That project, Porches: The South and Her Writers, turned into a thirteen-part public radio series that aired in 1999. I did episodes on James Dickey, Larry Brown, Reynolds Price, Charles Frazier, and a bunch of others. I’m planning occasional posts about some of those encounters.

The episode I spent the most time on was about Flannery O’Connor. Her work had a profound effect on me and I’m always on the look out for anything to do with her.

And so it was that I went to see Wildcat, Maya and Ethan Hawke’s interpretation of Flannery’s life and fiction a few months ago. I’d recommend it to anyone who has a worn copy of A Good Man Is Hard to Find on their shelf. It’s likely to be the closest thing to an O’Connor biography that I expect to show up on screen. O’Connor, whose lupus forced her to retreat from life in the Northeast to live with her mother in Milledgeville, wrote that there would be no biography because there was nothing to report in the space between the house and barn. So Wildcat focuses on her imagination as she writes Wise Blood and other stories while living on the farm with her mother.

But like a Star Trek nerd with a head full of useless trivia, I have a few things to say.

Here’s the background: When Flannery O’Connor finished her MFA at Iowa in 1947, she went to Yaddo, the granddaddy of writers’ colonies in Saratoga Springs, NY. There, while she was working on her first novel, Wise Blood, she became entangled in the Robert Lowell affair, which involved honest-to-God underworld spies, the FBI, and a red scare panic in the highest echelon of literary America. In the fallout, O’Connor had to leave Yaddo. Lowell, one of the most important poets at that time, recognized that he’d done harm to the young writer’s career and made arrangements for a place for her to land.

That led him to Robert Giroux’s office, where they called their mutual friend, noted poet and translator, Robert Fitzgerald.

Flannery, along with the three Roberts, agreed she should go live with Fitzgerald and his wife Sally in Connecticut. She could help Sally with their passel of children.

Sally is largely the reason the Flannery O’Connor holds the position she does in Southern Letters. Although O’Connor had some success in her lifetime, it was her posthumous publications that raised her profile and made her part of the canon. Those publications were Sally’s work. She and Robert edited Mystery and Manners, her collection of essays. Sally edited the collected letters, The Habit of Being. She also edited The Complete Stories, which won the National Book Award. Her work unlocked a coherent vision of Flannery’s writing.

And this is where I come in. While I was working on Porches, Sally and I became friends. I visited her in Boston and I became her occasional driver during the summers she was here in Atlanta researching her unfinished biography. We went to plays, watched tv, and I drove her home from church each Sunday. I showed her an episode of the sci-fi series Babylon Five featuring Brad Dourif, who had also starred in the movie adaptation of Wise Blood. She enjoyed it, saying, “He’s still playing Hazel Motes all these years later.”

And in the end, this is all a story about Hazel Motes. Because back in 1948, Flannery moved into the apartment above the Fitzgeralds’ garage in order to figure out what to do with him.

As Sally told it, Flannery would go up to her room after breakfast and write until cocktail hour, and Robert would go to his study and do the same. He was working on a new translation of Sophocles at the time. At five each evening, they’d both come to the kitchen where Sally would put up a pitcher of martinis and they’d compare pages.

I can imagine this as a marvelously happy time for the young writer. Sally and Flannery were fast friends. The Fitzgeralds were deeply Catholic and Flannery’s faith was the root of her being. She had time, a place to work, and sympathetic readers who understood what she was trying to write.

But that doesn’t mean her work was easy. She struggled with the novel’s ending, and Hazel Motes wandered pointlessly in Taulkinham for a while. For a while, she brought down meager, unhappy pages to the kitchen.

Oedipus’s Wreck

One evening, Robert brought the passage where Oedipus tears out his own eyes in fury to what the fates have brought him. He explained that it was the most significant moment of the play because it was the only moment that is not pre-ordained. It is Oedipus’ only act of free will. Flannery was transfixed

When cocktail hour came the next day, she arrived with the pages in which Hazel Motes blinds himself with quicklime.

I still picture Sally’s delight in telling that story and wonder who else she told it to. Maybe she’d told it to large crowds at conferences, maybe only to friends at dinner. I’m sure it would have been featured in the bio she was working on, but although there are plenty of notes, few actual pages of that work survived her.

One of the most iconic, pivotal moments in southern literature was built on an ancient Greek play and rooted in a period of idyllic literary collaboration, not a lonely, confrontational time on a farm with her mother.

Wiseblood was a product of her time in the North and the Midwest, in Iowa, Saratoga, and Connecticut, not Milledgeville. Sorry Ethan and Maya. Nevertheless, I hope to watch the film again. It’s a fine piece of work.

I don’t know if this anecdote has shown up in any O’Connor scholarship, but it’s not the first time she’s been linked to Sophocles.

After Flannery died, Thomas Merton, author of The Seven Storey Mountain and noted Trappist Monk wrote a much-quoted epitaph: “When I read Flannery O’Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can you say for a writer? I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor.”

Song of the Week

Saratoga? Check. Underworld Spies? Check. Vanity? Check. (After all, here’s your narrator inserting himself into important literary conversations he doesn’t belong in—if that’s not vain, I don’t know what is.)

The Song of the week must be Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.”

Here’s what you need for a good retirement: Health. Enough money. A safe place. And curiosity. Yes, curiosity.

You probably thought I was going to say friends, but I think friends follow from curiosity. If you’re curious, you get out, meet people, and ask them questions. That’s how you make friends.

Curiosity is the thing that keeps us engaged, keeps our world from shrinking. It drives us to learn more, see more, do more. It keeps us alive.

Without it, we just let the world come to us, letting it tell us what it wants us to think. With it, you head out into the world, see things, and meet people.

Curiosity isn’t a commodity like money or food. You don’t run out of it. If you ask questions or explore ideas, there’s always something more to learn, something you still don’t understand. Curiosity grows if you cultivate it. It multiplies. Like rabbits. What did Alice say when she fell down her rabbit hole? “Curioser and curioser!”

If you start wondering about something and indulge your curiosity, it leads to other questions, and you keep going. Or you can tell yourself you don’t have time for that or that it’s not important. If you always choose to always focus on the practical and move on, your curiosity withers away.

A well-tended curiosity manifests in many ways.

I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight

I went to a Richard Thompson concert the other day with a friend, and he ran into a woman he knew while we were walking to the venue. She mentioned that she’d never seen Thompson and didn’t know his stuff, but decided to come out because she’d heard some other folks talking about him.

That kind of floored me. It takes a lot to get people off their couches and into an event, even if it’s free. And my guess is that just about everyone at that show had seen Thompson before. Probably multiple times. Who pays for a ticket to go alone to see someone they aren’t familiar with? Maybe as a teenager or in my early twenties, I might drop into a club for some band I’d heard about around town. It’s been forever since I did that. But this woman, not young, followed her curiosity out her front door and down to the ticket booth, where she shelled out good money for an artist she hadn’t heard.

I’m really jealous of her sense of adventure. Lately, my curiosity has turned inward, and I’ve focused on a way to grow it within structure. When I was writing my novel, I developed a habit of working daily on personal long-term goals. As I’ve found things I wanted to learn about, I’ve tried to build a structure around those ideas and devote time to them regularly. Slowly, I’ve added new topics. The other day, I pulled together the list of stuff I’m working through, and thought, “Hey, congratulations! I’ve invented school! I created my own damned college curriculum.”

The University of Me

It all came together in a haphazard way, but it has gelled around my interests. It’s all stuff from different sources and in different media, but it feels coherent to me. The whole amalgam of courses is costing around $200, but much of it involves books that were already on my shelf, saving me a few bucks.

