I am recently retired, since March 1. The older you get, the more thinking-back you do, and it redoubles once you retire. As with all reflection, this thinking-back improves when you resist moralizing everything, turning every little memory into proof of either your own goodness or a foolishness that you have overcome. Encountering the past is not in the first event a moral exercise, it is a critical exercise. Once you have criticized, in the broader sense, you can derive some moral lesson if so inclined, which I often am not.
So in looking back, I have been reviewing my blog that I earnestly produced from 2005 until it petered out in 2013-14. Those latter years of the blog were the scene of a transformation in my life. In 2013, my dog died, I turned 60, and my dad passed away. I took those turns as the opportunity to buy two bicycles to add to the one I had already, and to become again a mad cyclist. I have been riding essentially 4000 miles a year ever since.
But that seems recent. I want to look back to what drove me to write so furiously for a decade, and to draw from that a morale for writing again now that I have time both to ride a bike and to speculate. Notice that I want to look back critically before I derive the morale, or the moral, as it were. Key methodological underpinning.
So I’ve been reading old posts. I am annoyed by my own floridity, and I suspect many a reader would also be annoyed. But it is baked in, folks, something I inherited in full measure from dear old Dad. I know that there are occasional sentences that need an editorial grenade. But my excuse must be that blogging is something you do on the quick and fluid, and you can’t get down to hyper-precise editing too much lest you lose the moment.
Speaking of the moment, here was a moment in May of 2009 which represented a different turning point in my life.
I got a new boss in 2008 and I like to say that he let me out of my box. He challenged me to take a new approach to my job, and so I did. In my little universe, form comes before even if it does not replace function, so I undertook to “cure my eternal schlumpiness” and become, step-by-step, a fashion plate. Nowadays, everybody thinks of me as well-dressed. During my last decade at Major Research University (MRU) where I worked, my haberdashery was a regular topic of comment. Well-dressed men in the west coast university environment are sufficiently rare that we recognized each other and had warm sly greetings as we passed on campus. My main competition was mostly young African American men, and those warm greeting permitted me the luxury of thinking I was flirting with guys out of my league, as it were. Of course, while employed, one keeps such speculations private.
But changing my look changed my outlook. When you costume, you have to wear it. You have be the look to which you pretend. And that means allowing my natural gregariousness to flourish, and my natural smile to precede me. It makes you more public, more an object others possess. And that modified my job, and expanded my purview.
This photo was still early in the experiment, before the bow ties, and before I got back on the bike and took off 10 pounds. And those glasses were the choice of my “art friends” and I never quite warmed to them. And my haircut evolved into something more upright. But before the change, I don't know that I could have pulled off this over-the-top presentation that I gave at the Southwest Regional Educause Conference in Austin, TX, called “Diffusion of Innovations, A Practical Workshop.” I shopped that thing for a few years, and had great fun with it. I used photos I had taken during a winter visit to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and that started a long career of illustrating my talks with bright and unexpected images whose connection to the topic was tangential and speculative at best.
A word on the stuffed Einstein. My three-decade friend, Roy Ortopan, gave it to me and insisted it be part of the presentation. Roy, a retired UC Berkeley librarian, passed away in February 2019 at The age of 93, and I took care of his needs for seven years before that. Like many of the retired and deeply aged, he came to live in part through the adventures of his younger friends, especially me. It is an oddity that the old blog started to Peter out just as I took over Roy’s care when his life partner died suddenly in 2012. Perhaps not an oddity. Roy always read my blog, and I wish he could read this new incarnation. Rest In Peace, old friend.
So I am rambling on about myself here, and to what end? Well, I am your blogger, and I have been the guy who gave that presentation, and that warms my heart if perhaps yours. But I am not that guy any more. Retirement, writing, remembering requires that I start with being the guy I am, even as remember the guy I was only a few months ago. And it requires that I let you in on the journey if only to give some guidelines to the things upon which I choose to reflect and the approaches that I may choose to take.
For what it is worth, I still stand by my theses in that Diffusion of Innovations presentation. But I will hold on to those thoughts for the time being.
I hope you come back and wander with me on this journey.
September 1, 2021