Year End Thoughts for 2025 — A Personal Preface

 

Alone in the wee hours. When I think.

This is my Sage photo. Taken at 3 in the morning on my iPad, unretouched, just a still from a 30 second video with just incidental lighting. Just me. I hold no office, have no title, have no books on sale in any brick and mortar bookstores, and have acquired no material fortune on which to build my own memorial.  Why should anyone listen to what I have to say? 

Until age slowed me down physically, drastically reduced my mobility, I considered myself a member of the thinking community, applying my education and diverse work experience to the challenges of life and cultural expression like a great many other of my peers. The passage of years changes that perspective. You (meaning I, I suppose) start to realize there are fewer and fewer people like you, including friends and family, with whom you can have productive, wide ranging interactions and discussions. This is a point at which one can start to feel alone, as if time has passed you by, and the absence of contact with others makes you one more of life’s losers. 

A friend of mine who died too young had some personal postulates I learned from and will never forget. He was the man who taught me how to write a big-time management consulting proposal, which transformed my business life in a trice and introduced me to spectacular opportunities. His two biggest convictions weren’t about the practice of Big 8 consulting though. They were 1) It takes 20 years to get good at something, and 2) Everyone has to have that One Thing they do well which is their yardstick for defining what doing well is in anything. I knew he was right when he said it. I already had my One Thing, and I’d spent 20 years learning how to do it well. Not that I was finished learning it. I am still learning it. I learn by doing it 8 to 12 hours a day, every day, even though I may look like a mope on a couch. That thing is writing in a multimedia hyperlinked format practiced by virtually no one else. For me, as it is for most of the wordsmiths out there, writing is thinking, the formulation, structuring, and ordering of divers hunches and intimations into wholly realized thoughts that can be advocated and defended. More simply put, if you can’t write it down coherently, you haven’t thought it through; it’s a mere fleeting notion, no matter how emotionally compelling you believe it is. Words and images are the legs I walk on these days. The ones attached to my hips hardly matter anymore. I have done more writing on more different topics, in more different styles and genres, than anyone alive I have read or know of.

My vanity makes me pretend that the deterioration of my knees and feet is due to motorcycles and cowboy boots, but it’s far more likely that the true culprit is ten solid years of racing through airport concourses carrying suitcases and briefcases on concrete floors barely covered by indoor-outdoor carpet. The next meeting, the next training gig, the next client opportunity, the next connecting flight. Loss of mobility is actually one of the blessings of old age. More time for plain thinking, recursive examinations of relationships, experiences, decisions, defeats and victories in something now approaching a century of context. The discovery that there are things you have occasion to know that not very many other people do. 

The other day, some wag on Threads posted a list of 25 American cities and said on average people have been to four of them. He wanted one number from each of us to use as some kind of ranking he had in mind. I had been to 18 of them, but I responded to the post to point out that he had omitted a number of cities equal in importance to many of the ones on his list. I ticked them off because they were on my list, including Salt Lake City, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis. My own total was 27. Several people came in to like my additions.

His list did not include any cities in Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe, or Asia. My world list does. Or islands hither and yon. Or states of the union. I’ve tried to keep track of visited destinations over the years. Why I wrote an essay a few years back explaining that I had no bucket list. There are places I would have visited if the opportunity had presented itself, but none I don’t have some counterpart for as a basis of imaginative comparison or have zero interest in. Same with risky stunt stuff like skydiving. I’ve had my full share of risking life and limb in cars, boats, planes, bars, fire escapes, city traffic, career choices, and emergencies. There’s no place or endeavor I can’t share vicariously via HDTV from my couch. If you can smell it or feel the air from the teevee, you don’t really need to be there. Bucket lists seem oddly desperate to me, a form of denial or compensation for a life not fully lived before.

