Nows and Forevers

Writer and human, born 10 years too late

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  • I’m bored with superheroes

    I’ve seen two superhero movies in the past eight days in the theatre, first “Guardians of the Galaxy 3” and then this past weekend, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” And I’m likely going to see a third, “The Flash,” later this month.

    Sigh.

    I’m not the only one to think that it feels all Hollywood does right now is either a sequel or a superhero movie, or a sequel to a superhero movie. “Guardians” and “Across the Spiderverse” are both superhero movies and sequels. The first is a franchise I don’t really enjoy, other than their picks of awesome ’70s and ’80s music for the soundtracks. The second is an animated movie that took me by surprise how much I liked it, and how it diverged from typical superhero tropes. And having a diverse superhero, with a diverse family, I loved it. And still do.

    I went to both with one of my kids, who loves all things Marvel. And yeah, we’re going to see “The Flash,” which is DC. I do want to see “The Flash” because I’m intrigued by seeing Michael Keaton as Batman one more time, and any time travel/alternate reality story has me hooked from the get-go. But I’m likely to quit after “The Flash.” Superhero movies have pretty much played out in my opinion.

    It wasn’t always this way. I grew up watching the campy “Batman” from the ’60s, in reruns in the ’70s in the New York suburbs. I still remember my first chuckle, where Adam West as Batman tries to toss a bomb and keeps running into obstacles, whether it’s a mother and her ducklings floating or nuns rowing a boat.

    “Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb,” West says exasperatingly.

    The first superhero movie I remember came out when I was 11, and it was a good one: “Superman” with Christopher Reeve. It was huge in 1978, and it spawned three sequels over the course of the next decade or so. “Superman II” was pretty good, if dated now. I don’t want to remember the last two. Probably nobody does.

    Plus, with Superman’s alter ego being Clark Kent and a lot of the action taking place in a busy metropolitan newsroom, how could I resist even if, at age 11, I didn’t know I would grow up to be a mild-mannered reporter? Well, maybe I did back then.

    That was it for superhero movies until 1989, when Keaton’s first “Batman” movie came out. I went to see it on a date and I remember being blown away by the look, the storytelling, the vision and by Keaton excelling both as Batman and Bruce Wayne. I watched the next one with Keaton but not the others, and was blissfully unaware of superhero lore again until my daughter became old enough to want to see one of the Marvel movies. I went to see “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight Rises,” the latter because I saw it being filmed and wrote several stories about it in the summer of 2011.

    That was “The Avengers” in 2013, and I took her without knowing anything about the movie or the burgeoning Marvel Cinematic Universe. You know what? I kind of liked The Avengers, loved the storytelling and the characters and almost everything. Then my younger daughter fell in love Marvel, and pretty much we’ve seen all of the movies and the TV shows. Well, they have. I’ve been losing interest for a while now and regarded latter movies and TV shows with the same view I had with the prospect of a “Frozen” sequel. I can understand the appeal, but I could do without it.

    I’m not adverse to lore or the storytelling, and I’m happy to see that the MCU is a much more diverse place than when I was reading comic books and watching superhero movies. But the sheer size of the movies, and the spectacle, has gotten to be too much I’d rather watch something completely new and less grandiose, and more original.

    And I’m saying that as an almost OG fan of one of the biggest franchises ever, Star Trek.

    Of the two, “Guardians” and “Across the Spider-Verse,” I felt the passage of time less with “Across the Spider-Verse.” It was better written, better paced, and the visuals were beautiful. I didn’t always think I was watching an animated movie. It was a little long at 2 hours and 16 minutes, and I would have cut a bit. But I understood what they were trying to do, and respected most if not all the choices. “Guardians,” well, that was even longer and I would have cut half the movie. But that’s just me.

    On second thought, I’m just going to read a book.

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  • The wisdom of Robert McKee

    Long before Brian Cox played the patriarchal media mogul in “Succession,” he was another unforgettable real-life character: Screenwriting and story telling guru Robert McKee in “Adaptation.”

    I like “Adaptation” as a parable about creation and the writing life, and as a living reminder of McKee’s classic “Story.” I’ve learned a lot from that book over the years, even though I’ve never been to the story seminar that is a setting in the movie.