I miss the social aspect of a classroom. Also, the dark sarcasm in the classroom, but none of the adult learning programs I’ve found nearly interest me. So here’s what I’m learning:

• German 101: With Austria and Germany in the sights for retirement, this obvious choice approaches a necessity. There are lots of resources online for learning languages, but I subscribed to the Great Courses platform and am taking the Learning German: A Journey through Language and Culture course. The instructor is James Phrem is an Ithaca College German professor. I like to imagine him across the valley from my alma mater, trudging through the snow on a cold February day. Like all Great Courses programs, the info is presented efficiently and without too much fuss. There’s some effort to make it fun, but it’s clearly just his college course recorded on a cheap set. I bought the associated workbook as well and read along with each class. I watch each lesson multiple times, and it eventually sinks in.

  I like the Great Courses platform quite a bit. Decades ago, I had a multiple CD set from them about how to build good sentences, and it rode around with me in my car for years, getting recycled constantly. It was the closest thing to a creative writing class I’ve ever had and helped build my confidence as a writer. We subscribe to the platform and dip in and out of stuff fairly often.

  We also watch a fun series on YouTube, Easy German. They have a more rigorous paid program, but the YouTube series is a nice complement to the classroom stuff I’m getting from the Great Courses.

• The History of Rock Music [and the 20th century] in 500 songs by Andrew Hickey. This absurdly ambitious podcast starts with Benny Goodman’s Flying Home in 1938 and ranges forward and backward across genres and fields of study in flabbergasting ways.

  I’m currently listening to the episode on the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. It’s over 80 minutes long, and the first fifty minutes are spent on the myth of Orpheus, the Russian Revolution, and 20th-century avant-garde composers. All of that is contained in a deep dive into Russian physicist, musician, and spy Lev Sergeyevich Termen. His story plays out like a Bolshevik Last Emperor with bit parts from Lenin and Marx. We get to about the hour mark before there’s mention of Brian Wilson’s band and their famous use of Termen’s enduring legacy, the Theremin.

  Trust me, this podcast is more exhaustive than any history 101 class—it just happens to be threaded together by a bunch of guys playing electric guitars.

  Hickey’s been making this podcast since 2018 or so and is up to about 175 of his 500 song target. I have about twenty “episodes” left to catch up. The sarcasm quotes are because his takes on any particular song have become so wide-ranging that it often takes multiple podcasts to cover one song. Hickory Wind, a track beloved within Byrds/Gram Parsons fandom but largely unknown outside that world takes four segments for a total of over six hours. That counts as one “episode.” Mega-Producer Rick Rubin has reported that it’s Bob Dylan’s favorite podcast and Bill McKibben at the New Yorker calls it the Oxford English Dictionary of rock music. It’s kind of a high-wire act and we hope for a better fate for Mr. Hickey than the OED’s compilers. But this course, delivered as a podcast, is about history and is not really about exploring new music. Although I’ve gone back and listened to stuff that I haven’t heard in years, it’s mostly familiar ground with new context.

• These days, my musical exploration is focused on jazz. I went looking for someone doing the same kind of work in that genre, but couldn’t find it in the podcast format. Instead, I turned to print. My guide is Ted Gioia and his book, The History of Jazz. I often spend an hour or so before dinner with the book in my lap and my good headphones plugged into my iPhone. The streaming services were made for this—nothing is better than being able to cue up an album or cut as I read how it was made and learn about the players involved.

  Gioia’s one of the most fascinating writers around. He’s considered the foremost jazz historian around today, has a degree in Philosophy from Oxford, grew up next door to the Beach Boys, and has an MBA from Stanford. He did stints with McKinsey and BCG, and was known as “the guy with a piano in his office” when he was a VC on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley. Stan Getz used to stop by with his sax while Gioia was working through this IPO or that. He calls himself a “pubic intellectual,” and the claim is certainly earned. It is also deeply out of fashion in the days of pundits and hot takes. His Substack, The Honest Broker, is my favorite regular read these days and did more to convince me to hop onto the platform than anything else. He’s been writing about AI a bunch lately, but also drops great music recommendations. He recently resurfaced his plan to conquer the great books. That lead me to my next course.

• Ted Gioia’s 12-Month Immersive Course in Humanities From Plato to David Foster Wallace (not Infinite Jest, thank God), here Gioia rolls us through a history of human thinking.

  Week one starts with Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates. That seems appropriate, since my first entry in this Substack started with a crack about Socrates’ trial. The range and scope of his recommendations are fantastic, and I’m grateful for the guidance. Although the list is Western-rooted in the Western hemisphere, he ranges through the Bhagavad Gita, Lao Tzu, the Koran, and even samples sub-Saharan Africa with the Mwindo Epic. He also includes music and visual art recommendations, and that allows him to dip into cultures with limited literary legacies. (I like the Great Art Explained In 15 Minutes Youtube channel for some of this.)

  I’ll say this though—there’s no way I’m doing this in twelve months. I’ve allowed myself double that time and will be working through this over two years. His 52-week curriculum limits reading to 250 pages per week. And with the doubling, we get a very manageable 125 pages per week.

• And that leaves my last course, Creative Non-Fiction 301: Substacking my Way to Fame and Fortune. I once mentioned to Dinty Moore, one of the scholars/writers who has helped define the genre, that “creative non-fiction” just sounds like fancy lying.

  He laughed, though I’m sure he’s heard a variant on that joke a million times. Maybe not a million. Don’t fact-check me. Nor should you ask how my free substack is going to lead to fortune. Or fame.

I don’t remember much from my college days, but I do remember that I was expected to take five courses per semester in my freshman year. So here I am, acting just like a freshman again. Please don’t make me live in a dorm.

That said, I often hear that one of the challenges of retirement is a lack of structure, and that’s something you often hear from motivated, accomplished people. I think the structure is easy, but the rewards are different. For those that have focused on professional returns such as money and recognition, learning or creating out of curiosity can be a real challenge.

Anyway, see you in class.

Song of the Week

The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations is one of the greatest production achievements of pop music. Brian Wilson called it a “pocket symphony.”

The recording involved over 30 musicians and 90 hours of multi-track tape. You should listen to it in a high-fidelity format with great speakers or a top-notch set of headphones to really appreciate what’s going on.

Be True To Your School, on the other hand, was made for an AM radio. Enjoy.

Epstein. Venezuela. Minneapolis. Cuba. Iran.

Your web browser ought to come with a trigger warning these days. It’s tempting to just spend our days seething with rage. And maybe that’s the point. We’ve been convinced that anger is the answer.

In twenty-first-century pop culture, there’s probably been no bigger phenomenon than the Marvel movies. I saw them all until they ran out of steam. I parsed out the trailers for Easter eggs, stuck through the credits for the post-credit scenes. I loved all the cameos. I was a Marvel nerd. And in all those twenty-odd movies, one line, delivered by Bruce Banner, always struck me as perfect for our life and times:

“That’s my secret. I’m always angry.”

For those who had better things to do with their time than watch comic-book movies, when ultra-cerebral scientist Bruce Banner, played by Mark Ruffalo, gets angry, he turns into the Hulk, the strongest creature in a universe chock full of gods and superheroes. Anger makes him nearly omnipotent.

When I was a teenager, our generation’s Hulk was played by Bill Bixby in a green-skinned remake of The Fugitive television series. His iconic line was, “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” It is a favorite of nostalgia-laden comic book geeks. Bixby’s Hulk knew that his anger made him do stupid, destructive things. At the end of each episode, he’d have to leave behind the friends he made at the beginning of the hour. It was one of the few weekly programs that always ended on a sad note.

But 70’s Hollywood had another bigger, more iconic line about anger:

“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

That is, of course, from the 1976’s Network and it has come to define America as much as anything. Hell, Rolling Stone just wrote about how it is a fifty-year-old diagnosis of our current state.

It was meant to be a cautionary tale, not a how-to manual. But I can’t help but believe that Rupert Murdoch had it in mind when he launched Fox News.

