“OK, Boomer!”

The kids, the Millennials, remind me of me back when I thought I had it all figured out. Not that they’re naïve or immature, but rather like when I was less empathetic to the toll that people’s struggles took on them and how it ground them down to cynical, compromising grownups with the awesome right to vote and affect public policy in new and terrible ways.

My wife and I redesigned the home office in our house over the New Year break. New coat of paint on the walls, a new desk for her and new layout of the workstations, so that we face each other with a pair of monitors for each of us to hide behind. We removed the closet doors and placed the file cabinets in the cavities. The bulk of the real work, however, ended up sorting the documents, ledgers, papers and piles of research stuff for saving, tossing or shredding or passing off to friends and allies who we thought could use some of these archives.

Among this detritus, were old magazines and underground newspapers of marginal cultural significance as nostalgia or historical value. Rolling Stone, National Lampoon, Yipster Times, Overthrow (formerly Yipster Times), High Times, Earth First Journal; Comic books, like Freak Brothers, Doper Dan, Cherry Poptart, Weirdo, Zap Comix and a surprising amount of those freebie pulp periodicals put out by local radio stations with news and reviews about the concerts and records of a bloated spectacular culture at a lost and lonely time in America. There were the mainstream stadium acts that all too soon became labeled Classic Rock alongside the trickles and tributaries…