideas and allowing subjects to bloom, listening even more, responding, laughing, providing and enjoying the pleasure of good company. Back and forth.

I’ve enjoyed many of these—good conversations—over the past few weeks, and with those in mind, I offer this post. Wondering: what, in your experience, makes for a good conversation? A great one? Any specific examples of a time you left a conversation thinking maybe not “Wow, that’s a conversation I’ll remember for the rest of my life!” (a la My Dinner With Andre, or Before Sunrise) but just “Wow—that was fun!”

A real person, but not their real name. ︎—who is a construct made out of three guys not named George— ︎Totally her real name. Ha ha! Not really. ︎

The clickbait on CNN (cnn.com) reads Gen Z Says This Emoji Isn’t Cool Anymore. Curious if not outright alarmed, I swirl my finger around on my touchpad, tap, then try to take it all in without panicking.

“New York (CNN Business) Bad news for people who frequently use the emoji: It is no longer cool,” I learn. First (because you have to in these situations) I take a couple of deep, calming breaths. Didn’t I text my someone recently— it feels like yes—and didn’t I say something I thought was witty, and didn’t I use ? Dear God, say it’s not true… but, there it is on my Android. Turns out the occasion wasn’t wit, but embarrassment: after inadvertently thanking my brother for a cake that he did not send me (someone else did) I had followed up that errant message with a jokey, “Oops! Wrong person! Sorry! ”

Like words spoken aloud in the presence of others, you can’t take back a text*. This only one of the five things** I loathe about texts: they hang there and taunt you for eternity with your social errors, your misspellings, typos and now, uncool emojis. I feel sad. M doesn’t reply to my apologetic mea culpa over the cake-thanking fiasco, which—even though I myself rarely respond to texts, not because I’m a passive-aggressive jerk (I am not) but because I never hear the alerts and never remember to check for them—is not like him, and I blame the emoji. Guess I am not cool enough now to merit even a friendly “No prob, Sis ” Or whatever is cooler than that like, I don’t know, “Geen prombleem, Zus! !” or even just, “.”?

Come on, dude, cut me some slack!

Oh, *** —that’s not cool either. I feel faint, so I crack a beer, which is what I do when life throws me a curveball during Happy Hour. I decide to compose a lighthearted, abashed-but-clever, follow-up text to M, to rectify our apparent falling-out over my lack of coolness. “BRO!” I finger-type, punching at each letter with the stylus of one, stiff pinky since thumbs were not designed for typing. “I was to realize that I used in my earlier message. I know, I know, I must’ve been . Can we just 𓀒 and ??? I’m your , for sake. Bygones! Anyway, also, just wanted to reinforce that I know you did not me a .”

Which, in retrospect, seems excessive if not bitter, and after a couple of hours reconsidering, I decide it was a mistake to send it but I don’t know what to do next. I scroll through a dozens of emojis online, all of which, to me, look patently uncool. With such a low bar, I try to understand what the criteria might be for uncoolness among stylemaking Gen-Z-ers. I realize that I’ve long considered ALL emojis, and the word emoji, to be stupider than anything in the whole universe.

Then, mercifully, something gives. I don’t a ’s anymore. Gen Z-ers and CNN can’t control the ing frame if I don’t let them. When they first invaded language, I vehemently resisted and , and . Only in the past few years did I allow to supplant what xoxoxo had previously done a fine job of expressing, because I wanted to be not sternly traditionalist but playfully if not wholly acquiescent. I now realize the extent to which I’ve allowed teenagers and the imperialism of pop culture establish new, impoverished standards for what I’d been raised to understand was good, not bad: the desire and capacity to articulate nuanced experiences, ideas, and feelings, yo.