The movie made during the time when CBS, NBC, and ABC were the only three networks in America, takes place at a fictional fourth network. The plot pivots on what is now a quaint idea—that broadcast news is a public service of the networks, part of their obligation to pay for the use of public airways. The corporate overlords at this fourth network decide that news should actually be profitable, and when their mentally ill news anchor, drops a jeremiad at the top of the national news broadcast, they have their new star.

Beale’s speech is a brilliant piece of populism. It doesn’t just tap into the anger of the audience, it grows it and amplifies it, then exploits it. Beale gives voice to all that seethes beneath the polite surface and gives permission for everyone to express it into the world. The moment where New York City flings its windows open and screams into a storm-drenched collective catharsis is a highlight of 70s cinema.

In the context of Beale’s monologue and the thunderous catharsis playing out in the streets of New York, the exhiliration of Faye Dunaway’s soulless corporate shill is easy to overlook. But it is the lesson we need to learn. America wasn’t doomed when people were shouting in the streets, it was doomed when she shouted, “Son of a bitch, we struck the motherlode,” at the top of her lungs.

Corporate America had found a tool to monetize our anger and to control us. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh would rule the airwaves within a decade or so. And after fifty years, our anger and that dream of shouted catharsis have gotten us to where we are now.

Catharsis: A Side Note

The problem is that catharsis doesn’t work. It’s been proven again and again in serious studies with white lab coats at universities.

Here’s a real study that shows as much. It is not the only one, there are others. It is good for storytelling and movie making, but bad science. Venting might feel good, but it just leaves us more angry.

And that’s where we are today. More angry. All of us, every day. I’m not saying we don’t have a reason, I’m just saying that it’s not doing any of us any good.

Nowadays, we don’t watch Network and we don’t see Bill Bixby have to leave his friends because of the consequences of his anger every week. Instead, we see the Hulk punching aliens and Nazis. We all want to be the Hulk.

Of course, the Hulk and his omnipotent anger are a comic book fantasy. Just like Superman’s ability to fly, it is nothing but a dream. No sane person thinks a man can fly, but somehow most of us believe that our anger makes us stronger. It doesn’t. It just makes us more angry and easy to manipulate.

But There is Another

If you have paid attention to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you’ll know there are lots of different Hulks now. There’s She Hulk. There’s Red Hulk. And somewhere, there’s a son-of-Hulk floating around. Also Mark Ruffalo wasn’t the first actor to try the role. Immediately before him was Edward Norton. His 2008 Hulk had to hide out in a favela in Rio to avoid the consequences of his anger. Not surprisingly, that version of the Hulk was a box office failure and Norton was replaced. Norton’s career has been just fine since then. Last year, he was nominated for an Oscar for his role as Pete Seeger in A Complete Unknown. To certain segment, though, he’ll always be Failed Hulk.

Norton, who avoids talking about his personal life, shows up on the Colbert Report with nothing to promote—no movie, show, book, or product. There’s a discussion of his involvement in a company that captures smokestack emissions from industrial ships in commercial ports. He doesn’t seem eager to talk about it, though.

Instead, the Failed Hulk shows up to talk about his own anxiety and the call to be an artist in these times. After watching this, I’m willing to believe that he made a bad Hulk because he’s just too damned normal to play a giant green rampaging rage machine.

Somehow, Edward Norton has booked himself one of the most coveted spots in the promo world—The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—to perform a 170-year-old poem, Walt Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.

It may be the most human thing I’ve seen through the pixels on my screen in years. For now, it is the antidote to the urge to be the Hulk.

Song of the Week

Elvis says he’s not angry. I don’t believe him. The next song on this excellent album is “Waiting for the End of the Word.” Do with that as you will.

[Gil Kulers is our guest writer for this week’s post. Gil and I once worked in the same news room when such things existed and also once lived so close that I could pilfer his wifi signal.]

I recently read a memoir of a writer and editor who emphasized that writers should not preamble and “get to the point.” Back in my days as an eagle-eyed journalist, this was called “burying the lead.”

To all budding journalists out there, this is sound advice.

So rather than prevaricate around the bush any longer, let’s move on to the topic at hand: world peace.

Why a former columnist/sommelier/maître d’ needs to be called out of retirement to solve BIG problems is anyone’s guess. But, since Daren (this Substack’s docent) is a good friend and has promised lucrative compensation [Editor’s note: It was liquid, not lucrative] , here we are: your wine guy in the street solving the age-old question of why we all can’t get along.

My solution: stop yelling, shooting, punching, criticizing, stabbing, bombing, annoying, shouting at, mooning and/or provoking each other. There. Problem solved.

Seeing that I’ve still got 800 words to fill out this column, I guess I’ll get to the other question Daren foisted upon me: Why did I go back to work after I officially retired?

Currently, I work Thursdays at a wine shop in Atlanta even though I retired four years ago. I’ll be honest, I don’t love roaming the aisles of a wine shop as a wine consultant. I do like it, though.

Why I like it requires a multi-faceted answer. An answer I began to ramble on about to this Substack’s main author over drinks at a local watering hole (hey, kids, that’s how your grandpa refers to a bar.). Anyway, besides solving the world peace thing, he said I should write about working during retirement so he doesn’t have to write a column for his readers this week.

(Being the aforementioned eagle-eyed journalist that I am, I can say that I made up the part about Daren slacking on this week’s Substack installment. Although, here I am writing this column and all Daren is doing is hitting the publish button.)

I went to a pretty fancy cooking school in Upstate New York while my wife and I were having our first child and after I already was a fairly well-compensated writer and editor. (Writers and editors once were well-compensated. I’m not making that up.) We’re talking major league sacrifices on everyone’s part for me to cash out on a burgeoning career to follow my dream of becoming a great chef. I did well at school, but maybe I did a little too well in its excellent wine course. They sent me to Bordeaux on scholarship to study that region’s wines.

When I got back to Atlanta, I received offers from two people:
1.) A sommelier who managed perhaps the best wine collection in Atlanta.
2.) A desperate publisher who needed a little help getting his wine magazine off the ground.

FYI, nobody who asks for a “little” help ever wants just a little help.

Unwisely, I said yes to both. Over the next decade, this decision about killed me. At my desk at 8 a.m., editing, writing, making story and photo assignments, dealing with a nincompoop publisher until 1 p.m. Then a shower, shave and put on that dining-room monkey suit. I’m in the dining room by 3. I polish a thousand wine glasses. Finish service around 10 p.m. I’m home by midnight or so. Still in my 30s, I actually thought I was having a heart attack one day. (It was just a little “shpilkes” and I was fine, but oy vey the thought…)

Tuesday through Saturday, every week. Sunday and Monday let me catch up on magazine deadlines, meet with the printer and other glamorous publishing stuff.

While I was with the magazine, I (again unwisely) started down a two-year path to become a Certified Wine Educator. Turns out I’ll do anything for a cool lapel pin and certificate printed on fancy paper. (Maybe it was a heart attack?)

What is a CWE certification? In short, it’s a bitch. The international certification program hinges on its three-part exam: blind wine identification, blind wine fault identification and a super-easy written exam. Super easy if you can memorize everything that’s ever happened to a grape in the past 8,000 years. The recommended reading page just had one word: EVERYTHING. I passed the wine ID and fault parts, but stumbled on the super-easy written exam. (There were questions on Bulgarian wines. Yes. Bulgarian wines.)

Anyway, nine months later, I flew up to Washington, D.C. to re-take the written exam. There were no Bulgarian wine questions, but I passed anyway with the highest score in the United States that year.

The wine magazine expanded out of Atlanta and into Birmingham and Charlotte. I took an ownership position in the company. All seemed mah-velous until the magazine and pretty much the entire publishing industry took the fanciest dive into the toilet. During this time, I also wrote a weekly wine column for a major daily newspaper. Cool, right?! That slowly and painfully hit the shitter, too.

(I know what you’re thinking: Is he ever going to explain why he went back to work after retirement? And what the heck does prevaricating even mean?)

I can only answer the first question.

