Old-Fart.Blog

Welcome to the rantings and ravings of an aging mind.

writing

  • My kids won’t watch my movies

    In the days before streaming, before cable, when there was just the zenith color TV with a dial you turned to change the channel (until it broke and then you used a pair of pliers), my dad would stay up late and the TV would always be on, usually tuned to the late, late show Read more

  • How On-Demand Killed the Magic of Waiting

    We got everything we ever wanted, and it ruined everything we ever loved. That’s the curse of living in the age of On Demand, where every song ever recorded is available at the touch of a screen, where entire seasons of television shows can be consumed in a single weekend, where the latest movies appear Read more

  • The Last Cigarette: How We Lost the Romance of Danger

    Let me be clear from the start: smoking will kill you. I know this because I just watched it kill my uncle, a man who smoked for fifty years and couldn’t quit even when the doctors told him it was cigarettes or death. He chose cigarettes, in the end, though I’m not sure it was Read more

  • The Death of Public Decorum: How We Stopped Caring What Others Think

    There was a time—and I realize this makes me sound like I’m about to tell you how far I had to walk to school in the snow—when leaving the house was an event. Not a grand occasion, necessarily, but something that required preparation, consideration, maybe even a little respect for the fact that you were Read more

  • Autotune Out

    I don’t hate pop music. I’d rather listen to an album side than top 40, but there have been good pop songs over the years. Ones that are not only earworms, but also interesting. Most pop is terrible. But some of it has at least captured the zeitgeist, and been a part of the soundtrack. Read more

  • The Death of Baseball: How America’s Pastime Became America’s Nightmare

    They killed it. They took the most beautiful game ever invented and turned it into a three-hour commercial interrupted by occasional moments of athletic performance. Baseball—real baseball, the kind that lived in your bones and played in your dreams—is dead. What we have now is some bastardized corporate zombie wearing its uniform, shambling around major Read more

  • The Savage Beauty of Growing Old in a World Built for Beautiful Idiots

    The mirror doesn’t lie, though God knows I wish it would. Another line carved into this weathered face, another gray hair sprouting like a weed in the garden of my fading youth. Fifty-seven years on this godforsaken planet and what do I have to show for it? A mind that won’t shut up and a Read more