Watched Francis Ford Coppola’s movie “The Conversation” again recently (I had a huge crush on both Robert Shields and Frederick Forrest in my younger years!) and thought it prescient.
We studied this film in film school for its use of sound effects and editing, also I’m sure just for its utter fabulousness. Now that we are watched and recorded and spied on 24/7 by government (NSA), corporate and even individual entities, it all seems rather quaint. The propensity to keep away from sexual contact can reference viagra australia cost become a sickly process because vaginal walls become thinner (regular sex often helps to overcome stress and anxiety- two major causes for poor erection and poor structure of male genitals. Some men bit by bit lose the steadiness levitra 20 mg click content now of their erections or to what degree the erections last. Nonetheless, among levitra 20 mg all these penis pumps, the particular case that can give the direly obliged drugs, anytime of time and that can bring greater satisfaction. So samples of generic viagra once taken can provide erections up to 40 hours which is the longest working life for any PDE5 inhibitor.
Still, the twist/comeuppance at the end still works for me. Also it’s the old days of San Francisco – when a middle class was predominant there. These somewhat dark films from the 1970s do remind one of that great era of less inequality.
Of course, I’m a little late to the comparison. The Atlantic did a piece on this last year, worth reading.
I’ve realized lately that I’ve read an incredible amount about early retirement, reinvention, midlife change, and related topics to probably write a book on the subject. OK, maybe not enough for a book, but certainly enough for a blog post.
So I write this in service of anyone reading who may be contemplating these issues and the difficult decisions they often entail.
First of all, once you leave a certain level of job early, you can’t go back. It’s like going home again, you can go to the physical place, but you can’t ever recapture the feeling you think you remember. I find it’s the same kind of thing with the working world. You’ve moved on; they’ve moved on and everything is different. It’s an important choice to leave, and not one to take lightly.
I left a high paying high esteem high stress corporate type job (public relations work) in the early aughts for more time to devote to writing and filmmaking and other creative pursuits; while having that time has been great, I didn’t truly suss out the financials, whether it be self-employment or part time work or just living on savings.
While it is possible I could survive on savings, living a very frugal existence (which I have done for some of the time since I left this aforementioned job), I’m the type to get nervous at only seeing spending with no income coming in at all. So I wanted to do something, just not what I was doing before which was overwhelming (this I realized after I survived a bout of cancer while at that job).
So one of the dirty truths I’ve learned is that nobody will hire you in the same industry you used to work in at a lower level job. You can only be hired again at the same level you were at or higher. The idea that someone with a lot of experience might want a lower pressure job just for the sake of paying the bills does not really compute with the HR types or the always upwardly -driven. And it’s even more that you “marry” your job these days than it was when I left – -management employees are tethered to the company 24/7 by all manner of digital handcuffs. So, no thanks.
So if you don’t want to get back on that rat race treadmill, new opportunities will always pay less. Sometimes really a lot less. So this it another thing I’d think long and hard about: do you really need or want to leave that job so much that you’re willing to give up the salary and the perks that come with it? You’re saying “of course I do, I just have to escape it, it’s hell.” Hell is also having absurd health care costs when you have just very basic insurance; no paid holidays or vacations, no fun gadgets the corporate budget pays for, certainly no paid-for travel, food or even coffee!
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I have been greatly blessed in my life; we’re not talking about a hell of no roof over my head or no food on the table, so I’m really not complaining so much as managing expectations. But can someone tell me whatever happened to that idea of job-sharing – for instance, you “share” the job, say, of PR Director with another person; perhaps they work mornings and you work afternoons, or alternate days. You’d think in PR, which as a industry has a ton of female executives, there’d be mothers who’d want that kind of arrangement. But it seems it never took off. One person I asked told me it was around the idea of benefits, as in, who gets the healthcare. Just one more reason for national single payer, Medicare for everyone, if you ask me.