Somewhere in the middle of all that my health—mental, physical, familial—suggested I give up the sommelier job. You have to understand what I put my wife, my two children and myself through before I walked into my general manager’s office at the age of 57 to say, I’m done. I did give Gary 13 months’ notice. Fair enough, I think.

“You put us and yourself through all that, so you can just sit on your ass?” a concerned spouse could reasonably ask.

To which a mutually concerned spouse might answer: “Hey, let’s go to France and Scandinavia for a month!”

I missed so many Thanksgivings, Mother’s Days, Easters, Friday and Saturday nights with friends, swim meets, dive meets, gymnastic meets, school concerts and so on over the past third of a century. Turns out these things matter more to me than advancing my career. Maybe things might be different if I worked a 40-hour week.

So that, friends, is the long-winded reason why I laid down my quill and tastevin when I could live a less frantic existence.

Why go back, then?

My last job was as a sommelier/beverage manager/maître d’. It was the best job in the world. I got to explore the wine world differently than as a wine journalist. I got to use my culinary training for fab-u-lous wine dinners. I learned a ton about beer and cocktails. I worked with mostly (mostly!) great folks. I loved most (most!) of my guests. It gave me great joy to help people fall in love with wine, food and the dynamic combination of both.

Yeah. Good times.

Oh, wait. That’s right! I also had to deal with incompetent wholesalers, some (some!) idiotic co-workers and a scant few (few!) insufferable guests. I had to hire people. I had to cover up for servers who harbored demons so they wouldn’t get fired. I had to fire people. (I once had to get a court to issue a restraining order for a bartender who, ahem, vociferously disagreed with my decision to let him go.) During the holidays, there were the 70-hour, seven-day, bonkers workweeks.

Yeah. Not so good times.

Now, I work one day a week. More if the shop needs a favor. I still love interacting with customers who are baffled, interested, misinformed and otherwise curious about wine. Or, perhaps, they just want to “win” their dinner club with the most awesome wine selection. (Awesome wine choices. It’s what I do best.)

Maybe world peace is overrated. Inner peace—and peace with the world right around me—beats the heck out of ambition and trapping some version of success.

My wife, who, by the way, still works, is comforted by my… let’s call it “retirement light.” I also have a lot more time to prepare great dinners and desserts for her and friends. Did I mention I went to a famous cooking school to become a great chef but never really tapped into all the culinary training I received inside and outside the classroom?

I don’t have anyone to fire now. I also don’t have to hire anyone, which wasn’t the worst. I did hire a few folks who are doing great things in the hospitality industry. And I did give a bunch of writers their first writing assignments. Several of them have published books and gone on to write for international publications. Those are things I cherish, but the training and managerial stuff not so much.

Working out the nuances and strategies of solving humankind’s inability to be nice to one another takes time. Retirement frees up my schedule to work out the details with a friend at a local watering hole.

And all that work I put into to become a wine expert? I still get to use that. If you’re not using your accumulated knowledge and experiences, you’re losing them. That would be a shame. I get to explore that knowledge with every customer’s question and curiosity. This brings me great satisfaction, although as yet no inquiries on Bulgarian wines.

So, Daren, that’s why I still sorta work even though I’m sorta retired.

One more thing on the subject of world peace. A good first step toward all of us getting along would be for everyone to stop driving slow in the passing lane. C’mon, people, I gotta get to work!

Song of the Week

[This is still Gil, BTW]

I discovered jazz guitarist, Pat Metheny, when I was working at Sam Goody’s record store in White Plains, NY. This was during my wilding period between a stint at Northeastern University and getting my journalism degree from New York University. While I was a print guy, I was fascinated by electronic media. TV news was king in the 1980s and I considered a path down that road. That didn’t happen, but I always fantasized directing a national nightly newscast. If that ever happened, my first order of business would be have Pat’s “(Cross the) Heartland” as the show’s introductory theme. Its staccato notes and urgent pace always reminded me of a busy newsroom full of tap-tap-tapping typewriters. Even the title is perfect with its uniquely American theme. It’s the opening track of the Pat Metheny Group’s 1980 album American Garage and I’m sure it created a lot of fans of his music and jazz fusion.

Gil Kulers lives in and putters around his house in Avondale Estates. He can be found at Tower Liquors on Piedmont on Thursdays, where he’ll find an awesome wine from Bulgaria for you.

Hello, it’s me. It’s been a long time.

Here are a couple of things I’ve learned in the time I was gone.

First, never break a good habit streak. Once you’re rolling and stop, it can be hard to get back into the groove. Even for things you enjoy.

Second, comparison is the killer of joy.

I knew both of these things already, but I fell into old traps.

I’m going to blame the nearly two months it has taken to get another post on Tom friggin’ Junod.

If you’re not familiar with Tom, he’s one of the finest magazine writers of the last fifty years. His Falling Man has become the unofficial eulogy for the Twin Towers. For many, it defines our memory of 9/11. His profile of Fred Rogers became a Tom Hanks movie and has elevated Mister Rogers to a cultural touchstone. In the next few weeks, Tom will publish a memoir of his father, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What it Is to Be a Man. I expect it to be a phenomenon. It will win big awards. It will be a movie. It will cause people to start dressing like a 1960s hairlegger.

The thing is, Tom has started doing publicity for the book, and one of his stops was the How I Write podcast. And when a writer as good as Tom Junod spends an hour or so talking about the secrets to good writing, other writers should pay attention.

After I processed his advice, I wrote lots of words for this Substack. I kept revising a long, 5,000-word piece centered around learning as much as I could from Tom. And none of it was up to snuff because I was trying to write like Tom Junod.

What a waste.

So that’s where I’ve been—trying to write like someone else. That said, I’d encourage other writers to watch the podcast. There is a lot of good stuff in there—just don’t lose yourself.

Also, buy the book.

My ersatz sabbatical has had me thinking a lot about writing, though. And the point of it. The thing about Tom’s stuff is that a couple of his pieces are Important. Capital I, era-defining important. Aspiring to that is a worthwhile goal, but there’s no quicker way to drain the pleasure out of a project than to put that kind of weight on it.

I’m not going to write that way. But I am coming to terms with my writing as little i important. That’s because in 2025, over half of the traffic on the internet was generated by AI. This shit is taking over our lives. Writing is our primal art and we are surrendering it to some server farm in rural Idaho.

As AI slop comes at us like The Great Wave off Kanagawa, striving to write well is my flag of permanent defeat, patched together out of flour sacks and raised above my rickety sloop. To care about language is the only resistance I can offer. The act of making art for arts’ sake is once again a radical notion.

I came across this video a few weeks ago about the advantages of film in the era of digital. It tells the story of what we lose for the sake of convenience. But it is also about taking the time and focusing on craft. As much as Tom’s advice, it’s reframed how I think about writing.

After I watched this, I wanted to go to the nearest pawn shop and buy an old film camera. But I’m a writer, not a photographer. (Also, I already have a perfectly good Ikoflex sitting on the shelf.) I don’t need a camera, I need a keyboard and I need that moment of focus that all writers strive for.

I’ve been known to complain about the act of writing. I often quote good ole Dottie Parker’s line, “I hate writing, but I love having written.” That’s an oversimplification. For me, there’s a lot of sloppy time around writing. Getting myself comfortable, checking emails and messages, distracting myself with this website or that app. It’s all a type of throat clearing. All of it is chasing moments of focused creativity.

I probably could have written a bad novel with the time I’ve spent on Substack if I’d used some Nanowrimo methods. If I’d used a little AI, I could have written a three-book romantasy series. But at sixty, much of the regret I have is for the corners I cut. I made great opportunities for myself, then failed to do great things when I found workarounds that meant the results were good enough, but not great. On the other hand, the things I’m most proud of are the things I gave everything to.

I would never have called myself a writer at the time I told myself I was going to write a novel. I just wasn’t very good and the word meant too much to me. But I wanted to be one, and I committed to the process, to not cut corners, to learn the craft, and do the work.