    Here, Cox riffs on McKee in a few scenes. He’s only a minor but unforgettable character, saying the things that the real McKee would say.

    A lot of it isn’t new to me, or anyone who writes for a living. I’ve been a student of writing, dramatic structure and narrative for almost as long as I’ve been able to write. I’ve built my career on narrative, whether in my own work or as an editor when I was in my 20s and 30s. I’ve been told I was a pretty good editor with flashes of brilliance, even though with just one exception (a very important one), I’ve always seen myself as more of a writer than editor.

    Cox’s McKee — and McKee himself — tells Nicholas Cage/Charlie Kauffman that a character needs to want something for the story to work.

    “You can’t have a protagonist without desire,” he says. “It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any f-ing sense.”

    I think back to something that had profound impact on me as a kid, Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules of creating writing, which I had seen in one of my grandfather’s magazines when I was 11 or 12 and pulled it out discretely. I had that page for decades.

    Vonnegut wrote:

    Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

    Kurt Vonnegut

    This short clip, and another scene with Cox, impart other dollops of wisdom: no voiceovers (and in the middle of a voiceover), don’t waste a reader/viewer’s time (what many an editor has told a writer), and no deus ex machina.

    That last one I remember as a lesson from my beloved 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Kathy Clark, at Coronado Middle School in Coronado, California, back in the early ’80s. No deus ex machina in your stories! I think about that every Marvel movie my kids drag me to.

    And then, one of my favorite pieces of advice: The main character has to change by the end of the story/movie.

    Yeah, I like that.

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  • Starting a new (writing) chapter on a Chromebook

    I’ve been trying to find ways to increase writing moments, stealing back some of the time that I should be writing but haven’t. I do a lot of writing, both professionally and for myself. A lot of it is on either computer or mobile device, or both. A fair amount of it is handwritten, in myriad notebooks or scraps of paper.

    I’m a prolific but sometimes messy writer. I have lots of electronic nooks and crannies where I’ve put full drafts, partial drafts, first drafts, final drafts of published pieces, and the like. And that’s just electronically. I have boxes of writing from the over past 40 years. I wonder if I will ever get organized.

    But, I try.

    My latest strategy has been to streamline my writing process. Maybe don’t write in as many apps or software programs, try to keep to a minimum the number of notebooks and pads and scrap papers where I’m writing. I’ve kept a journal for a long time, but that’s only in the chronological sense. I’m not good at keeping one in the physical world, completed volume after completed volume, in a nice row on bookshelves or neatly tucked away in boxes.

    Remember, I’m a messy writer.

    I wish I could say I was better on the computer, or at least synchronized across devices. But even there, I have a lot of real estate: multiple websites, Google docs, apps and an iMac, a MacBook Air and several hard drives. Oh, and I can’t forget all the disks I still have from my Mac and PC days.

    I’m getting heart palpatations, just thinking about it all. Really, some day, I oughtta get super organized. ‘Cause I’m not.

    One of the reasons why I use so much paper — beyond actually liking the physical act of putting words on a page, as I do — is that I don’t have a handy computer. The iMac is in one place. My MacBook Air, an 11-inch model that’s nearly eight years old now, is wonderful but I don’t like bringing it everywhere. I’m afraid I need something that is sturdy, has strong battery life and also I wouldn’t mind if it got beat up a bit. Or worried about it getting stolen.

    For a few years, I’ve been eyeing what they now call the Hemingway Freewrite. If you haven’t seen one, it’s a small, e-ink device that’s strictly for writing. It’s expensive but fit for purpose: There’s no worry about distractions because, well, there’s nothing to distract. You’ve got a keyboard, a small screen and your thoughts. That’s it.

    That appealed to me. So did the long battery life. I liked the idea that I coudl bring it with me anywhere, and just write. But the price tag, well, that’s one of the things that’s stopping me. I don’t think I’ll ever get one.