Another thing I’d mention is that age discrimination is rampant and horrible and really hard to pin down. After my last full-time job layoff at the end of 2009, I got crickets response to my resume, with its 30 years of PR experience and several more years of publishing experience. Gurus I talked to encouraged me to leave off the year of my college graduation (1980 – and that was 3 years later than if I’d gone directly after high school) but I figured when they called me in for the interview they’d figure out my age anyway. Except – there haven’t been any interviews! I’ve not been called into any interviews for full time communications jobs in the last five years. Depressing, sure. You become, in a sense, unmanageable (and I understand this now) which derives from many things – experience, age, temperament, your accumulated wisdom, etc.
So one of the gurus told me: “I think consulting is the way you should go.”
Truly, she was correct. And actually, there wasn’t much alternative. So I have become a B2B writing consultant. But this guru also said: “And then you must commit to it 3000 percent!” She was right about that, too. Passion is key if you’re going to become successfully self-employed. Not everyone is cut out for this. For most of us, clients don’t grow on trees. You need to do major marketing work to have a chance to bring in the work — so again, make sure this is something you really want to do.
Some other thoughts on early retirement/involuntary retirement: If you retire at, say, 55, that’s maybe 30 years in retirement. That’s a long time, a really long time! You really need to think long and hard about what you’re going to do with all that time. Lying around the pool or catching up on TV series is OK for a month or so, but beyond that I think most people need a purpose. In fact, I’d say you shouldn’t retire even at a traditional retirement age of 65 or 66 unless you have a plan for what you’re going to do with all that time.
I used to look down on people who were unemployed or said they couldn’t find a job, thinking they were probably doing it wrong or just plain lazy. Then it happened to me. Funny how that works, eh?
I have more pearls I hope to share in future posts.
Here’s a recommendation for the erstwhile progressive, a trio of books to get you thinking about the current state of affairs in the world and in particular, the United States. This list will scare you if you’re brave enough to read the books and internalize their messages, taking the unflinching look — which is pretty hard to do, I admit, since we’d like to think that the United States is different, it’s the best country, all of that. That’s how I was raised and what I was taught in school – you probably as well.
Those days are over, if they ever really existed. Here are the books, in no special order, along with my notes/impressions.
OK, this is a difficult book if you’re not interested in financial arcana. Much of it is very prosaic, and it doesn’t help that it’s written by someone whose first language is not English, but French. That said, there are a few chapters that are riveting.
I felt a lot of the book was restating the same thing over and over. However, I learned a great deal about the history of capitalism as practiced in the West, and found it fascinating to learn about such obscure things as the Cost Of Living in the 19th Century and the history of inflation, etc. He makes a very persuasive case that the return on capital will always outstrip other forms of income and that will always lead to greater inequality, unless governments manage wealth by taxation policy (that’s his main argument).
I look at it this way – there’s an easy way and then there’s a hard way to fight inequality. The easy way is through modified tax laws, which in the US should take us back to the rates existing in the 1950s and 60s, our most prosperous era. The hard way is to go back to 1789, (see Revolution, French) which I don’t think would be a plus for anyone – for the 1%, surely not, but also not for the 99%.
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The Shock Doctrine should be required reading for anyone participating in a representative democracy, that’s for sure. Highest Recommendation. It’s a lengthy book, and well worth the trouble.
and perhaps the most shocking of all —
No Place To Hide — Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State — Glenn Greenwald
This is Greenwald’s account of the release of the Snowden NSA files to him and filmmaker Laura Poitras over a series of secret communiques and trips to various corners of the world. (The documentary film of this event/process is called CitizenFour and I highly recommend watching that as well – covers the same territory but obviously the book goes into more depth.)
Basically, your government is spying on you. All of your texts, emails, facebook postings, phone calls and any other kind of electronic communication you make is being logged and compiled. This, at present, is the basic idea of the Snowden revelations — that Americans are being spied upon in the name of “national security.” And not just people the government has probably cause to suspect of something, but all of us.
Critics of Snowden et al. will say that it’s only the metadata being tracked – things like phone numbers but not phone conversations, email headers but not the content of an email message. So the takeaway is that we have nothing to fear from that, that it’s not really spying. Tell me, what kind of picture of you would a good analyst have from knowing what phone numbers call you and that you call, and the content of your email headers? I think it would be a pretty good picture. If you have a mobile with GPS (and don’t we all) then they also track wherever you’ve “checked in” etc. So if they’re interested in finding out more, all they have to do is set a few parameters, and it’s like “24” or Jason Bourne right here and right now.