I knew what writing wasn’t, and I didn’t want any part of it. I was running one of the larger book festivals in the country at the time. It seemed like every time I was at a gathering, another someone would come to me and tell me they were a writer and they had a great idea for a book. Often, they would be looking for help writing their book. They had the idea, but couldn’t find the time to get it on the page.

Here’s an idea for a book: A guy gets up from his hospital bed and walks home.

You might say that’s not much of an idea, and you’d be right. But Charles Frazier turned it into a National Book Award. That’s the plot of Cold Mountain.

You don’t need an idea to be a writer. You need to do the work.

Writing a novel was me putting myself through a kind of school. I’d already gone to the finest schools, mister lonely, but I only used to get juiced in it. This was different. There were years of research for my book, but also years of revision. The research was fun. The revisions—less so. Revising—reworking my own sentences over and over— taught me to write. When my agent called and told me that St. Martin’s was taking my book, I considered it my graduation. I got my diploma. I moved my tassel. I’ve called myself a writer since that day—that is my reward for doing the work.

I’m still a writer, and my goal is to be a better writer. Just not necessarily to write like Tom Junod, damn him. And becoming a better writer means sitting in the chair and putting fingers on the keys. A human writing about human things and making human mistakes. Let the AI wave crash over me, I’ll still be typing away.

So after a short break, I’m back here in myhandbasket. I missed y’all.

Song of the Week

I couldn’t do the opening line of this post without having this track tucked in down here.

Hello, It’s Me is the first song Todd Rundgren ever wrote. It is a perfect pop gem but quite sad at it’s heart.

Rundgren has always zigged when the world was zagging. It’s part of his charm and cultish longevity. To this day, one of the most incongruous producing credits in rock and roll history is his name on Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. These days he admits that he produced the ninth-best record of all time just to make fun of Bruce Springsteen. Ha, ha. Very funny. Now do Dylan.

This is a classic koan, or Buddhist riddle. It is not intended to be answerable. The Buddhists believe that these kinds of questions can cause doubt in a student’s mind, sparking a shift from obvious logic on the quest for enlightenment.

Those kinds of logical convolutions are what the Buddhists eat for breakfast. So when the Buddhists get very literal, it means they are trying to explain something to us like we’re little children.

Mi Esposa was at the market when I called her and told her I was going into town to see a group of Buddhist monks that were coming through our little town of Decatur.

“Monks?” She asked.

“Yeah, there are two dozen Buddhist monks walking through downtown Decatur. You were on the text chain about them.”

“Actual monks? I thought that chain was just your weird code for something else. I didn’t think there were actual monks.”

Yes, Buddhist monks walked through Decatur the other day, stopping on their 2500-mile-long trek from Fort Worth to Washington DC in an extended prayer they’ve titled “Walk For Peace.”

That is a nicely literal name. They’re trying to tell us something.

A Cheerful Way to End the Year

I walked the mile to where Decatur’s welcoming ceremony was held. A Senator, a mayor, and some county commissioners were there to greet them. It was the night before New Year’s Eve and many in the crowd of thousands were smiling despite the cold . There’s a nasty chest cold hitting a lot of people right now, so I hung in the back avoiding the dense gathering of disease vectors. I didn’t see any of the dignitaries, but I could hear everyone.

A monk came to the microphone to talk of their mission. He spoke of compassion and mindfulness—Buddhism 101. That’s post-doc level Buddhism too, but without the riddles. At its heart, Buddhism is simple, but it still requires a lot of practice. That’s what the questions are for.

Probably the most famous koan is “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?”

These riddles are not aphorisms that are meant to be taken literally. For example, I can close one hand rapidly, striking the fingers against the palm of my hand. That makes a sound. Is that the sound of one hand clapping? A Buddhist would laugh at that answer. It’s too literal.

Another famous koan is “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

They do not mean that one literally either. If you meet these monks on the road, DO NOT kill them.

This needs to be said since America has already tried once. Yes, in classic American literalism, the Walk for Peace monks were run down by a tractor-trailer somewhere outside of Houston. One of them eventually lose a leg as a result. It was an accident, not malicious. I’d like to think that the truck driver emerged from all this a little more enlightened, though.

Again, Do Not Kill The Buddha!

The monk offered a blessing. I was going to record it for you, but he asked the crowd to raise both hands to receive it. I might be a hard-hearted son-of-a-bitch, but even I understood this was not a southern “bless your heart,” but something more. I put my phone in my pocket, raised my hands above my head, and tried to take in the chant in the spirit it was offered.

He finished by inviting everyone to walk with them to Washington. “Spiritually, not literally,” he joked. He seemed to be getting the swing of things in America.

When they headed out, they walked quickly, like people who were well-practiced at it and had dinner and a warm place waiting for them at the end. There were close to a dozen police cruisers and emergency vehicles following them with their lights flashing.

Me and a couple hundred others followed them through the town. The person in front of me wore a hoodie with “True Religion Jeans Company” printed stylishly on the back. The red and blue lights bounced off the store fronts, making the cavalcade feel like a disaster response. Say what you will about Decatur, Georgia, but this city was not going to let something happen to these men under its watch. I followed them as far as Church Street, where I turned toward home.

I barely caught a glimpse of their saffron robes the whole time. Truth be told, I didn’t try very hard. I was happy to be part of a crowd of people who were there to honor them and their message. But the flashing lights and chirping sirens were annoying the heck out of me.

What’s the sound of one man walking?

If I kept walking up Church Street, I could have stopped at the Buddhist meditation center. I’ve sat there on a few Sunday mornings absorbing the calmness and tranquility of the space. I liked the place a lot.

The monks didn’t go anywhere near it.

Of course, the monks already live in a monastery. If they needed peace and quiet, they could have stayed home. The challenge, of course, is not to find peace in peaceful places. That’s the easy part. Finding peace in the chaos? That requires post-doc Buddhism. Even at a distance, even in the flashing disaster lights, even in the harsh cold of a winter night, these monks managed to project something meaningful.

That’s what I learned in my half-mile walk in their footsteps. Imagine what I could have learned if I had followed them all the way to DC. Literally.

If I had the chance to talk with the monks, I’m not sure what I’d have to ask them. I already know what the intro level lessons are—compassion and mindfulness. If I can get a grip on those, I might be ready for a koan.

My only regret is that I completely missed Aloka, the peace dog that’s leading the walk. I would have loved to have played with Aloka.

A Note to Regular Readers

One of the reasons I launched A Clean Well-Lighted Handbasket six months ago was to reclaim the joy in the habit of writing. For me, that required a commitment to publishing weekly.

My once-a-week commitment has gotten me to the point where I look forward to writing every day. I haven’t had that for years. But sometimes, that deadline has caused me to rush a piece I should have spent more time on. That has lead to some sloppy writing and made me miss the chance to delve more deeply into something I want to say.

I read a column the other day that pointed out that AI is taking work from average writers everywhere, but great writing is still rising to the top. I’m proud of what I’ve published here. Buthe goal of every writer should be to be better, and for me that means taking more time. I want to spend more time with my thoughts, and I want to spend more time getting things right. So you’ll be hearing from me a little less. A Clean, Well-Lighted Handbasket will publish biweekly moving forward. My hope is that you will enjoy the new iteration more.

Song of the Week

The first song that came to mind this week was the Original Sins’ Kill the Buddha. The Original Sins are one of my favorite bands, but that isn’t one of their best cuts. I’ll post something from them someday.

So I did a search for Buddhism and rock songs and I came across a close Buddhist reading of Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower. That whole song feels like a koan, so I’m going with it.

Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.

Better writers than me end the year with a “best of” retrospective from the past year’s posts. We all know it’s a kind of cheat. Writing is work, and the holidays are when we try to leave work behind. So we write a paragraph or two to introduce our favorite piece from the past year, post it up, and get on with the nogging of eggs.