    I like something portable. The MacBook Air is portable but it’s not something that I could feel that I could take with me anywhere, like a park or sitting among friends and family, or just in the downtime, in the car or something. It’s still too expensive. I tried the iPad, along with a good keyboard, for a while, and that worked well. As a writer, tools are important to me and an iPad and a detachable keyboard worked OK but it always felt like too much kit.

    I’ve had a real writing spurt over the past several months, ever since the fall. The words have spilled out, often intensely. It’s been a while since I’ve written that much, that intently, with that much purpose. I’ve had to pull over my car — or use dictation — to capture it. Sometimes I’ve woken up in the middle of the night to write, and it’s been a while since I’ve done that.

    It’s a blessing, all this writing. But it’s also led me to try to find ways to make it easier.

    Using the iMac or MacBook Air, yes sometimes. But I can’t be portable with the iMac and the MacBook Air is convenient but I always feel like I’m going to break it. (Plus I don’t like the keyboard as much as I wish I did.) I can be more portable with the iPad, but it’s not a long-term solution. (And again, the keyboard leaves a lot to be desire.) I have written a lot on my iPhone, and before that the Blackberry. But my thumbs don’t work as fast as my brain. The convenience factor has led me to do a lot of writing on paper, which takes an extra step to translate or shape up into a computer draft.

    Does anyone else have these problems or is it just me?

    Last weekend, I found a solution. It had been staring me in the face for about two years, and I’m surprised I didn’t think about it sooner.

    What about a Chromebook?

    I know what you’re thinking. A Chromebook? You already have one of the most portable computers in history, the 11-inch MacBook Air. Why do you want something else? You already have a pretty good vehicle for writing.

    I didn’t buy a new Chromebook. I already had one, new in the box for the past two years, tucked away in the back of a closet. My father bought it for the kids, but they haven’t needed it. So I put it away, thinking that at some point one of the kids would break theirs and they would need a replacement.

    But that didn’t happen in late 2020, all through 2021 and 2022. Now, six months into 2023, I wondered during spring cleaning whether the Chromebook would ever get out of the box. It wasn’t looking good. So I pulled the box off the shelf, opened it, and found an 11.6-inch Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 CB, circa late 2020/early 2021. I charged it, turned it on and then went through the steps to connect it to my Google account.

    I work almost completely in MacOS and iOS, for more than a decade now. (My first Mac was in 1986 and I’ve always had one for work ever since.) I went all-Mac in 2012, quickly forgetting anything that I ever learned about PCs. I haven’t looked back. But I also didn’t know much about Chromebooks.

    That hasn’t stopped me, really. I’ve found the experience almost universally pleasant, even if I am still getting used to being tethered to Google Docs. The 11.6-inch screen, and the relatively small footprint, allows me to bring the Chromebook everywhere. Or almost everywhere. It’s low price (about $200) means that I don’t have to be worried about breaking it because it’s somewhat replaceable, and all the files are in the cloud anyway. The keyboard on this thing is wonderful. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a laptop or notebook computer that I’ve enjoyed typing on. This one has a solid feel, keys that have substance, and they aren’t slowed by my quick touch typing.

    And the battery life! I got 12 hours out of the box, which is about two days of writing. Even in its heyday, my MacBook Air couldn’t do that. My iPad barely makes it that long. I can’t remember when I had a device that lasted that long.

    It’s only been a week, but the signs are looking good. I have written a lot more, in a lot of different places, just like I anticipated. I bring paper with me, but I haven’t reached for it as much. I still sometimes wipe away text — my Welsh tutor used to call it “banana fingers” — but I’m working on that. I lost a whole day’s worth of writing because I hit a button on the side without (I think) saving it. Being able to write on the Chromebook has been a revelation, and only a little bit of a workaround and change to my process.

    I expect a summer of writing on my Chromebook. Can’t wait.

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  • Ode to WordPerfect

    This takes me back.

    Ode to WordPerfect

    I was walking through Staples the other day when I glanced a software rack and saw a blast from the past: WordPerfect.

    For computer users of a certain age — and you gotta be in your 50s, at least — WordPerfect rings a bell. I have to say that I had no idea WordPerfect was still going. I long ago left WordPerfect behind, but it was for years in the ’80s and into the early ’90s my word processor of choice.