I was shocked that this is the world we live in now, not some sickening vision of an Orwellian future. It’s the United States of America, 2015. Welcome home. Read and know.
Though it’s pretty surprising this is the first time it happened. Probably, if you found this story somehow through the Internet, then you’re like me, because, yes – I admit that I sometimes watch COPS. Sometimes, even, I binge watch COPS (episodes are only 22 minutes long; also, they’re often set in Palm Springs, where I used to live, which gives me a kick).
But it’s like that empty high, that kind you get from the pink and white iced cupcake you know you shouldn’t be eating but do anyway and you’re gagging about 20 minutes later. Because COPS brings out the worst in us.
It’s about making us laugh at the misfortunes of poor people, mostly. Yuck yuck yuck, here’s another poor white trash slob getting pulled out from under his trailer. Surprise – he’s not wearing a shirt, he’s drunk, and he has no teeth. Well – I may have it bad, but not that bad! Not yet anyway.
Also I think the show really points out the absurd futility of the war on drugs, and the asinine laws we have on the books which routinely revel in absolutely destroying young men’s lives. More often than not, they’re young men of color. Although I’m sure the producers of COPS go to great pains to at least give the illusion that they’re unbiased in reporting on crime and race.
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But it’s so often set in some small town in a backward state where these minor drug crimes are felonies and it’s the way to keep these people off the streets, right – we don’t have that slavery anymore so that sure as hell won’t work – so send them all to prison. That’s the plan, right?
I get mad. Not only am I watching these COPS, who are probably decent guys and gals just hoping to make a living so they can buy a house and have kids and get a decent pension if they don’t get shot first, participate in this ruin but I also see it’s my tax dollars going to waste.
And sometimes their moralizing makes absolutely no sense. I remember one episode set in Vegas (another one of their favorite locations) and they were busting a young lady for streetwalking on the Strip. In the interview with the female task force officer, the girl talked about the money she’d make turning tricks (hundreds of dollars per night, or more) and the Person in Charge went on to detail how bad a life this would be, etc etc. But this young lady knows, like you and I both do, that a pretty 19 year old girl with perhaps a H.S. diploma, if that, in today’s world, might be able to get a fast food minimum wage job in a hellhole place like that, paying $8.25 per hour and requiring her to wear a silly costume and be a latter day wage slave – with no real hope of ever getting anywhere economically.
Not that prostitution is a sure road to a fantastic middle class life (though it could be a start) at least it pays a decent wage and there’s some semblance of control (at least this particular girl seemed quite smart to me). So what’s the real crime here? A no-victim offense like prostitution, or the systematic elimination of any real route to middle class?
All this is to say I resent the moralizing this show wants to convey and their definition of “crime.”
I’m really not sure who the real criminals are anymore.
There I go with my anti-Facebook Manifesto, all righteous and everything, and now here I am telling you I’m back.
Go head and snicker. Surely, I deserve it.
Not that I still don’t think it’s generally a pretty bad idea, but here’s the deal kids:
basically everybody is on Facebook, and unfortunately, many of them are using the message protocol there as their de facto email. I don’t like it, but there you are.
I know many people and have lots of family in far away places. I’ve lived in San Francisco, Milwaukee, Palm Springs and have many friends on the East Coast as well. It’s unrealistic to keep up with them in person and this is really just the path of least resistance (especially for a lazy person).
I miss getting invited to things. Facebook has become the way people invite you to parties, events, personal meetings, etc. and I was missing that big love! Not that it can’t happen in other ways, but. . . see first point above.
Honestly, there were a couple of personal relationships that really blossomed in real time due to Facebook, and now those have waned. That’s the thing I liked most about this social media journey, and I want those people back in my life on a regular basis (and it wasn’t just virtual).
I do need the visibility. There’s still the remote possibility that people will look for staff or, heaven forbid, find out about books on Facebook. Again, like I said in my Manifesto, people don’t go to Facebook specifically to find books or writers, but the impression could be made. It could happen.
