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Every night my youngest, usually after his brother has gone to sleep already, insists that I tell him several chapters of a story I made up one night, desperate to get him to stop getting out of his bed, called “The Adventure Squad,” in which he and his family meet his heroes, fight bad guys, and avert an apocalypse.

This is surprisingly common in speculative fiction, I’ve noticed. Once you’re asking “what if,” you may as well ask what happens if the threat is so bad that it could mean the Return of Gozer. Superheroes are forever discovering alien threats or an invasion from Hell. Even something like Batman, which tends to be more about colorful criminals staging elaborate, small-time crimes, gets dragged into some DC crossover event multiple times in a year in which a billionaire wearing spandex and a cape is somehow able to stop Satan himself, or at least the Floronic Man and Poison Ivy from a dastardly plan to unleash a mega-cloud of super-marijuana to end all war.

Life imitates art (regrettably not in the case of the war-ending super-weed; to be honest, I think I’m sort of with Floro and Ivy on that one). It’s been just about a day since the odious hate matrix with a degenerating brain was handed the keys to The Button and he’s already signing things and barking out language that feels like it was drafted by some cheap, two-bit science fiction writer designing Baby’s First Dystopia for a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

That should have been my career (writing cheap dystopia, I mean, not the Presidency). In The Adventure Squad, my youngest, his brother, and three of his cousins get together to celebrate holidays and are inevitably pulled into a different universe to save it from villains taking it over and blowing it up, or what have you. As they do this, they develop unique superpowers, and each chapter they gather a clue as to who the real Big Boss Bad Guy is, usually by finding one letter of his name. It lets me end things on a cliffhanger and note that he has to be good at bedtime if he wants me to continue this practice(an empty threat, of course, because it is quite difficult, at least for me, to say no a four-year-old quietly asking for a story to help him go to sleep). This means that The Adventure Squad sort of has chapters and sort of has books that are all linked to one story, sort of like The Magic Treehouse series, as far as I was able to tell back when I read that to the oldest, before it was devoured by Minecraft. So far The Squad has unveiled King K. Rool, Bowser, and Ganondorf as primary antagonists (youngest has a Nintendo focus at the moment – I have been playing a lot of old Donkey Kong and Mario at his request).

The bad guys also always are teaming up in the IP-laden, escapist fiction that will soon become the only form of entertainment produced by mass media. The Master, working with the Daleks?! Green Goblin, working with Rhino?! Warner Brothers teaming up with Discovery?! In the stories, often some squabble for power reveals that the team-up is a fake-out and it has one true person behind it all, the man behind the curtain, usually whoever the writer’s favorite is.

Life imitates art again. All the world’s worst people are out there shaking hands, patting each other on the back, and generally having a grand old time. A guy infamous for remarking that a worm ate part of his brain, a guy who’s such a loser that he bought Twitter so he could become its main character forever (and look at people’s private messages when they catch him cheating at video games), and neo-fascists from all around the globe are pledging their support for one another. Steve Bannon (Game Over! Return of Bannon) compared this capitulation of the Zuckergang to General Douglas MacArthur, but it feels more cartoonish, like Grima Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings, or whoever that guy groveling to Voldemort is in Harry Potter. Who can be bothered to remember anymore? It genuinely would not be surprising if it were revealed that the “oligarchs” have had a secret base where they hunt poor people for food, and they’ve just decided that they don’t need it to be a secret anymore. Last time, just like in the stories, they pretty quickly started knifing each other in the back faster than we could measure in Scaramuccis, but this time, they all seem to be bowing to the king(or, in at least one case, sieg heiling for him). I guess we’ll see how long that lasts, such it matters beyond the celebrity entertainment factor.

My youngest insists upon editing The Adventure Squad live as I am telling it. Bowser Jr. must be involved, or King K. Rool must use his scientist name. This can be difficult, because trying to invent a story appropriate for a four-year-old based on his own frame of reference and coming up with superhero abilities for five children is tricky enough to do on the fly without trying to remember that when King K. Rool wears the lab coat, he’s actually called Baron K. Roolenstein (something I had to look up on the Mario wiki).