    I wrote a lot of college papers, and a fair amount of creative writing and short stories, on WordPerfect. Seeing the name again after all these years made me nostalgic.

    Back in the mid-1980s I didn’t know much about computers. I was 16 or so, and had been around them at school a bit (my high school had an Apple II) and a lot more around my father’s house. He worked on mainframe computers in the ’70s and early ’80s and brought home his first portable computer, a Kaypro, in the early ’80s. And he bought a Commodore 64 in 1983, and I spent a whole summer happily typing away on short stories and playing Flight Simulator.

    He later upgraded to an IBM PC clone and I first encountered WordPerfect and another word processor, WordStar on his computer when I stayed over. He was a professional writer and editor, so he kept up with computers and wanted one at home. Dad wasn’t much for computer games, so when I played with his computer, all I had were WordPerfect, WordPress and the occasional Lexis-Nexis research portal. (That was too expensive for me to use, though.)

    When Dad upgraded to a better, faster model, I got the PC, for my senior year of high school. WordPerfect and WordStar came along with it.

    Even today, nearly 40 years later, I can remember what the PC looked like on the desk next to my bed. It had an amber monitor, which sat on the long, flat, chrome computer case. Inside the case were two black disk drives, which took 5 1/4 inch discs, which in those days before cheap hard drives was the way to run a computer. One floppy disk held the computer program you wanted to run. The other was what wrote your words and data to disk. It was portable, noisy and oh-so-precious. If you bent the disk, or spilled something, or left it in the heat, your data was done for.

    This was all in the DOS era, where you had to learn arcane codes to get anything to work on the c> line. It’s a little like terminal mode now on my Mac or on the PC, although you really didn’t have a choice. Just to open the program required to know the right prompt. I think it’s funny that I learned DOS pretty well and also Basic, the computer language. Both of those skills are useless now, and have been ever since the Mac and then Windows took over the world.

    WordPerfect. In those days without the mouse, you had to know your way around a keyboard. That wasn’t too hard if all you wanted to do was write, although you had to pay attention to where you were saving your file and if you were at all. WordPerfect, and WordStar, were phenomenally complicated programs for their time. WordPerfect had a lot more customization available, thinks like advanced formatting and something that became macros, those little keystrokes that you could use to save some typing.

    But being a teen-ager, all I wanted to do was write.

    I had been typing papers and short stories for a long time, having inherited my dad’s college Smith Corona and then getting an electric typewriter for my 16th birthday. I wrote some on my dad’s Commodore 64 and then more on the PCs he got, but it wasn’t until I inherited one and could turn it on whenever I wanted that I really fell in love with writing on the computer.

    And I think “fell in love” is a good way to describe it. I liked the idea of seeing my words on the screen. Even if the words and characters were all the same — there was no such thing as “what you see is what you get” — it was fascinating building my own paragraphs and pages, one after the other. I could move them around! I could write several beginnings, or middles, or ends. No eraser or correction type needed.

    It was, and I still believe it today, kinda magical.

    I wrote a lot in WordPerfect, not just everything for senior year of high school and then throughout college, but also short stories and attempts to write a novel and a play. I was then, and still continue, to be an all-of-the-above writer: I wrote my journal out by hand. I didn’t start writing my journal on the computer until I got out of college, which was by then on a Windows machine.

    By the time the summer of 1990 rolled around, I had heard of this bright shiny object called Windows, and my next computer, a new Zeos, came with Windows 3.1 and, significantly, a full-color text editing application. I didn’t immediately fall in with Microsoft Word, either for work or for personal writing. Instead, I backed into it, using Microsoft Works and then, begrudgingly, picking up Word on sale and then, as a bundle with Microsoft Excel and, later Microsoft Access.

    The bottom line is though that I left WordPerfect behind.

    So did a lot of other people. Novell, which developed WordPerfect, sold it off in 1996 to Corel, which put out new versions and then began to bundle it with other Microsoft Office alternatives. Until Google came around and overturned the applecart, it apparently was a strong competitor.