I recently came into and read a collection of letters and essays written mostly by the male members of my paternal family’s older generations. My father and his cousins grew up on rich bottomland, on a farm in Kansas, near Hiawatha. They were a sprawling, extended family, photographic evidence depicting overalls and haystacks, cornfields, tractors, fishin’ poles, barns. My dad, who went to community college then majored, post-Korea, in English at the University of Denver, earning his graduate degree in Education at the University of Arizona, writes one or two essays a day and has done this for decades. He’s also a skilled code-switcher: he can pepper a conversation with (citational, ironic, or unconscious) breadbasket and military colloquialisms, then deliver an articulate indictment of contemporary political leadership, contextualized by history. Dad’s a philosopher, a voracious reader, and now, at 88, a blogger. The capacity to understand and proficiently use written and spoken English is pure joy to him. Dad’s cousin, Les, has likewise produced eminently-readable, even poignant, essays, from travel memoirs (he was a long-distance biker in earlier years) to compelling depictions of life in Hiawatha in the ’50s, complete with keenly-observed and fascinating portraits of local characters. Even today, he can vividly recall detail of their lives, some of them folks his family knew and others near strangers. Another cousin, Raymond, saw the world through the eyes of a do-er, a hands-on fixer, an engineer, and wrote about life from that perspective. None of them ever used a single emoji, for which I’m grateful, as I’ve enjoyed reading every word of their stories and observations about life.

I suppose what I’m getting at, ultimately, is what Wittgenstein so eloquently put in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “The of my are the of my .” It’s a tension, of course, because language is fluid, organic and imaginative, not fixed by its rules but described as much as prescribed by them. Also, most people don’t speak only emoji, so there’s that to refute the sense that the world is going to in a

Which has nothing to do with my concern over having outed myself as uncool to my brother, so who cares? I lose another night’s sleep over his radio silence, then am awakened to a text. It is quiet, affectionate yet powerful, a minimalist’s mocking rebuke:

?

Not even ???, just ? And he did it both effortlessly and emojilessly.

I wonder if M is really that much cooler than I, but of course, he is, and I stand before the evidence, humbled by his eloquence.

⊶⊷⊶⊷⊶⊷⊶⊷

*Wait, can you? Text me if yes.

** 1. Pecking at a tiny keyboard 2. Undeniability 3. Phubbing: texts taking precedence over what’s happening in real, physical, face-to-face time 4. The expectation that you’re at the beck and call of your little alert; that you’ll drop everything and reply 5. Autofilling 6. Uncorrectability once sent. That’s six. So what?

*** Did you know you can italicize poop, and this is what it looks like, just a bit leany.

The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

edward schlosser

Schlosser’s trenchant and heartbeaking observations do not reflect my own experience at my institution… but enough of my academic friends and colleagues (globally!) have expressed to me, in private conversations, the sense that their long and hard-earned careers and reputations can be destroyed now for teaching difficult ideas or rubbing a student’s sensibilities the wrong way–or just because someone has an axe to grind, and chooses inflammation/defamation as their offensive weapon of choice. I feel hopeless about teaching.

A single, pissy student–or, say, a trio of mean girls– can gather a mob; can disseminate and widely promote poisoned preconceptions and misconceptions about a professor who somehow challenged them, and it can snowball until indignant people who imagine they’re acting on behalf of Justice are in fact perpetrating blind Injustice, never imagining (in their victimized narratives and proud vendettas) that they might be flat-out wrong, basing judgments on self-serving gossip, assumptions, and insufficient information. The arrogance! And undermining their own expensive educations, to boot.

In today’s climate, an injured (or unbalanced, or narcissistic) student with an agenda can ruin a career. A teacher dare not relax her or his vigilance; must not even make a normal human misstep– say, mispronouncing a name; taking a student’s gender for granted while in the throes of an interactive exchange; having an opinion on a politicalized issue; making a statement with which one or two students disagree without having even understood the statement.

When I was a student, it was a thrill and a joy to have my cherished assumptions upended and my mind blown. I trusted my teachers, even the tough ones, even the ones I didn’t like. I sometimes felt ignorant, because I was ignorant. Not stupid, but ignorant. Or glib, or unprepared. Often, I said something in class and was told I was wrong… and professors often mistook me for someone else, or failed to use my preferred name (which was not my given name, and which was, at that time, strikingly nonbinary). Not once did it occur to me to gather a horde of followers to overpower, tar, and feather the professor before chasing him, or her, from the campus.

Professors do not take on the impossible work of teaching (it’s not for money, believe me, that we do what we do) because they are evil, or uninformed, or care nothing for positive social change or for student wellbeing. On the contrary. Most professors teach, in addition to research, scholarship, service, because they are deeply curious about the meaning of life…and care, a lot, about helping students develop mature critical thinking and insight, those tools for a better life.