These wikis are also the only way to understand who all of the villains are on TV and the movies now. Even the parodies and homages are so deep into the rogues gallery that The Boys has multiple spin-off characters being incorporated into the show and Kite Man has his own television show. We’re approaching some kind of easy-reading singularity, in which Darth Seven of Nine sues the Acme corporation for illegally transporting the Iron Throne to to the town of Derry Maine, shortly before it falls into a portal to Ravnica: City of Guilds. Likely written, drawn and acted by “artificial intelligence,” a word that has now lost all meaning except that, as it has currently been commonly employed with regard to the arts, almost every reasonable human being hates it. I suppose that at least once everything is some kind meme slurry stealing everyone’s work and likenesses, we no longer will have to discover which creator has decided to become loudly transphobic or be the subject of an exposé revealing decades of sadistic sexual abuse under their belt (the Neil Gaiman thing still hurts).

It’s a bit more fun watching the fictional, rag-tag heroes continuously avert the End of All Things, I suppose. I am not sure what power I have (despite being decidedly rag-tag and being able to conjure up a gang in a pinch) against the absolute onslaught of evil that is likely to consume this decade. While we drill-baby-drill into accelerating climate change against the wishes of most of the rest of the world and opt tell the World Health Organization to go pound sand if they think they’re going to help with the pandemics that are likely to ensue, lots of the people who could help are likely to be slaughtered in the mass deportations that are apparently starting as I type this. The villains in this situation cackle and host tacky, cringeworthy, almost unbelievable celebrations, just like the fictional ones, but nobody appears to be about to smash through a stained glass window and defeat their cynical machinations with ingenuity and the power of love and friendship.

Youngest, who picks up on adult anxiety like any child, has vowed that he will protect us from “Donald Trunk,” one of the few Bad Guys that he seems genuinely afraid of rather than wanting to emulate. I continue to rack my brain to think what on earth I can do about all this, since it seems a growing number of people are simply onboard with burning everything we’ve built over the years purely because they enjoy spite more than empathy. At the end of each Adventure Squad, the squad returns from whatever dimension they were in victorious, just as us hapless parents return from looking for them, oblivious to all the adventures they’ve been on.

Still, I’d rather that the apocalypse not be a job for the next generation, especially since it will be tough for them to do anything about it if they spend their adolescence in some kind of Mad Max hellscape. It seems like the one thing all of us should have agreed on, really, to maybe not destroy the planet. I guess the 1980s nostalgia powering all of those franchises includes a Doomsday Clock so close to midnight that we’re all perpetually lying awake waiting for the ball to drop (the ball, in this case, being the planet).

In the meantime, I can only hope that the Adventure Squad helps, in both of the possible interpretations of that sentence.

My eldest (I guess I’ll just start calling him Eldest) has been taking a once-a-week afterschool class on coding for kids.

“How do you spell ‘maker’?”

I usually have to yell the letters across the house; he is not patient enough to wait for me to finish whatever I’m doing and walk back into the dining room, where he has set up a workstation that he pulls out as part of his “I’m home and can relax now” routine.

For six, he is actually a very good speller, but he’s still in that stage in which it takes some time to read or write, and sometimes he needs a grown-up to do it for him, either to speed things along or so that he can enjoy a story without laboring too much over it.

He codes, at the moment, in Scratch, mostly because I learned a little bit of it back when I took a couple of programming classes, so I can help a bit and show him some things.

Eldest, like me, tends to dive headfirst into everything, but noting so much so far as programming. He loves to code. He works on an old i-pad and, gradually as he has developed his route, we have added a keyboard and a mouse (Logitech, of course), as well as a paper book that he can reference. I am not ready for him to have unfettered access to Google yet.

How do you spell “danger?”

This puts some limitations on him when I’m not around to help him, because I sure as hell don’t want him going to Google image search to find photos to use for his sprites. He is not ready yet even beyond the safety concerns – finding a transparent png or using Pixlr to magic wand away white space can be a little tricky. It’s fine; Scratch has a lot of built-in assets and he is actually already pretty good at drawing his own. One of his games, a platformer, has three “stages” that he made entirely using the software’s drawing tools.