But I’ve only been at this for six months, and I just can’t pull off the “Here’s the best of my first twenty-five posts” with a straight face. After all, one of the objectives of writing on a weekly basis is to get better at it. If that’s working, and progress is linear, this should be the best thing I’ve ever written. (Narrator voice: It won’t be.)

A Solstice Gathering

Each year, a dear friend hosts a gathering at the winter solstice. There’s a bonfire and a ritual where we ceremonially burn written effigies of the things we want out of the world. There’s music and drink and a feast.

Wait a second—we might be a coven. There is always a goat or two nearby and potions of mulled wine are passed around. I really think this is a coven.

Damn—I might be a witch.

Anyway, under the dark of moonless night on December 21st, we each wrote down the names of things we wanted shunned from the world on scraps of paper and burned the scraps. I had planned to bring a copy of the New York Times and burn the entire thing, but this year’s solstice was on Sunday, and the Sunday NYTimes is up to a whoppin’ twelve bucks. Plus, it would have taken forever for that thing to burn.

I could have afforded a copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution instead, but its final printing is tomorrow, and burning it would have felt like speaking ill of the dead. Even a coven doesn’t do that.

My desire to burn The New York Times was as much about what most media has become as it was about everything that the Times covers. All that’s included in the news these days. Instead, I saved myself some money and wrote “The New York Times” on a scrap of paper and turned it into ash.

Although the things that were burned that night were all worthy of going up in flames, one offering stuck with me. A fellow witch threw in his “I voted” sticker from the last election. He said he wanted to burn away his anger. (Us witches don’t conform to your outdated gender norms, BTW.)

I’m sympathetic. It is nigh on impossible to be an aware person in this world without being angry. I often say that I live in a bubble these days, that I’ve insulated myself and that’s the only way I can manage my own anger.

But I don’t know that that’s the actual mechanism. I’m engaged with the world enough to know what’s going on. I may pass on learning the details, but I get the gist. I understand the jokes on SNL Update when I happen across them. I just seldom find them funny.

We can only use our one precious life in this foundering world and I choose not to spend my days enraged. Instead, I try to turn toward gratitude. Sincere gratitude is a true antidote to anger.

And when I think of gratitude, I think of Robert Hicks.

A Late Eulogy

Many know Robert as the author of The Widow of the South and several other novels. He was that and much more—historian, art collector, benefactor of many good causes. He was a man of deep faith. And he was a raconteur extraordinaire. He knew everybody, including by sheer coincidence, the witch with the sticker.

He made an art form of being Robert. And I’m proud to say he was a friend.

He died in February 2022 after several years of dealing with cancer and its aftereffects. If you knew Robert, or just followed him on Facebook for that matter, you understood gratitude. As he lived his life to his fullest even in those later years, his thankfulness was apparent in everything he did. He would post his thanks for every IV of medicine that was pumped into him, and every encounter with friends or strangers that struck him.

Of course, Robert was a grade A writer and a heck of a storyteller, so what could have come off as maudlin or treacly was infused with genuine sincerity.

When I decided to write about him here, I went to his Facebook page to see some of the posts leading up to his death. It took forever to get to them because hundreds upon hundreds of remembrances and tributes have been written on his page since then.

I think of conversations I had with him the first time I visited him at his home, Labor in Vain. Robert was the kind of guy that could name his home and make it not seem silly. It was 2017 and political rage burned hot in my chest and it was all I could talk about. He tried to steer me elsewhere even then, telling stories and pouring me peach-flavored moonshine that was good enough to make me wish I was a southerner.

Robert knew how close to death he was in the last years. I still think of the package I got from him just a few months before he died, returning some books I’d lent him. He was just cleaning house, he wrote. I knew what he meant.

He wasn’t angry at his illness and the pain it caused him. He was thankful for his medicine even as it made him feel worse and only slightly prolonged the inevitable. He was grateful for his friends and the love they gave to him. I’d like to imagine what he’d say to me for writing this, but he was saint-like in those days.

I drove up to Robert’s wake and his funeral on that winter’s day. Famous people were everywhere. A past governor of Tennessee gave his eulogy. Grammy-winning musicians played at his wake while Oscar-winning actors read poems. People he’d known for decades and who he loved dearly were up front. I was a stranger and stood in the back.

That doesn’t diminish my debt to him though. My simple, unspoken eulogy for him is that I am grateful for his gratitude. From the cheap seats, that was the lesson of his life.

As 2025 comes to a close, it is good and right to say good riddance to the evil of this year and to hope for better in the next. But the thing I hope to nurture in 2026 is that sense of gratitude. Burn the election sticker and focus on the things that make it worthwhile. Gratitude is a precious thing and it is the path to a better life.

Song of the Week

Each year when the coven gathers we play this John Hiatt song. I fell in love with his music when I first picked up Riding with the King from the cutout bins in 1983. I saw him play a small coffeehouse in Rochester, NY in 1985 and have been waiting to see a show as good ever since.

And, just to close the loop, he was standing graveside when they buried Robert.

For my sixtieth birthday, I chose to go to Vienna. After many years of dreaming of Europe, I’ve been able to go regularly of late and have covered a lot of ground. And when Mi Esposa asked where I’d like to go to mark my official entry into oldness, Vienna came to mind immediately. We had already ruled it out as a retirement destination due to its distance. Still, I wanted more.

After a week on the ground, that all changed. Yes, we had a great time. But this is a city that has more to offer than a good time for tourists. Now it’s high on the list of destinations. I accept that there’s recency bias involved here, so let’s start with a more objective assessment.

What the Adults Have To Say

For several years in a row, Vienna was listed as the most livable city in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a division of The Economist publication. It dropped to number two in 2025. The EIU claims that change was due to overall political instability in Europe, though I think it was because the graphics team had run out of stock photos of Vienna to put on the cover of the report. Nonetheless, it scores 97.1 out of 100 in their assessment. That ranking is based on infrastructure, healthcare, education, stability, and culture/environment.

Other European cities in the top five are Copenhagen, Zurich, and Geneva. Copenhagen is the new number one, but it wouldn’t be if the judges took seasonal affective disorder into consideration. I mean, what do you do in Copenhagen in February besides leave?
Zurich? Geneva? Vienna is about 40% cheaper to live in than those Swiss wonderlands. Surprisingly, the publication that calls itself “The Economist” doesn’t consider cost of living in its rankings of livability.

Anyway, three percent short of perfect is still pretty good.

The Retired City

Here’s my theory—Vienna is a retired CEO disguised as a city.

Don’t get me wrong, Vienna is a vital place, it’s not the sitting-on-the-porch-in-a-rocking-chair kind of retired. It’s the capital of Austria, and a major nexus for business. It’s an important medical R&D center and a leading tech hub. OPEC has a big presence as do many of the multinationals. The streets and restaurants are full of smartly dressed business people making things happen.

But it’s a city that worked hard as the seat of an empire for centuries, socked away its cultural wealth and accolades, then took its golden parachute. Now it’s living its best life, managing its retirement portfolio for the long-term, and settling into that golden time when it has health, wealth, and friends, while leaving all the drama to the youngsters.

It’s a city that gets its exercise, eats well, dresses up for the opera, has the kids home for the holidays, and enjoys life after they leave. It has everything it wants and needs, thank you very much.

So let’s run the numbers:

Overall Score: 4.55

That’s the second best score overall, slightly behind Freiburg. But one consideration not included in the scorecard is access to health insurance. That’s because I set up my criteria thinking we were really only looking at German destinations.

Signing up for Austria’s very good insurance program is straightforward and inexpensive. In Germany, the public health insurance program is essentially closed to new subscribers after age 55. The private insurance in Germany is better, but more expensive.