As a teacher, I always tried to recreate the mind-blowing, upending experience for my own students. I have dialed it back considerably in this climate. I am now much less of a creative, motivated, determined teacher; more of a careful, obsequious guide. I fear that the days of truly transporting, tranformative teaching are over: some students (the worst among them, frankly) will not stand for any ideas they do not approve.

“That’s how a chilling effect works: It makes everyone terrified, resulting in self-censorship and preemptive punishments on teachers who transgress some imagined line of propriety.”

-Waldman and Sargent, Opinion | Teachers are under fire in increasingly bizarre ways: One Mississippi educator was fired for reading kids a silly book about butts.
The Washington Post, 3.11.2022

In today’s Washington Post opinion piece, Teachers Are Under Fire in Increasingly Bizarre Ways, authors Waldman and Sargent also write:

“In Idaho, the appropriately titled House Bill 666 would provide jail sentences for teachers or librarians who disseminate “material harmful to minors.”

How, the article wonders, and how (I ask) can librarians do their jobs? How can teachers possibly teach (or enjoy teaching) when the message is that they are probably up to no good? When they are surveilled and scrutinized? How can a teacher be playful, creative, spontaneous, joyful, loud, funny, confident, encouraging, or authentically engaged when she might be fired for the “wrong” expression of any of those qualities?

Claims of harm–and the extremely general denunciation of “harmful” acts — are specious, like calling someone a witch if they act in ways that you decide are disobedient. The proof of a “Witch!” allegation was found (or not) by strapping down and dunking the ostensible witch under water, where, if she drowned, she wasn’t a witch after all– and if she did not drown, she was obviously dangerous and must be burned at the stake. Unlucky was she who ran afoul of the local clique of “Christian” mean girls, who’d smile in smug satisfaction while enjoying the spectacle of their victims running out of air or writhing in the flames.

“Harmful” (the term now thrown at anyone bullies don’t like) is a charge that is used to justify self-righteous attacks against educators who have run afoul of some cabal. The term has no clear or useful definition. It relies upon hearsay. It privileges the accuser’s feelings, words, and perspective over the feelings, words, and perspective of the accused (and over any counter-narratives provided by witnesses, and over curiosity or reason). “You caused harm!” now excuses attacks. Pointing the finger at someone with the claim, “You caused harm!” is like crying out in the public square, “You murdered my child, you Devil!” The imputation is likely to get the accused set upon by an angry mob without any further evidence, much less dialogue.

“Harm” is subjective. In contexts where “harm” is used to fire someone (the teacher in the article reads a book to kids that includes butts and farts, and is out of a job in no time, having thus potentially harmed children) the term “harm” functions as an incontrovertible label. “You caused harm” is used to shut down lively discourse, criticisms of authority, nuanced thinking, and (gasp) humor or other forms of free expression.

Can harm actually be caused by a teacher? Of course, duh. I won’t go into sexual improprieties or assaults here, or patterns of obdurate abuse of power. Let’s just talk about offenses like reading a funny butt book to kids, or challenging college students to think beyond and outside their comfort zones and political scripts. We teachers can and do (all, I imagine) sometimes hurt others, inadvertently or on purpose. That’s the nature of being a person in a room with other people, or a living thing among other living things. Part of the courage needed to be a teacher– to stand, day after day, in front of a roomful of mixed learners (some perpetually mad; some eager; some smart; some not so smart; some hypercritical; some eternally bored)– involves finding ways to connect, to enliven interest, to spark change (for learning is change) while remaining, ourselves, engaged, and hopefully while being present in each moment, even sometimes forgetting ourselves as we enter into classroom conversations. When we forget ourselves– stop monitoring our behavior–we’re way more likely to make a quip, or to speak sharply about a topic we care about, or to accidentally step on a student’s emotional toe because we assumed we’re all on the same friendly page, but we’re not.

Most of the time, if we’re wrong, we say “Oops!” and “Sorry! Misspoke! Didn’t intend offense!” or “Here’s what I meant to say,” or “Won’t happen again.”

