Back with my exes
The heart wants what it wants. Stupid heart.
Hello! I’m Doug. You may remember me from such extended efforts as Laid-Off Dad (2003-2010) and Dad 2.0 Summit (2011-2022), both of which looked at the river of my life and bent it every which way. Friends, experiences, knowledge, excitement, heartbreak, and more high-end hotel breakfast bars than I could have ever expected to sample. So many dainty yogurt parfaits!
I’m here to tell you that I’m having a renewed romance with the written word. It feels a bit like I’m back with an ex, and not even after one of those marathon “how we hurt each other” talks. I didn’t really expect it, since I spent most of the lockdown memorizing Office reruns. But one day I just broke up with cable, picked up one of the too-many unread books I own, and it just felt right.
The other thing that kept me alive during lockdown was learning how to produce podcasts, which I truly love. So, as if on theme, another ex —
— and I got together to make When the Flames Go Up, a podcast about handling all the really adult stuff that starts slapping you around after you turn 50. We’re all dealing with something we didn’t see coming, and we hope this burgeoning “fiftypedia” becomes a library of advice and shared experience to help us all figure out our Third Acts. (Although for me, it feels like Act 8 or 9.)This is our logo, which I’m going to have to update after Magda marries a nice gentleman from Boston and takes his name:
I love this time. Sure, there are plenty of reasons not to love this time, since so many foundations we thought were solid are wobbly with termites and dry rot. One of those foundations is the business of human creativity, which some no-talent pinheads would like to replace with AI because their rodent-wheel brains answer only to margins and greed. The technology seems inevitable, especially as the robot-makers are so busy asking an overmatched government to please god stop us from making more robots!
I called this new project The Big Swing, because swings are like life. They’re meant to be fun, and they require trust in the somebody else who built it. They can also be disorienting and vomitous or send you off a 6000-foot cliff.
But in this pressured environment, where chatbots answer phones and writers wonder why the AMPTP won’t commit 2% of a show’s streaming revenue to its creators, doubling down on the written word feels like an act of defiance, a big bet on what you love, a commitment to muster as much torque as possible and end up either mobbed at home plate or joyless in Mudville.
I suppose being in my 50s means I don’t really care which happens. My kids are grown, my knees still mostly work, and the options are exhilarating. If you’re feeling this and you’re out there with me, let me know.
I LOVE reading your writing again.