On the Ground

First off, Vienna does not want your car. It wants you walking its streets or riding its trains. The public transportation system is considered by many to be the best in the world. Residents pay 365 euros for an annual pass that gets them access to the local trains, buses, subways, and streetcars. And there’s no turnstiles or tickets involved—you just walk on and off without hassle. This is a city where living without a car might feel perfectly natural. (BTW, retirees get access to Austria’s countrywide train system for a whopping 29 euros per year.)

Vineyards, you ask? Vienna is the only capital city in the world with vineyards within the city limits. Multiple vineyards in the city itself. What does that say about its priorities?

How about mountains? Sure! This is Austria, after all. The Northern Alps are about an hour and a half away.

Thriving Altstadt? Kinda, sorta? So much of the city is pedestrian-friendly that it all feels like an old town, but the businesses aren’t so traditional and it all feels current.

English-speaking community? In spades. Healthcare? World-class and easily accessible. Fresh food? Take a walk through the Naschmarkt. Dining? Don’t get me started. Music? We’re talking about Vienna here.

Vienna is also a very safe city—with a crime index less than half of Atlanta’s. (Once they caught that Harry Lime guy, criminal activity plummeted.)

Tourists? Sure, why not?

Vienna is, of course, a big tourist town, but even the tourists feel different. A trip through Switzerland, London, or Barcelona means dodging the flood of influencers who spent their morning getting themselves made up so that they could pose in front of one iconic view or another. We saw one in the Michaelina Wautier exhibit in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and she just looked silly. You don’t see much of that in Vienna.

Mozart don’t Instagram.

The thing about Vienna is that it is a big city, but on the ground it feels like the worst parts of being a big city have been stripped away. There’s little traffic, and the noise that comes with it is missing. Crime is low, getting around is easy, and the scale of the city itself doesn’t feel overwhelming, like New York, London, or Paris sometimes can. It’s both vital and calm. It’s a great place to visit, and it sure looks like a great place to live.

Song of the Week

Once upon a time, there were two sworn enemies born of the same mother: Bono Vox and Ultravox. But there could be only one, and so they met in a clash to the death.

They say that Ultravox fought more valiantly, but Bono Vox laid a trap that involved a lot of old-school cameras and flash bulbs in an opera house. In the end, Bono Vox emerged as the victor. The trap, however, backfired and he was blinded in the battle. Ever since, he has been forced to wear special prosthetic sunglasses in order to see, despite looking ridiculous in them.

In shame for killing his brother, Bono Vox dropped the “Vox” from his name and has gone by “Bono” ever since. Swearing that he would redeem himself , he has roamed the world, saving one starving child at a time. It was long ago, but those of us who witnessed the battle can never forget it, for it happened in Vienna. Oh, Vienna!

This story makes as much sense as this video. But I always stopped and watched it when it came on MTV in 1981.

Now that I hit 60, I realize only people in their seventies or eighties are going to say that now. I don’t want to be insulting, but I think their perspective is skewed.

As I woke this morning, thinking about what it means to be sixty, a song came to mind. That’s not surprising. In my youth, I could have entire conversations where I did little but communicate through song lyrics. I still have the ability and the database of lyrics, I’m just old enough now to understand that it’s quite the annoying habit.

Anyway, the lyric that came to mind: “I don’t count my losses now, only my gains.”

That’s the line—from a Paul Kelly song I hadn’t heard in a few years. In fact, I couldn’t remember the song, only the line.

I lay still for quite a while, counting my gains: Mi Esposa next to me, the house around me, friends, good work, financial plans, family, health.

There are, of course, little aches and pains.

Wait. I think that’s the name of the song: Little Aches and Pains. Now I remember.

Disabled we’re born, disabled we die
Is that a cliché? I’ll make it one.
And hope it doesn’t get too creaky

I have found that what you don’t know will hurt you
And what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
Leaves you with little aches and pains
I got ‘em always now, sunshine or rain
Oh, these little aches and pains
I don’t count my losses now, just my gains.

You see, I can still let a song speak for me. It just a different song than when I was 15.

Little Aches and Pains is the end of a cycle, the story of a failed romance. The great Australian songwriter released a little over a decade ago when he was in his late fifties, nearly my age now.

One can only lie in a warm bed and count one’s gains for so long. If you are in the right place, they come easily to you. But if you stay still, the other things come. The regrets.

I’ve never been one to dwell too much on bad descisions. More often than not, the difference between a good and a bad descision is luck—the thing that determines the outcome often happens outside of one’s control. The bad descisions just roll off me. As Iay there, though, warm and cozy in my bed, the real regrets surface. The cruelties, the callousness. Real sources of shame. Those can spiral up from the past—everything from conversations last week to long-forgotten scenes on elementary school buses. There’s no remedy for those.

The Paul Kelly song is from Spring and Fall a disarmingly simple album, both in arrangement and lyric. It’s opening track is rooted in John Donne, and the final, unlisted bonus track is a song lifted from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. When I first heard it a decade ago, it didn’t really stick with me. I was hoping for some of the fantastic pop hooks and witty lyrics I’d fallen in love with when I’d first heard Kelly in the 80s. But I’ve come to love simplicity in most aspects of my life, and late in my fifties Spring and Fall has come back around to me.

There’s a lesson in the way he stripped away the useless and ornamental, getting down to the heart of things, laid bare.

Last month, he released a new record, Seventy, marking his seventieth birthday. Adele has some time to catch up to that. Seventy is quite good. I’ll write about it in a decade or so, when I can understand it.

Eventually the day calls. It’s my sixtieth birthday. I have plans for the day, and a fantastic trip scheduled for tomorrow. My bladder pressed, and I got out from under the covers. The plantar fascitis in my right foot tweaked when I stepped on the cold floor. Little aches and pains. I’ve got ‘em now, sunshine or rain.

Passau University students make up about a quarter of the city’s population, and almost everywhere you get a university, you get English-speakers. The Danube, the Inn, and Ilz all come together at Passau, which is why it’s known as the City of Three Rivers. That makes it the Pittsburgh of Germany but with a better baseball team.

Every German city worth its salt has a cathedral. And since Passau’s main trade was salt in the ancient days, its cathedral, St. Stephens is a good one. It known for its magnificent pipe organ, the largest in the world. I’m sure Chevy Chase would have a joke for that, but I don’t.

I know what you’ve been thinking. Europe is too expensive. I could never live there. According to Numbeo, rent is 52% less than Atlanta, a good dinner is 36% less, and a decent bottle of wine is 65% less. Think of that next time you see a $30 burger on the dinner menu. You’d expect the quality of life to be low, but Passau scores quite high on that with great arts and culture and low crime.

The city has a vibrant dining scene with local producers at its heart. Dairy is particularly strong, so there’s a good cheese culture, but the area doesn’t have much of a wine scene. As you might expect from Bavaria, it’s got the beer thing going on, though.

It' also has one of the best old town sections in the region. Lots of flaneuring to be had in Passau. All in all, it has a lot in common with other German college towns like Heidelberg or Freiberg, but is much more laid back and costs less.

The downside is that it’s not easily accessible. The closest major airport, Munich, is two and a half hours away. Passau is not a major hub on the train system either, so it’s not a great location to explore the continent from.

So lets take a look at the numbers:

Overall score: 3.72

An aside

I’ve eschewed politics and the more dreadful parts of history here because lately politics brings much anger, despair, and little hope. But just because I don’t write about the worst aspects of Germany history doesn’t mean I’m not aware of them. If you are in Germany, you can’t help but be aware. As a nation, Germany does not look away from its Nazi past. I encountered mournful markers of what this country did under the Third Reich in most towns I’ve passed through. To travel through Germany is to see a country continue to confront its own crimes. But the atrocities of Passau are worse than the other places I’ve looked at so far in my survey. Three subcamps of the Mauthausen concentration camp were located in this city. Visiting Passau, or living there, involves being face-to-face with that history. For me, Passau’s history would overwhelm the blinders I wear to make it through this world. This is not a stance based on some sort of moral high ground. I don’t pretend to be that pure. Passau simply wouldn’t let me look away. But I think Passau would be a very fine place to live.