To productively deal with alleged harm, prosecutorial types as well as the prosecuted might be wisely advised to be curious and specific: What happened? What was said or done? By whom, to whom, with what effect, according to whom? Was there an error or misperception involved? Was there a physical assault? A verbal assault? Is a conversation in order? An apology? Should mutual understanding be sought, or perhaps not? Was the harm truly egregious? Or maybe were someone’s feelings hurt in a way that might heal after a few hours’ anger and a glass of wine with friends (or even with the purported “harmer” to mend the relationship?)

One remembers, with profound gratitude, being guided or sometimes just propelled through uncomfortable feelings and resistance, by great teachers and librarians… whose business it was to expose students to new ways of thinking; whose life’s calling was to wake students up to their own creative, intellectual and emotional capacities. Thank you, Miss Tyler! Thank you, Monte Henrie! Thank you, Joanie Evans, Casey Kizziah, Lisa Jacobson, Robert Perillo, Fay Simpson, Polina Klimovitskaya.

One remembers being helped to laugh at one’s own ignorance, weaknesses and fears. Thank you, Jimmy Tripp, Mario Siletti.

One remembers experiencing, in school, brilliant moments of insight and growth after having been surprised, even shocked, in transformative classrooms. Thank you, Barbara Dobos!

Gone are those days, thanks to the tyrannical Crusaders (not for anything truly good, only against what they deem bad) who– believing only in their own pumped-up feelings of perfection–cannot imagine how wrong they are, nor acknowledge the harm they, themselves, wreak.

Waldman, P., & Sargent, G. (2022, March 11). Opinion | teachers are under fire in increasingly bizarre ways. The Washington Post. Retrieved March 11, 2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/10/teachers-under-fire-censorship-books/

…and other mysteries

For the past year, whenever we walk up 17th Avenue from our house in the direction of the park, which we do daily, I anticipate the hole. I don’t say anything. Michael is sometimes in the middle of a joke or anecdote—one meant to illustrate the focal topic of that particular walk—and I don’t care to cut in with irrelevancies. Our subjects range from teaching as opposed to telling… to how power corrupts (perhaps especially those who think they’re incapable of abusing theirs)… to what we should have for dinner. The choices are: frozen pizza, a salmon sandwich, takeout from Pepper Asian Bistro, a Caesar salad, poke, chili with fritos, or a shrimp chimchanga. Really, it depends on the mood we’re in.

Strolling by restaurants with their animated patios—populated in spite of COVID-19, much to our relief, as we want our neighborhood businesses to thrive even though we would not personally sit among others with our masks off and our mouths open no matter how delicious the barbecued sausages look—my attention shifts as I prepare to pass the hole. After the intersection, I can see it ahead. It’s about a foot long, eight inches across, and it vanishes off the edge of the sidewalk: a gap where there is no concrete and no grass, no dirt, nothing at all, just an opening into an impenetrable blackness. When we’re beside it, I glance in but do not exclaim, What the actual hell is up with that hole?

The hole is a feature of an area immediately in front of a row of rental units where families and children live. I know this because not only do I see kids playing there, on the stoops, but because the sidewalk often has a stray ball or a trike lying about. I wonder if anybody who lives there has worried about the hole enough to call the property owner or the City. I wonder if the property owner and the City have ignored their concerns. I wonder why the property owner or the City don’t care.

The hole is also right there where plenty of pedestrians walk. The elderly, young couples in love, joggers, drunken revelers, dads pushing babies in strollers, entire groups of coworkers, and whole families pass by this fissure every morning, afternoon and evening. COVID has forced us all to veer frequently off the concrete to avoid others by the health-conscious distance of six feet. Why hasn’t someone stepped into this thing and broken a leg, or like Persephone disappeared into the depths? Why haven’t I?

Last spring, I called Public Works. I reported not just the one but several similar orifices I’ve seen in the course of our wanderings. There’s a patch on 18th Avenue that has caved in to the point that it could swallow a small dog, let’s say one of those irritable, super-yippy little things with the underbite and all the fur. Whether or not the dog would deserve it, I won’t speculate. They can’t help how they are. None of us can.

My tone, during the call, was one of courteous excitement hardly bordering on panic at all. The person to whom I spoke wanted to know the exact locations of alleged holes, which coordinates I described. She then wondered if this wasn’t perhaps the responsibility of the owners of the adjacent properties. But, these holes are all over the neighborhood, I said. On the verges. A verge, as I am sure you know, is that area between sidewalk and street. It’s not clear that it’s the City’s duty to keep these safe, but if the City doesn’t, and the property owners don’t notice, care, or take action, somebody could die.