So I’ll rejoin, after all, it’s free. Still. Sort of. Though it’s not an equal trade at all. This time around, I’m going to try to:
“friend” or accept as friends only those people I know and like in real life.
avoid politics as much as humanly possible, though my fingers may get itchy.
I’ll just ignore the gross pictures of your food.
I’ll still share stuff, but hopefully this will be highly curated and mostly stuff from here (the blog) that I’d like to see distributed; I know Facebook will try to thwart that as much as they can, because they’d like to make money on wider distribution.
Will only share the barest minimum of digital assets — meaning photos, in particular. Naturally, I’m on Instagram as well, and Facebook owns that, so. . . any suggestions there?
OK, so now it’s Arnold 0, Zuckerberg 1. Don’t know how long I’ll be back, but stay tuned.
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Hey, I’ll work for sex, too. Feet, not really but thanks.
I haven’t posted much in the last few weeks, and the reason behind that is (as well as my usual procrastination issues, but beyond that) that I’ve started working. That’s right, working, on a regular basis. Like in permanent, reliable part-time, something I’ve not seen in my economic life for the last four years.
I wanted to document it as part of the posts on the blog regarding my unemployment experience, or my underemployment experience.
It’s odd, it ended as simply as it started. How did it start? A phone call to meet a boss (who is now dead, btw, not that it’s pertinent to this part of the story. But. She is. Dead.) at a coffee shop near the airport, a mere 20 0r so miles from where I was living at the time, for a meeting to discuss, well, exactly what? So it was a ruse, the only agenda for this meeting was to fire four people in our tiny communications department (so they just axed the entire department and outsourced the function – sound familiar?).
If it sounds like I’m resentful it’s because I still don’t understand why this simply could not be done with an easy phone call or an email (or even a text – do people get fired by text now? They must). No, instead, we’re going to make you suffer on the L.A. freeways, on a Friday, pointlessly, to do this horrible thing. Grrrr.
Anyway.
What happened was I’d been posting semi-regular reminders on Facebook, of all places, that I was looking for a seasonal or part-time position and one of them actually came through. Shocker, right?
So I’ll try not to say anything bad about Facebook for a few minutes. What am I doing, work-wise? Well, part-time, working 3 days a week, doing some selling, some blogsite maintenance, some communications, right here in L.A. Don’t want to be more specific than that, but indeed it looks like it could be as permanent as I’d like it to be.
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Some final thoughts (for now) on the past four years of unemployment, underemployment, self-employment:
It really is all about networking. All of the good freelance gigs I’ve gotten as well as this permanent job came through friends or work contacts – nobody posted a wanted ad for any of these. So what everyone says, including all the advice gurus, is true.
I believe the world of work and of looking for work has fundamentally changed. We have not recovered much at all from the crash of 2008. I still cannot believe how hard it’s been to find a job, any kind of job, really, with 40+ years in the work force and a pretty decent resume. Kind of unbelievable, but that’s what it is.
Not everybody needs to have a job anymore. We can now produce everything we need with minimum workers, so many of us don’t have to actually work. We, as a society, have to figure out the economics of that. Productivity gains have all gone to the top, and are not shared with the workers. In the future, eventually, this will change, one way or the other to a more equitable footing.
It could all happen – the crash – again, tomorrow. I hold no illusions that things will ever go back to the way they used to be. It’s good to be resilient, and I’m glad I’m pretty good at frugality.
That’s it for now. I’m sure I’ll think of more and add to the list.
Oh what to do, what to say about this? Something, for sure. I couldn’t just not talk about it, even though it’s one of those things, not so different from climate change in that regard, where the individual feels that there’s probably little they can do on their own to mitigate or stop this horror.
I mean, I can’t just pop over to Moscow or St. Petersburg and grab a bunch of LGBTs and bring them home with me.
What is clear to me is that we cannot stand by and not say or do anything. If not us, who? If not now, when?
There’s lots of things/ways to protest, on the table, that people and organizations and governments are doing. Let’s look at them, let’s see what makes sense for us in both groups and as individuals.