I’m not boasting. Just reporting. I’ve had an extraordinarily lucky and rewarding life, despite the relative poverty of my old age. That too was a decision, a deliberate withdrawal from the rat race because it was no longer adding to my experience but merely repeating it with diminishing personal returns. Where the Sage mentality starts to creep in. The unwelcome observation that growing older for most friends and acquaintances has meant finding a comfortable repetition  of days, years, jobs, routines, hobbies, and causes, all of which serve to block out questions that are getting harder to answer about what you had in mind in the first place. You know. Meaning of life type stuff (MOL). Family is the most common answer to the MOL inquiry, and it certainly can be that, but I wonder how often it is more a convenient answer than an accurate one. Passage of years again. During my time of observing and experiencing my own and others’, I am convinced that families have been eroding in terms of their contribution to the quality of individual lives. We seem to have lost the plot in this vital component of living well. Too many appointments for soccer and dance class, too many bedroom doors with “Keep Out” signs, too many video games, too few intimate family dinners, too many holiday dinners where the only safe subject is the food on the table and the directions to the house hosting the get together.

If all this suggests that my own course through life has reached a point of serious ambivalence about subjects not spoken of very often anymore, you are right. I don’t feel that I have a monopoly of some kind on virtue in my dwindling generation. I have made many mistakes and wandered into dangerous preoccupations as much as many peers I dare to criticize. One thing I have not done, however, is build a rut filled with enough human and material props to prevent me from asking, What should I be doing today? I always have something in mind to do right now. I never experience writer’s block. When I come up empty on a next project in some genre or medium, I change direction and keep going, because my essential themes are enduring, universal, and inexhaustible. Unlike most of my contemporaries, I believe that it all matters. Everything is part of everything else, and there is deep meaning in the sum of it all.

I have too many pet topics to count. I don’t torture myself about whether I am qualified to comment or theorize about anything I encounter. What I can reliably offer is my own perspective on it. It was Socrates who said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Even if I don’t know as much about a person or a discipline as a formal “expert” whose focus is narrow and specific in its own way, my focus is also specific in my own way and rarely narrow. I have a metaphor base to call upon that is quantitatively and qualitatively vast.

Why I also compile lists of bests (and, less often, worsts) in all manner of categories, from music to sports to books to writers to art to movies (and movie stars and directors) to TV shows to Presidents to candidates to motor vehicles to states of the union to news outlets to religious denominations to… you name it. I offer my opinions knowing they are opinions and also that they add up to what other writers rarely offer, a clear, wide picture of the mind that asks you to trust its combinations of words as born of insight more than what Hemingway famously derided as tricks and cheating (of which he was manifestly as guilty as anyone). I provide a basis for evaluating the quality of my education, the breadth and extent of my reading, my tastes in a host of things, my logic, my emotional makeup, and everything but detailed accounts of the women I have slept with or the family secrets family members want kept private. In fact, it was this restriction, made crystal clear in my upbringing, which made me approach the avocation of fiction writing in a completely different way than 90 percent of 20th century novelists and playwrights. I wound up inventing a complete literary movement because I wasn’t free to embarrass my family and friends by novelizing and defaming them as an exercise in dramatic license propagandized as “truth.”

Two parchment pages from my Vennich Manuscript. When you’re doing 

it honestly, as you write the words, the words are writing your real self.

I have also been honest and passionate about my politics. Not in the fireworks of  a Stephen King or an Oliver Stone, spewing sound bites into a camera, but with serious analysis communicated both satirically and soberly. Even I have accused myself of diverting too much of my writing attention to the contemporary fistfights of presidential campaigns and social justice activism. I’ve read the critique that the world lost a lot of potential Dante masterworks because he engaged himself so deeply in Italian politics later in life. But I know what he knew, which is that the artist is also a citizen with responsibilities to contribute his insights where they might benefit more to the living than to generations still unborn. 

In my case there is no real inconsistency. My abiding themes are the underlayment of all current political turmoil as well as the ruling mandate of artistic expression.

How that is so is what the remainder of my  End of Year Thoughts are devoted to. What are the prime areas of conflict and threat that must be confronted in 2026 and beyond? Atheism, Sex, the Erosion of Consciousness, the Tyranny of Science, and the Judas Goat of Artificial Intelligence.

These will be addressed in the next part(s) of the EOY missive this year.