It’s gratifying that his current obsession is at least something that he can learn with and something that allows him to exercise some creativity. Coding is filled with puzzles to solve, and mostly, they’re puzzles you create for yourself. How can you make the coding blocks simulate a jump, such that the sprite goes up a certain height and then descends until connecting with something solid?

He explores the games other people have created and peeks at their code. He asks me to clarify. He flips through his book. He has idea after idea after idea, and all of them are beyond his current ability. That’s good, I think. A stretch forces you to think of where you can start. Often, he’ll make a program, and then instead of going back and editing it, he’ll recreate it, reinforcing the ideas that he has taught himself.

R-E-P-E-T-I-T-I-O-N. That’s a tricky one, with an E that sounds like an I and one of those “tion” endings that sounds like “shun.”

He has to ask to spell things almost every minute. Every variable, sprite, and method needs a name, descriptive of what it is or does. I don’t mind, except that sometimes I have to tell him to wait while I’m calming the youngest down or talking something through with the wife.

He has trouble with transitions, Eldest. When it’s time to put Scratch away so that he can eat or sleep or go to school, he gets upset. Well-versed in language about emotions, he will tell us (after we have exhausted the number of “just five more minutes” that we can allow) that he needs time to be sad or that he needs us to comfort him.

At one point, over an hour after his normal bedtime, he and I had to sit on the couch and have a conversation: it is okay to feel your feelings and to ask for comfort from the people you love, and both of us are willing to devote the time to helping him move past his sadness, but, certain things are time-bound.

School starts at the same time every morning and if we don’t get in the car at the right point, he will be late. Supper is roughly the same time every evening and if we don’t eat it, it will get cold. Bedtime is the same time every evening, and if we don’t adhere to that schedule, he will not get enough sleep and he will be tired and cranky in the morning. We cannot control the sun and moon.

He looked at me, face still wet with tears, and said “Sometimes it feels like everything is time-bound now.”

Oof. All those spreadsheets I have that are missing checkmarks, those video games I want to finish but haven’t been able to because I have to go to work, or shower, or eat, or wash the dishes, or take out the trash, or I’m because I’m just too damn tired.

How do you spell “relatable?”

This is one of the hard things about being a parent, finding the right balance between structured activities and unstructured leisure time. Will he be sad later that we haven’t signed him up for piano lessons or soccer? He already has school, swim lessons, Hebrew School.

I only get a couple of hours with him on the weekdays and I have to spend half of it trying to get Youngest to eat or get both of them to clean up their toys and get ready for bed. If it were up to me, we’d all have a lot more free time, I want to tell him, but it isn’t up to me. All I can say is that sometimes it feels like that to me too, and remind him that he did get to watch his show, or build Legos, or code, and the weekend is always around the corner. That he likes going to school, really, because his friends are there.

It helps to remind me, though. We only get so much time, and it’s important for me to spend a lot of it taking him to the movies, watching Amphibia with him, making a treasure map with clues for a pirate game.

And spelling words while he teaches himself to code.

P-L-A-Y.

Because I absolutely despise cars and because public transit has gone… down the tubes (a-ha-ha!), I have been walking to (and from) work for over a year now. It is four and a half miles and takes about an hour and a half. It means there are weeks in which I get a solid 36 miles in.

Typically, mornings are the worst time of day for me. I wake up thinking about every regret I can remember and it takes me awhile to bring my brain to heel and knock it off, which can be difficult when you’re underground, inside a tiny metal box with a bunch of other people who haven’t had their coffee yet. I miss the Red Line being operable (not everyone can walk), but I don’t miss taking it.

It can be interesting to experience the same stretch of road during the same time of day over and over. Plus, I can catch up on all those albums I’ve fallen behind on. Apparently the Decemberists had a release in 2024.

I must have been running a little late this morning because I didn’t see the bright red Pigott Electric Co. van. I worked with Mr. Pigott at a previous job and it’s vaguely amusing to me that I’m often walking the same stretch of street that he’s driving down (at about the same speed – I keep up with him until I have to wait to cross at a busy intersection).