    I’ve gone past Word, gone past WordPerfect, WordStar, all the rest. I write a lot still, both for work and in my personal life. I use a variety of tools. I love their convenience, but I sometimes worry that the writing can get distracted by bells and whistles. That’s why I try hard to use only simple programs and apps for writing.

    Just like the old days.

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  • Pollen so thick it piles up

    The pollen season has reached a crescendo. And I am sniffling, coughing and sneezing through it.

    I have been on allergy medicine for three months, ever since I went to Florida in late February. (OK, I missed a day or two.) but in Zyrtec I trust, and except when it comes to user error, it doesn’t let me down.

    That is, until this point in the season, where you can actually see the pollen. Then there is nothing I can do.

    I don’t need to check the Accuweather app to see that both tree pollen and grass pollen are high. There is no amount of washer fluid that can remove the pollen coat on my windshield.

    I know it won’t last. A few more weeks of sneezed and then the pollen onslaught will ease. I wlll keep taking my medicine, sneeze into my elbow, and keep lots of tissue handy.

    Then it will go, at least until hayfever season.

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  • Beginner’s mistake

    I just lost a whole day’s worth of writing, thanks to an assumption I made about auto-saving.

    A rookie mistake.

    There I was, writing in my interstitial (or so) journal, beginning about 7:30 a.m. and then continuing through the early afternoon. I had probably 1,500 words, along with a draft for a blog post. I was using a new Chromebook, which I haven’t used before this weekend. But I was enjoying running it alongside my MacBook.

    Then, I accidentally bumped the Chromebook’s side. Apparently that rebooted it. When it finally came back, both files and every word I had written, was gone.

    To be fair, I was working in offline mode, as I wasn’t near WiFi. But I also expected the work to save every once in a while, and I also build automatic saving stops into my workflow after learning the hard way, years and years ago. I was using the Chromebook text app, not Google Docs, which I know does auto save.

    Look, it’s not life-changing stuff, just notes to myself and the beginnings of a blog post. But it is a little unnerving.

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  • AI’s effect on white-collar jobs like mine (and maybe yours)

    It has been a few months since generative AI like ChatGPT and Bard hit the national consciousness. The concern over what it means for jobs, particularly white-collar jobs, hasn’t died down a bit.

    I was talking with a fellow journalist yesterday, and we joked that AI hadn’t come for our jobs just yet but who knows how long it will be. I don’t claim to know. Nor is it a paralyzing fear. I wonder how generative AI will impact my job and I’m uneasy about it, but I have to say that the state of journalism already was uneasy for us humans and it’s not hard to think of AI as yet another looming challenge.

    The Los Angeles times just published a thought-provoking column from Brian Merchant about this very topic: “What it looks like when jobs disappear in the shadow of AI.” Merchant looks at the rise of AI at the same time the entire news department at Buzzfeed was sacked, and whether journalists will end up being replaced by AI.

    Merchant calls AI “an ambiguity generator” when it comes to jobs:

    “It allows those who hold the power to justify making all kinds of calls, in the name of embracing the future, improving efficiency, and so on,” he writes. “And in this still very young AI-infested moment of ours, we can’t be sure which way many of those calls will break.”

    I think he’s onto something here. I’ve spent half my career covering business, and a fair amount has been chronicling the impact of change on companies and workers. That could have been the decline of industry in the Northeast in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when my traditionally blue-collar hometown started losing its factories and making the painful transition to bedroom community. Or maybe the offshoring of whole industries, like the shoemaking industry in central Maine, where hundreds of workers were jettisoned without the skills (or economy) to find new jobs. Or the rise of technology, biotech, energy and advanced manufacturing industries that were mostly the realm of science fiction when I was in school.

    I cover that a lot today, with the decline of coal mining and steel manufacturing and the rise of so many other things, without the mechanism of transferring employees’ skills to something else. It’s happening in journalism, too. I long ago left the world of daily newspaper journalism, the places where you would see a range of local news, sports and features gathered by reporters and editors.

    I will tell you that I left it before it left me. Community journalism, the kind of work and public discourse that we need in a democracy, is a shadow of it what it was even in the ‘90s. There are plenty of towns and cities where the mechanics of governing rarely sees the sunlight of journalism. It doesn’t pay for newspapers — or any media really — to delve too deeply into those topics.