Boycott Vodka — a lot of bars and towns are boycotting vodka purchases and drawing attention to this by doing “public pours” down storm drains, etc. My take: great as an attention-draw-er, as publicity stunt without much practical impact — as I understand the vodka industry is not Russia-based. Still, it’s a cultural touchstone and this is a way to draw attention to the matter.
Boycott Olympics in Sochi – the Winter Olympics in February, 2014, will be held in Sochi, a city on the Black Sea in southern Russia. The various proposals are to boycott nationally – as in, not send a team (which won’t happen, at least from the U.S.) or to pressure the IOC to move the Olympics to a city where they’d recently been held, such as Vancouver. I honestly don’t know how effective this would be. It’s probably too late to make it happen now regardless. What lasting effects did the western boycott of the Moscow 1980 Olympics and their corresponding get-you-back boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 have? I’m not sure either was a factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was a massive economic meltdown five years later. Russian LGBT have purportedly said this is NOT a good idea, they would like the world to come to Sochi to keep the spotlight on the human rights abuses of the home country.
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Christopher Isherwood (l) and Don Bachardy in the late ’70s.
For this week, the 10 reasons from the point of view of the older guy in the intergenerational pairing. *
Again, these are reasons I’ve come up with myself from my own experience or anecdotally from things I’ve observed.
So here we go, here are some possible reasons an older guy might seek out a younger adult guy:
He’s adorably beautiful: well, duh. The cynics among you will say that this is reasons 2 through 10, as well. Got to admit there is something about that dewy fresh flesh that springs back when you touch it.
He’s agreeable: from postponing dinner till nine to having a Diet Pepsi when he really prefers a Diet Coke (cause it’s all you’ve got) younger men can be more easy going. There’s that shrug: whatever.
He’s enthusiastic: younger guys will often (if not always) want to do something with a consuming passion! They don’t merely say yes; they’re all in.
He’s GGG (good, giving, game) – this comes from Dan Savage and his “Savage Love” sex advice program — he strives to be good in bed, to be giving to his partner, and game to try out something which may not be #1 on his own list (see enthusiastic, above).
He’s respectful: By the very nature of finding himself with you, he’s respectful of all the gifts an older person can give to an individual and to society; it used to be that everyone was raised to be that way, these days, not so much.
He’s trying to please: I find that this urge to please the older person is almost always part of the dynamic, often unexpected. But I’m not complaining.
He’s teachable/nurturable: Oscar Wilde famously said, “I’m not young enough to know everything.” But all twentysomethings are not that way, and often I’ve found younger men wanting to learn things that life experience has already taught someone older. (I was not this way, however, I was young enough to know absolutely everything! Now I’m trying to unlearn it all.)
He’s usually more interested in the larger cultural landscape: what I mean is that he often will have interests beyond the narrow diversions of his own particular generation. It may come as a keen interest in winemaking, or opera, or deep sea diving.
He’s accommodating: He knows he can’t have everything his own way so is more likely to compromise and enjoy the differences between the generations, and he’s authentically interested in learning about those differences.
Finally, he’s trusting, he’s expecting that level of integrity from you because you’re an older, hopefully wiser, person. In our cynical times, that’s a refreshing quality.
Just for the record, I’ll date someone of any (adult) age. It’s always an individual attraction thing for me, and there’s no specific type I’m looking for. Do you (either younger or older) date out of your own generation?
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Just wanted to update this today (9/23/21), about 8.5 years after I published the original story, which was really about how white privilege dictates what we see around societal violence and other misfortunes (such as illness) – though I didn’t have that language then, even though I recognized the operative theory. Over the past week, much has been made of “missing white woman” syndrome in the case of murdered Gabby Petito. And it’s not just white women, it’s also white men – who, as victims, are covered more than people of other races/backgrounds. This quite from a story today in CNN.com by Holly Thomas:
“Perhaps one of the most painful reasons stories about pretty young White women seem to capture the public imagination so completely is the subconscious prejudice that bad things aren’t “meant” to happen to privileged people. Safety is one of the aspirational perks of having an apparently perfect life. Well-off White people can generally assume that when they call the police, law enforcement will automatically be on their side and want to help them. But this level of support is far from a universal given, and far too often a function of racial privilege.”