Before the sun comes up, I get to pass by some haunted-looking mannikins (maybe all mannikins are haunted looking, especially in the wee hours of morning, in a dark, closed shop), shortly before a powerful scent of bacon from the not-yet-open diner. This morning, Colin Meloy was belting out an extremely Decemberists song about some people attacking a wedding.

It feels vaguely like I’m walking into sunrise, like eventually I’m going to catch up to the light and see the darkness behind me, but of course, that isn’t how it works. All of a sudden the sunrise is gone and the full morning light is here. I never see it coming. A watched pot, etc.

Every time I go by a certain CVS, I remember that my oldest son, for the first time in his life, heard a song that he liked on the radio and asked us to play it at home later (“the CVS song,” which was Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver’s License, and I have to say, he had good taste on that one; really takes you right back to the pain of those adolescent break-ups.)

Along the way there’s a dentist’s office with an ostentatious sign: on it is a big smiling, cartoon tooth giving a hearty thumbs up and wielding a tooth brush as though it were a flag. There’s sometimes a woman who does outdoor yoga in the apartments nearby, but she wasn’t around today; maybe it’s too cold anymore. I am not sure what to think of her, since she does her yoga near a pot with a sticker on it that says, incomprehensibly, “JUST SAY NO TO THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY!” That seems like a strange sentiment for a town in Massachusetts, but so does doing yoga in the street when your apartment is right behind you, I guess.

In the middle of an album about folksy tales with archaic language, ghosts, and disasters (again, typical Decemberists), there’s an earnest, basic love song:

Everyone has earned at least one of these songs, I suppose, but then, I’m coming back from a short vacation celebrating my tenth wedding anniversary, and I’ve probably always thought they were the most important kind of songs, anyway.

Down under a bridge where the commuter rail tracks are, someone has spray-painted the word “NAKED” at least four times, in increasingly elaborate designs. I would like to see it as a commentary on vulnerability, but more realistically it was probably thoughtless, everyday horniness.

There are other political advisories: a sign big enough for an entire store window begs people to stop voting for more bike lanes and to focus more on infrastructure, because not everyone can cycle. “FREE PALESTINE!” signs stuck in fences and on mailboxes are evergreen, regrettably, because nobody in power ever seems to listen. A poster stuck to a pole, (newish now, but it will likely be weeks or months before it gets taken down), notes that “men’s rights activists” will be marching to abolish abortion in Boston and calls for counterprotest. I have been following the arrests in the news and can only feel disheartened that these weirdos are at it again. They’re never going to shut up now that their idiot king is about to be in charge again. I guess functionally overturning Roe wasn’t good enough.

Of all the signs and graffiti, my favorite one is on the imposing wall outside a venue I once booked for an offsite. The gray wall has a patch of lighter gray on it, on which, someone has written in a darker gray, “THIS GRAY NEEDS MORE GRAY.” Someone has since added, in yellow, “less imo,” which I think misses the joke. The one sentence was enough.

I drift away from the Decemberists during the twenty minute song about Joan of Arc, which is so dull for a walk that their catchier music bounces back into my head.

All I want is…

The slalom of street-crossing and bicycle dodging due to construction takes up a lot of the second half of the walk. The fire station in Inman is forever roped off in front, some huge biotech is building towers for both labs and living space that looks like it will take years to finish, and the sidewalks are being torn up in half a dozen places at any given time.

This part of the walk is also more heavily populated; before, it’s mostly a few dog-walkers and joggers on the sidewalks, who are too preoccupied to do much more than notice somebody walking the other way. During the second half, it’s all loud construction workers, rushing cyclists and people unloading crates into restaurants.

For awhile, there was a very old woman who would pop her head out of her apartment to feed the birds as I passed, greeting me with a “Good mooooooooooorning, honey!” and winking in a way that was vaguely lascivious, but I haven’t seen her for awhile. I hope that she is okay. As inappropriate as it was, it helped to pull me out of my own head, which, in case it isn’t obvious, has always been one of the biggest challenges of my life and is the reason my mornings are so dismal.

Maybe she’s the one who did the “NAKED” graffiti. Stranger things have happened.

Every time I pass the Kantipur Cafe, the same half-assed Abbot and Costello “Sure, why can’t you pour?” joke pops in my head. No wonder I didn’t keep up with improv.