I wasn’t planning to end the sentence like that; I meant to write, Then who will? but I realized that someone COULD die. People die all the time. One minute, they’re riding past you on their electric scooter, all shorts and a t-shirt in February, which is so passive-aggressive. The next, a wheel having slipped slightly off the edge of the concrete, they—minus their red Warbys, which land with a clatter on the curb—have vanished into the murky depths. Whether or or not they would deserve it, again, is not for me to say.

And, I pressed the Public Works lady, don’t you want to understand the nature of the holes, the underlying cause, so you can better respond? Even if it’s not absolutely the City’s issue, you don’t want to ignore that there could be a much bigger thing going on, of which the holes are but a sign. There needed to be an investigation, was my message.

The Public Works lady suggested that I submit an online report that would/could/might prompt some kind of action. I pictured a phlegmatic, older male in baggy pants and a windbreaker. He would come take a looksee and set into motion something, perhaps Caution tape, a crew with walkie-talkies, the disruption of traffic, the discovery of complex of subterranean caverns, the remains of early settlers or (older than that, far older) of paleopeople. Ghosts would be released. Or, they’d find a portal. Or nothing. Who knows? I wanted to. So, I did submit, I submitted liberally, attaching photographic evidence to my emotional plea. Then I relaxed, as much as I ever do, and waited.

Months passed. Things happened on the news. It was easy to imagine worst-case-scenarios, unstoppable societal mayhem, anarchy, Armageddon. There was always COVID, of course, and the isolating features of its perpetual avoidance, plus distressing images of a man whose windpipe was crushed by a police officer, plus protests (covered incessantly on Fox and CNN as if protests were the only thing happening in the whole universe, and as if the image of one burning trashcan, played over and over, or six kids breaking windows, meant utter chaos had been unleashed upon the planet) plus the upcoming U.S. Presidential election and its fraught discourses across all media channels and platforms, plus the development of a sprawling tent encampment, desperate people with nowhere else to go, on our block. Shop windows were boarded. Murals and graffiti appeared, some angry, some mournful, some ugly, some beautiful.

There was also this. One day, Michael and I were followed home by a very large, pale, half-naked, bearded, muttering man. No, no–he pursued us. We’d walked by him, parsing the effects of organizational climates in which relational and intellectual discomforts are voiced as accusations, and where differences of communicative style or perspective are only framed as the entitled behavior of the privileged. Anyway, what? Oh, right: so, this giant, shirtless dude decided to come after us like old Squish Plop in the campfire story.

There were people out and about. We weren’t alone, but among the public, so why he picked on us—two average-looking, masked, middle-aged pedestrians—is anybody’s guess. We glanced back, and there he was, barrelling towards us, half a block away. We glanced back again—Ha ha! It looks like that fellow is after us! Ha ha!— and he was thirty feet from our heels and gaining. We ended up more or less hightailing it into our house, where we slammed the front door and heard him barge onto the porch. He rearranged our porch furniture—Thump! Scrape! Bang!—then sat in the lounger, talking loudly to himself. I worried that he would hurt himself, given his size and the age and frailty of the lounger. After about five minutes, Michael opened the door and said, “You’ll have to leave. This is our porch, and you can’t be up here.” Michael came back inside, and we called the police, who never showed up. We expected our visitor to throw something through the big picture window, which he did not. But, eventually—after fifteen more minutes—he lumbered from our porch and, on his way out, tore our front gate right off its hinges and stomped on it. When Michael went out again to ask him stop destroying our property (I’d decided to watch, not to participate) the man hurled a splintered stave at Michael’s head, which it missed by a couple of feet, smacking hard against the house.

In November, it snowed, and when the snow melted, the hole on 17th Avenue was still there, more defined now, less a crevice and more a crevasse. At this point in the year, we were discussing Zoom and whether it allows for greater intimacy than socially-distanced classrooms where everybody is masked. Nodding vigorously (to cover my distraction and alarm at the hole’s persistence) I agreed with Michael that in some ways, it does. On Zoom, you can see people’s faces, their expressions, and you’re not shouting through a mask. But, you miss presence—physical presence. You lose the ripples of spontaneous laughter that can energize a classroom. You lose eye contact.