    Stories about local governance and activities may be critically important to democracy — and they are, really — but the amount of people interested in them doesn’t often justify the amount of time spent to really do it justice. The type of beat reporting I did for school boards and towns and cities 25 years ago, no journalist has the time to spend on that now. Nor do our bosses want them to. We can tell through web and social data how a story does, and these types of stories don’t “do well” in analytics.

    Would AI help that? Doubt it. Maybe if you were to marry the Boston Dynamics physical robots with a powerful journalism-focused AI, then you might be able to construct a Journo Bot that could go to all those meetings that we human reporters can’t. But I find it hard to believe.

    More likely, at least for the time being, is that we’ll see generative AI take up the slack in doing researching and writing the types of stories that aren’t a human worker’s best use of time. It’s already happening. (See CNET and elsewhere.) But it’s going to be a long time if ever, I think, before the bulk of the journalism can be transferred to AI.

    Am I being too optimistic? I don’t think so. Generative AI requires there to be a paper trail, or at least a pixel trail. That’s some of what we do as journalists, but rewriting press releases has never been the best use of a journalist’s time. And staying in the newsroom is never the best use of a journalist’s time. Nope, the news is out there, to paraphrase The X-Files, and I can tell you as a longtime journalist, it rarely comes to you.

    I don’t see the development any time soon of an AI that will be able to do that kind of legwork.

    And then there’s the very real danger of AI getting things wrong or being so prolific that it waters down the value of the printed word on the Internet. Already on social media, and some websites, there are countless lessons in what happens when you don’t have professional reporters and editors to gather and produce news. AI amps up those dangers by orders of magnitude.

    How that will spin out, I have no idea. But I wonder whether that’s the secret sauce, the fly in the AI ointment that there’s no answer to at the moment. We can replace humans with AI in white-collar jobs. But we won’t be able to replace that human connection,and the things that humans bring to the table as journalists, writers and other professions. It’s one thing to automate a production line, which can make for efficiencies and scale that humans can’t reach. Yet what makes us human — and what you want as a human — can’t be provided for by AI.

    That was brought up to me the other day by someone who isn’t a journalist but is seeing the impact of AI on other white-collar fields. He didn’t think AI was going to wreak as much havoc on journalism and storytelling in particular because, at the end of the day, machines and algorithms aren’t people. Nor can they tell a story like a human being can, or like a human being wants.

    I think that’s one of the best arguments I’ve seen about this topic. I’ve read generative AI fiction, even played around with it a bit myself. It has left me wanting. That’s partly because it’s in it’s early stages, but also because the gap between human and machine isn’t easily reached.

    People want to read stories about people, my editor and every other one since time immemorial has said. And people probably aren’t going to want to read a story about people, written by a machine.

    Not in the long run.

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  • Road safety

    Seen on the road a few days ago: “This could be your last text.”

    Passed this sign several times on my trip to Ohio. It’s apparently part of a road safety campaign that also includes an electronic tally of how many days since the last serious crash on that stretch of road.

    Four days on one section, 247 for another.