Don’t want summer Mondays

Don’t want stunning wordplay

All I want is…

Most of these storefronts and restaurants are places that I have never been inside, despite passing them by 6 – 10 times a week. But I still feel vaguely sad when I see that one has closed or changed hands. One of the easiest ways to divide the eras of my life is by my commute. The walk to Ruggles, the endless bus ride to Salem State, the two busses and a train to get from Somerville to West Roxbury, the walk from Roslindale, the times it was too cold for the Green Line and I’d walk down Commonwealth Ave, stopping at the grocery store on the way back, walking the Minute Man bike trail to Alewife to take the few stops to Harvard…

You start to recognize things. The specific place that smells a little like sewage, the same guy, wearing a fedora, getting on the train car with you. You invent names for people and places. Strong Bad the Eternal Orange Line Denizen. Here at the Turn. “Can I Borrow $20?” Medical Device Guy. Names of dire importance for the mundane, not to drown out the tedium but because they have inexplicably become a part of your life and you’ll miss them when that part of your life is over. People and places that mark an era deserve titles of import.

What I try to remember by the end of the long walk is that the trajectory of my own life, at least, has largely only gotten better. This commute is better than the one before it, which is better than the one before that, and on and on. What right do I have to wallow in regret? A lot of the people I miss are fine, as far as I know, and I have everything I need.

I have, in fact, just been to a nice hotel in New Hampshire with a woman that I have been with for thirteen happy years, to celebrate the anniversary of our marriage and take some time to reconfirm our commitment to each other, and when we returned home, both of our children flocked to hug us.

Amidst the exploding Decemberists fairy tale of the walk, there’s that one, earnest love song.

Drag me to your altar

When my footing falters

All I want is

All I want is you.

Well… that and a couple of cups of coffee.

I am not much of a talker, anymore.

I was. A talker. As a kid. Couldn’t shut me up, from what I understand. My own kids will happily talk in a stream, above the vocabulary level for their age, displaying those surprising insights that children do when they reverse engineer complicated phrases for concepts for which we already have words.

I’m either too slow with my thoughts or too careful with my words. Conversation passes through topics so quickly that anything I might have said feels like last minute’s news. This isn’t a complaint, really. Get a reputation as the quiet, contemplative type and it takes a lot of the pressure off, until you have to host an orientation or run a meeting, and then, at least, the expectations are low.

But I will write. Hubris will catch up with you quick if you say that you’re good at something, so I’ll say that I’m probably adept. I can shift voices and narrative distance, I have a recognizable style, and I have my obvious flaws, like over-relying on the rule of threes.

There’s a kind of internet speak that sort of defies sincerity, and it’s slowly grown over time. We’re all so keen to be witty and get the last laugh. There’s a “dopamine hit” (one of those phrases that’s been used so often, it’s lost a lot of meaning here on the web, like “late stage capitalism“) that comes with the numbers of thumbs-up reactions, or heart reactions, or emptyquotes, or whatever the social currency happens to be.

It’s not all bad. There’s something about executing a succinct, less-is-more sort of postmodern joke that makes the whole thing a kind of performance art, and despite my previous caution, I’m going to go ahead and say that I got good at it, in certain spaces. I grew up with it and I’ve been doing it for a long time.

More and more, “shitposting” makes me think of how Daniel Kaluuya’s character feels about his dystopian world in Black Mirror’s Fifteen Million Merits. “It’s all confetti.”

There’s this thing that happens with any mass media at some point, I think, in which bad actors grab the steering wheel and suddenly, charm overwhelms any sense of poignancy. All of a sudden, so much seems to tickle the same neurons that engage with empathy and pathos, and all of the actually important and good things about people, but never actually engages them beyond the surface. A dopamine hit, courtesy of late-stage capitalism.

I’ll miss laughing at the memes. There are spaces out there that had a real handle on my sensibilities that I will, probably, never find in real life, or, realistically, here.