Again, I want to emphasize that what happened to Sam and Bret are tragedies, and they deserve to be covered as much as anyone who experiences a similar crime or misfortune. But I do wonder if these stories would have been written at all if they both weren’t white and privileged.
Original Post about Sam Michel and Bret Shaad
Sir Francis Drake Apartments
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I was touched by this Sam Michel murder story, which I saw just by accident in The Los Angeles Times over the weekend. I was struck by a couple of things beyond the mere horror – and maybe the complacency by which we accept such things as the hazard of living in the big, bad city.
First of all, it was the location of the murder, the Sir Francis Drake apartments on Serrano in Koreatown. This building is managed/owned by the Swel Group, and I’ve looked at many of their properties when searching for K-town apartments both in 2011 and also again very recently. The Sir Francis Drake is an amazing, beautiful building — hands down, it had the largest and probably nicest studios of any building in the Swel Group list. I almost moved into the building in summer of 2011 but found a larger (and cheaper) apartment elsewhere.
My quite recent inquiries into vacancies there were not responded to – don’t know if it had anything to do with this notoriety or not, but I was blissfully unaware of the murder.
The other thing that struck me about this sad story was Sam Michel’s love of Griffith Park, something I share and have since I was in my 20s. So that could’ve been me many years ago, or so many people I’ve known who come to L.A. to create their artistic life.
Our family recently lost someone about Sam’s age to a violent death (suicide, not murder) so I know somewhat of what this family is going through. I also hope someone with information comes forward to collect the newly-upped reward ($100,000) and that the person who did this gets caught.
One of the early reports of this murder in the Times also says that there’ve been 35 murders in Koreatown since 2007. I wonder how many of those have gone unsolved?
Interesting that this particular death, this unsolved murder is the one that’s focused on – and why is that, as there are so many unsolved murders in the city? Certainly his family is not going to let the matter drop, and they shouldn’t. But there’s also a facility with social media and press access that comes with education and class.
I’m just a few years away from being able to start using one of the two social insurance programs I’ve paid into all of my working life. So, this time the spin from the right wing, referring to these programs as the loaded “entitlements,” is personal. I thought Mike Hiltzik (disclosure – I’ve met Mike, he did a great piece on my former boss Ray Dolby when I was PR Director at Dolby in the early 2000s) really nailed it with this list of lies published in the Los Angeles Times.
First of all, a tax restoration (instituted to help avoid a depression) is not a tax hike — one of the Right’s favorite lies. Also, that temp payroll tax cut left out certain categories of people who don’t pay into the social security system anyway – teachers, for one.
Then there’s the problem that millionaires and billionaires also get social security – it’s a huge drain! Wrong again. Have you ever gone to the soc sec website and punched in different scenarios for your retirement benefit? I have – and after a certain point there’s not more than a hundred dollars or so month difference between what someone making $25K per year would get vs. someone making $250K per year would get – Social Security is set up as a baseline income for seniors.
Also, one shouldn’t think of these programs and the deductions that go into them as retirement funds like an IRA or 401-K. They’re not. They are insurance. Everyone’s ultimate benefit will be different, depending on circumstances. It’s more helpful to think of the situation along the lines of car insurance or homeowner’s insurance. While these conditions generic cialis price are more typically thought of as affecting older men, they certainly can – and do – occur in younger men. This property of the Tadalis is plus point over all other medications used to cure the erection problems. tab sildenafil In fact nowadays all the newspapers and TV advertisements are filled with several pills claiming to enhance cheap viagra from uk your sexual life. However, people must know that there are side effects of certain medicines, alcoholics, drug abuse which directly brand cialis no prescription impact your sexual desire and function.
The last lie is the tendency of the critics on the Right to lump social security together with Medicare – which does have some very serious problems going forward. Medicare is hampered by a huge external, i.e., the for-profit, American carnivorous health care fiasco, aided and abetted by Congress on all sides – and as long as that’s the case, costs will rise much faster than inflation or premiums could ever keep up. But don’t take my word for it – read Mike, he says it much better than I can.
How embarrassing.
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