Personal evolution
Change may be constant but it can still surprise you.
For two-and-a-half glorious years in the mid-1980s, my best friends were tennis and an American kid, Brian. We met in eighth grade at Alice Springs High School, of all places—Alice Springs is in the dead center of Australia, famous mostly for being the jumping-off point to see Uluru (it’s still 300 miles away). If you’re wondering how a suburban kid from outside Washington, DC ended up there, I’ve got two words for you: Pine Gap.
The Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap is one of the world’s most important and sophisticated surveillance centers. It’s run jointly by Australia and the United States, staffed by a total of about 800 people drawn from every intelligence agency acronym you can think of. It’s also why Aussie school kids in Alice Springs find themselves with American classmates, and why those classmates can never quite explain what one or both of their parents does for a living.
For a town like Alice Springs, Pine Gap added a dash of mystery. As an impressionable 12 year old, the American kids seemed exotic. Brian had an Amiga 1000 computer, a Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer, a hot tub at his house, and a quintessentially American mouth full of “make my teeth as un-Australian as possible” metal braces. He would receive a telephone-book-thick JC Penney Christmas catalog a few weeks before the holidays, and we’d pore over all the goodies you’d never, ever find in Australia. Brian would return from Christmas vacation with American footballs and sweatshirts and, I could only imagine, the nagging thought he had come home to about the farthest world imaginable from where he’d just been.
He also insisted on wearing knee-high athletic socks as though it was the most normal thing in the world.
In case you’re lucky enough to have been under a rock protecting you from utterly pointless debates, there’s an intensifying fashion war under way between Millennials and Gen Z around sock height. Millennials like ankle socks; Gen Z is backing the crew sock. As a member of Generation X who prefers no-show socks with sneaks, I have no dog in this ridiculous fight.1
But it did remind me I never saw why anyone would wear long athletic socks with shorts and sneaks, unless you’re not only a NBA player but about to start a game (I also believe people should only wear team jerseys if they actually play for the team. Remind me why you’re wearing a jersey with someone else’s name on it? Or, even worse, your own? As a grown man?).
So, no long athletic socks. That’s one belief that’s remained constant for four decades. A lot of other beliefs haven’t. In my teens, my favorite book was John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent. I thought it had it all and it affected me deeply. I re-read it recently and … I mean, it’s still Steinbeck: beautifully written and important. But it just didn’t have the same resonance and it’s not Steinbeck’s fault: artists speak to us in different ways for different reasons at different times.2
Personal evolution has obviously been a prominent recent theme for me. I’m not the same person I was a year ago, let alone the same person I was when I read Discontent for the first time. Some changes result from sloughing layers of self-protection and compromise to rediscover myself—the guy my mum joyfully welcomed back, declaring she hadn’t seen him for a while. Other changes are even more meaningful for their unexpectedness: meeting someone with energy different to anyone you’ve known, who discovers parts of your essential self you didn’t know existed.
And you know what? I suspect I’ll come back around to Discontent. Some dismissed it on release as a lesser work, struggling to understand Steinbeck’s claim it addressed American’s moral degeneration of the 1950s and 1960s.3 Then Watergate happened. Reaganomics. Gordon Gekko. Sixty-three years after it was published, we’re in a world where the pressure to appear successful seems ever-more crushing, with an entire political movement devoted to the fallacy people can be and are self made, with no apparent irony their leader is an incoherent, spectacularly incompetent nepo baby.
So, Discontent may resonate more in the years ahead, as all great works do. But knee-high athletic socks? They’re still a hard no.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.
If you care, the age brackets are generally agreed to be: Baby Boomers born 1946–1964; Generation X born 1965–1980; Millennials (or Generation Y) born 1981–1996; Generation Z born 1997–2010; Generation Alpha born 2010-2024.
Except Ayn Rand, who was always full of shit even when I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in those susceptible years as a money-hungry-curious younger man. Pro tip: if someone says they admire Howard Roark, they’re (a) not paying as much income tax as they should and (b) still believe they should pay less.
The Nobel committee knew better, awarding Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature and saying Discontent had “resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American.”