But I can’t do it anymore. The echo chambers, the parasocial worship of celebrity and e-celebrity and, uh… whatever I could add here that would make this one a rule of threes, it’s just… getting to me. Even in the places I like. I’m tired of anxiously appending “lol” to the end of my comments, that I have already edited extensively for brevity (this is uniquely a young Gen X and Millennial phenomenon, of course, but in our defense, we tend to be more computer literate and have good reasons, based on experience, to hedge our bets when post things).

In college, there were periods of time when I used to write for fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. I know because I kept charts. Nobody besides me will ever read a word of most of that, which I expect will be the case with all of this, but at least it means I can be honest and write like a human being, instead of like some programmed robot fishing for clout.

You can’t make clickbait headlines if you don’t care who visits your website.

There are some drawbacks: the other people in my life have not consented to using pictures of them, or their real names, so I’ll have to come up with some pseudonyms and I will not be putting pictures of them here. It is more public than most social media, some of which is anonymized and some of which is at least protected by privacy settings, such as we trust them. People who mostly just looked at the pictures of my kids will have to see them on the shared photo album. Sorry. The internet may have become more ephemeral and I can use robots.txt and pay for a domain in perpetuity as much as the next fellow, but I tend towards caution when it comes to publicly putting out pictures of people who aren’t me.

Things that I am likely to talk about include being a parent of two kids, my hobbies, my lamentations on the state of world democracy, and, probably, sometimes, obsessive compulsive disorder, which I have.

My hobbies, at the moment, include reading (I used to read 100 books a year and am at about a quarter of that lately, so I’m hoping to change it), playing video games, watching the 1001 Movies to Watch Before You Die list (all versions, which means, of course, there are considerably more than 1001), reading every Batman (and Bat family) comic between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Flashpoint, amateur bookbinding, and probably a lot of other things that will come to me as they come up.

Some of those are what I call my “Forever Projects,” because they take a very long time (I finished one, recently, which was to read all of the Arthur Schlesinger Jr. An American President series, and I expect that I’ll finish “read all the Discworld books” in a couple of years.)

If you want to get a handle on what I’ll write about here, my kids are six and four, I’m currently playing Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake and Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, I am reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and Terry Pratchett’s Mort and I’ve been stalled on the 1001 list because I have a system (the system is a brain goblin that arbitrarily compels me to create spreadsheets and make check marks in an order that pleases it), and one of the movies has been hard to get now that I’m out of practice at using bit torrent and I’m not willing to pay upwards of $30 for something I’ll watch once. You probably already know if you’re here, but politically, I’m one of those commie, leftist, Black Lives Matter, trans rights, and on and on sort of people, although I confess to taking the controversial action of voting for the Democratic Party candidate for major offices most of the time, for harm reduction, as fed up with their bullshit as I am. Otherwise the wrong lizard will be in charge, to reference Douglas Adams.

That huge-ass sentence that takes up about half of the last paragraph is about what you can expect from me, often. Also, I use a lot of fucking swear words. As far as I can tell, they’re less overtly harmful than, say, those words that, totally by coincidence, vaguely resemble slurs just enough that they have become uncomfortable. Even the hilarious human tendency to turn previously innocuous words and phrases into sexual innuendos has produced more accidental harm than the word “fuck” can ever hope to, I think.

I have no idea, really, how often I’ll write, or if I’ll even keep it up, or (rule of threes, baby!) what I’ll even write about. It’s been a long time since I did this, and traditionally, when I start out trying to write about myself, I veer into the fictional instead.

And you don’t have to read it. I’m not keeping tabs. My own wife will skim this, at best. But I have to write, apparently, and this is a hell of a lot better than linking to a depressing news article and saying “The planet is dyin’, Cloud, lol.” At least, for me it is.

It’s worth the price of a coffee for me to rant at myself periodically, and show off how many words-per-minute I can type in a setting that doesn’t include mutual indemnity clauses.

If you want to be part of the cloud that this middle-aged man is yelling at, feel free. Hopefully most of them will be shorter than this one.

I am going to ignore things like categories and tags for now. I may come back to them, but I think the best way of sorting things is probably chronologically. I’m not sure I even have the coherence to make things more easily sortable.

Thanks for reading all that, imaginary person who did.

May the way of the Hero lead to the Triforce.