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  • The road rarely taken

    Somewhere on Interstate 70 in Ohio

    I’ve driven this side of Interstate 70 only a handful of times in my life. But they’ve been for significant reasons, so some of the memories remain, no matter how long ago. It’s funny how that works.
    On the trip out of Pennsylvania, and for much of the trip to Columbus, it doesn’t look too much different than Pennsylvania. Miles and miles of, well, miles and miles. Eastern Ohio, at least, here, isn’t flat. It is the Midwest, no doubt. But that’s really a glance at the map instead of the look out the window. It’s remarkably green and hilly. If it weren’t for the unfamiliar and unmistakably Ohio names, I could be anywhere east of here.
    It’s only when you get past Columbus do you reallize you’re no longer in the Northeast. That’s where the land flattens, the farmland starts to grow, and all the other parts of the countryside morph into what East and West Coasters call flyover country.
    I’ve certainly flown over it a lot, both for business and personal reasons. It’s by this time, when I fly out of New York, that I am not really looking outside anymore. But now that I live in Flyover Country, I have a different perspective.
    This stretch of road, where I ride now, reminds me of a part of my life, long gone, but also pretty important even though I didn’t know it at the time.
    My first time here was in September 1981, when my family left New England to drive to my uncle’s wedding in Indianapolis, where his bride grew up. The trip from Connecticut to Scranton wasn’t that remarkable. I have spent more than half my life living in that stretch from central Connecticut to the Hudson Valley of New York, and I knew it well even then as a 12-year-old. And I spent a lot of time in the car as a kid, visiting my maternal relatives in the Scranton area.
    But Pennsylvania, that vast commonwealth, I had never driven the length of it all the way before. I don’t remember a ton, but I do recall seeing oil derricks off the highway, poking and rhymthically swinging up and down.
    I was fascinated by that. It isn’t something you see where I grew up.
    We stayed the first night in Cambridge, Ohio, which my grandfather told me was near the hometown of John Glenn, the famous astronaut. That was cool, but other than that I don’t remember anything else of the trip. At least not in Ohio.
    The Buckeye State was, through no fault of its own, unremarkable. What I remember next is crossing over into Indiana, and a sign that said it doesn’t follow daylight savings time. It’s funny, again, how you remember that.
    I was only in Indianapolis for four days, and we left that Monday and drove all the way back home after the wedding so that I could start school that Tuesday and my mom could go back to work. I had no idea that I would be going that way again, only four months later, when my mother, stepfather and I drove all the way across the country to our new home in San Diego in January 1982.
    That became a signature event in my life, and it partially began with this stretch of road, from Connecticut through Ohio and a great way on Interstate 70.
    That was 41 years ago. It took a long time for me to come back to Ohio. I flew over it a lot, but didn’t drive I-70 here until the spring of 2009, when my father and I visited the Air Force Museum in Dayton, and again in 2017 when he and I went to Hamvention, a big amateur radio convention they hold here annually.
    And that’s why I’m there again, on my own for the first time when I drive this way, in 2023.

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  • Trapper Keeper, revived

    A 2023 Trapper Keeper, just like I had in 1980.

    Some things from the ’70s and ’80s play better in 2023 than others. Looks like the Trapper Keeper might have been better in the past.

    It pains me to say that. I loved my Trapper Keeper, which I brought proudly to Griswold Junior High School in September 1980. My dad bought it for me, probably at either Bradlees or Caldor, along with extra folders for each of my 8th grade classes. It kept me relatively organized that year, as I remember. And I wasn’t the only one: You could hear a lot of Velcro open and close all around me in every class.

    I moved to southern California for high school and promptly forgot about my Trapper Keeper. Maybe it wasn’t cool. Maybe I had too many classes to take, with too much paperwork. I liked them and now to change up organizing systems.

    Between the early ’80s and two years ago, I had really not thought about or seen Trapper Keepers. I have bought school supplies for my kids for a long time now. But it wasn’t until two years ago, while getting stuff at Staples that I saw the OG Trapper Keeper again.

    I couldn’t get my kids to bite. But I couldn’t help picking one up and opening it for old time’s sake. But it wasn’t something I was gonna buy.

    Apparently a lot of people felt that way, at least on my corner of the world. They display stand remained full, and then moved to the back, then a few months ago moved to clearance. The price for the longest time was $10 for the binder and three folders. They had all the colors I remember.

    Yesterday, though, as I went to pick up something at my local Staples, I walked by the clearance table. They were marked down to $3 each.

    I couldn’t resist. I picked up this green one. It’s the same color I had in 1980. Funny how you remember that.

    I have no idea what I will do with it. My Welsh classes are over, and I don’t have another class that I take notes for. In fact, professionally, I usually take notes on a computer because it’s faster and easier to collate. It’s rare that I use a reporter’s notebook.

    I don’t think I can I treat my kids in a Trapper Keeper, not now at the end of school nor next September.

    And that’s a shame. 13-year-old me had a good school year with his green Trapper Keeper.

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About Me

Journalist and writer. Loves writing, storytelling, books, typewriters. Always trying to find my line. Oh, and here’s where I am now.

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