In the weeks and months of winter, the hole has continued to stare at me, cyclops-like, when we go by. In the middle of the night recently, it came to me that our neighborhood must sit atop a vast sinkhole. The openings I can see on the surface are indicators of an imminent catastrophe. The City is, no doubt, aware of what’s going on, but the scope of the problem is so vast, they can’t imagine how to deal with it, so they’re pretending it doesn’t exist, as Cities do. When everything caves in one day, they’ll be all like, We had no idea! What a tragedy! All those people. All those houses. The pub, the taco place, the waffle house, all of it, gone forever. Huh! If only someone had submitted an online report with attached photos, all this could have been avoided.

I ponder cities and their governing bodies, all governing bodies. I consider how challenging it is, even for the faculty in my small department, to come together, discuss an issue, and get something tangible accomplished.

I think about how—given the wealth of our nation, our level of prosperity and education, and the sheer number of us who care about quality of life for all (even if selfishly, because a rising tide, yadayada)— we ought to have solved homelessness by now. As a nation, and as communities of neighbors, we ought to have figured out how to truly and sustainably help our down-and-out, our neediest, those who suffer the most among us, while ensuring that the healthy and the capaple can find work, are able to earn a decent living, and are in a position to take care of themselves. I guess it must be true that maintaining a permanent, helpless, dependent and unhappy underclass is politically and economically beneficial to those in power, else we’d surely have done better. What the hell is up with that hole?

Given the frankly astounding reach of science and engineering—the capacity of our very best thinkers and designers to develop solutions to problems—we ought to have been on top of the human-caused components of climate change for decades, if not for a century, collectively and without significant infighting. We should have realized the aspirations of scientists, environmentalists, clean energy advocates who have been on this since the Industrial Revolution started spewing filth into our (only) (shared) (necessary) air and water. The whole energy enterprise, to the extent that it poisons our only home, is unsustainable, a bad idea, and needed to commit to change decades ago. What the hell.

We should, by now, have managed to productively address the flow of human beings across (arbitrary, socially-constructed, but important) borders without subjecting our society, our families, our children, to traffickers and terrorists, and also without vilifying, torturing, warehousing, and treating as inhuman those who most need empathy and compassion. Not everyone who wants to come into a country belongs there, and not everyone who crosses a border brings blessings with them. Nor does everyone bring ill; some bring hunger and hope, determination, love, goodwill, creativity, brilliance. Are we stymied by the complexity? Welcome to societies across human history: welcome to many thousands of years of Who’s “We?” How Do We Live Together? To Whom Are We Responsible? How Do We Protect Our Loved Ones? How Do We Best Thrive? Ought we not to be in a somewhat better place in our response to these questions, given millennia of practice? What the hell.

Shouldn’t we (after all this time on the planet, living among one another, sleeping with one another, raising families, creating communities, depending upon each other for help when we most need it) have, long ago, reduced violent policing (by our own civil servants, against us) for the benefit of all? Surely, by now, we ought to have been able to successfully mitigate patterns of intimidation and brutality by badge-flashing, uniform-wearing, gun-toting law enforcement… without undermining the capacity of police to protect and to serve, while recognizing and promoting ethical officers, and collectively improving the cultural health of our local police forces, thus of our communities. What the hell.

Our species is amazing at reproducing, creating, designing, building, repairing damaged cells, sewing bodies back together, improving chances of survival for people with any number of illnesses, connecting the world via invisible signals. We’re the best at making things explode, brewing better and better beer, and landing a probe on Mars. We’re just not all that great at fixing some things. Why would I expect that a phone call to the City of Denver might result in a City employee coming out to examine, assess, put into context, and deal with the gaping holes that riddle our neighborhood?

I appreciate that as many things work as do: that traffic flows on our streets; that people go to the grocery store, hand over bills or swipe a magic chip and are allowed to leave with food and paper products; that I can teach a remote class on Zoom during a pandemic; that there are parks in which parents push toddlers in swings on sunny days. These all seem like miracles to me. But, what the hell is up with that hole? I probably won’t accidentally fall into it. Possibly, nobody else will, either. I hope the neighborhood will not be sucked into the earth. I have to believe that it won’t.