Song of the Week

Let me not cast aspersions on Green Onions. It was my ringtone for years—it is a perfect cut. Flawless.

But Steve Cropper’s run at Stax is stacked and I thought I’d surface another perfect cut, written by Cropper and his pal Eddie Floyd one dark and stormy night at the Lorraine Motel. Yeah, that one. I like thinking of these two legends, one White, one Black, young friends working together, crafting this timeless song together and laughing.

How stormy was it? It was like thunder. Lightning. It was frightening.

They wrote it for Otis Redding, but Stax boss Jim Stewart didn’t think it was a good fit and Floyd recorded it instead. Stewart was wrong and Redding recorded it later. But Floyd’s version is still the best.

Once upon a time, you could write your way to a good living. I dare say those days are gone.

Elizabeth Spiers, one of the founders of Gawker, just published her remembrance of those heady days when the internet was fun, Requiem for Early Blogging. She writes about quitting her gig as an equity analyst as her blog blew up into a full-time gig. She’s had a long and fruitful career since then, as a contributing writer to the NYTimes, hosts a podcast for Slate, and bylines in Wapo, New Republic, Fast Company, GQ, etc.

But the post ends with a note that she’s looking for a new gig. Her profile photo shows her behind the mic in a podcast studio, because that’s what writers do—podcast.

I’m not writing all this as a critique of Elizabeth Spiers, who is someone I genuinely admire. Rather, it’s a commentary on the state of writing as a profession. It is a disaster.

The End of a Noble Profession

I wrote marketing content for a while, both in-house and freelance. This is the working stiff segment of the writing world, and I was grateful for the work when I had it. I still monitor freelance writing Reddits, and they are currently pits of despair, full of former in-house people who’ve lost their jobs. The entire profession has been subsumed by the AI wave, and they are all looking for a place to sell their buggy whips. And because many of them were freelancers, they aren’t showing up in the unemployment stats.

Meanwhile, the demise of journalism has not been overstated. In about a month, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution will send out its last paper copy. I don’t the announcement surprised anyone. Digital will continue, but it’s a different animal and the newsroom is just an echo of a ripple of a Xerox of its former self. Freelancers can find gigs, but not as many as lucrative.

Books? Dear God, no. I have a friend who just published a fantastic novel to not much acclaim. The popular publishing industry has no idea how to sell something that doesn’t already have an audience. Editorial is driven by marketing departments, and marketing relies almost exclusively on identity and grievance. The literary world is turning and turning in a widening gyre.

What’s a Poor Writer To Do?

Dorothy Parker once said, “I hate writing, but I love having written.” For much of my life, I wanted to be a writer, but I did not enjoy writing. When I started my novel, I knew that the writing would be a slog. But I couldn’t not write the story, and so I wrote. Badly, at first. I revised the manuscript many times, and each time I did, I improved not just the draft, but myself. Each pass made me a better writer as I forced myself to deal with my writing mistakes.

I wrote badly until I wrote well enough to enjoy it.

Now, I look forward to my precious, focused writing time, and I largely enjoy the results. I can reread these pieces with pleasure. If someone asks me what I do these days, I’ll most often say, “I’m a writer.” That’s not what pays the bills, but it is how I think. I’m happy to be writing again. And be read.

On Thanksgiving morning, I got a notification from Substack that I’d added my 125th subscriber. For some, that number might seem like a pittance. There are writers on this platform with hundreds of thousands paid subscribers. But for me, this venture is a gathering of friends.

So I am giving my thanks for each of you that have subscribed, read, or joined the conversation. Over the years, I’ve done much work that just disappeared into the void. And when I launched this Substack five months ago, I expected this work to follow those pieces into that dark. I felt the urge to write again and I told myself that doing the work would be enough, regardless of finding an audience.

Instead, there are comments, likes, shares. Real-life conversations over lunch or drinks. I was at a family gathering on Thanksgiving evening, and a cousin arrived and told me that his family had spent the previous day “flaneuring.” Imagine my mutiliation of the French language moving to the next generation. What’s not to love?

So I’m grateful for you, dear reader. Here you are, reading all the way to the end. You should know that you’re the reason there’s joy in the writing.

Song of the Week

When’s the last time I thought of ZZ Top? The beards, the car, the goofy keychain, the digital fuzz guitar effect have all passed into that 80's fog for better or worse.

In high school, My boss at the Record Exchange in Williamsville once showed up in the middle of my Sunday afternoon shift, closed the store and took me to a nearby bar to drink the afternoon away and play pool. He’d done his wife wrong the night before, and she’d tossed him out. This wasn’t an unusual situation. He was drinking buddies with local concert promoter Harvey Weinstein.

I drank cokes, ate a burger, and shot pool. He did shots, played pool, and pumped quarters into the jukebox. He played ZZ Top’s“Blue Jean Blues” over and over again. There was no one else around to complain.

I doubt I’ll listen to ZZ Top again for another decade or so, but today I’m going to queue up the best of as I go about my day. Enjoy.

Usually, I’ll end up at the Goodwill checking out the book selection, maybe I’ll stop at an estate sale or two, then have a banh mi and pho at Lee’s Bakery.

It turns out that my act of wandering has deep literary roots. Flâneur is a French noun I’ve spent years incorrectly twisting into a verb and refers to “a type of urban “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, or “loafer.”

To lift a whole paragraph from Wikipedia:

Sainte-Beuve wrote that to flâne “is the very opposite of doing nothing”. Honoré de Balzac described flânerie as “the gastronomy of the eye”. Anaïs Bazin wrote that “the only, the true sovereign of Paris is the flâneur”. Victor Fournel, in Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (What One Sees in the Streets of Paris, 1867), devoted a chapter to “the art of flânerie”. For Fournel, there was nothing lazy in flânerie. It was, rather, a way of understanding the rich variety of the city landscape; it was like “a mobile and passionate photograph” of urban experience.

(Even though I now know the verb is actually “flâne,” I’m still going to use “flâneur” because:

1. I’m still an ugly American only slightly ashamed of my ignorance,

2. If I say I’m going to flâne, Mi Esposa will expect that I’m heading out for a Cuban custard, and

3. I’m trying to learn a modicum of German right now and learning a French declension is just too far for me.)

Of course, the streets of 19th-century Paris were overrun with philosophers like Balzac and Baudelaire, so every stroll, lounge, saunter, or loaf carried deep philosophical and historical weight and required an essay or three. Don’t worry, though, Kathleen Rooney carries on the tradition of documenting the importance of the flâneur at the Poetry Foundation with her essay, Don’t Forget the Flâneur.

Ok, Forget the Flaneur

Fo us more trivial folks, Kurt Vonnegut just calls it “farting around.” His advocacy for farting around has become a popular meme and shows up in Facebook feeds fairly often. For him, it is our highest purpose. Here he is trying to convince us to spend an hour buying an envelope.

Vonnegut farted around in New York City, though he was so practiced at it that he could pull it off anywhere. I was once in a house in Sagaponack Bay that he wandered in while farting around. Here’s some proof:

For the rest of us, a good flâneur requires a certain type of place. It’s easier in Manhattan than any other American city, but it’s still a bit of a challenge. Mainly because New York is so damned busy. Tourists wander around “The Big Apple,” but New Yorkers are always late on their way somewhere. They do not flaneur. (To be fair, a resident of an well-educated, international city like NYC would defintely flâne, not flaneur.)

A Flaneur in the City Too Busy To Walk

The best thing Atlanta has to offer a flâneur is The Beltline. The Beltline is glorious, but there’s not much randomness involved, and randomness is key to a good farting around. On the Beltline, you go one direction and then turn around and go back. And that walk on the Beltline is often packaged as “exercise.” Atlantans are too busy to fart around on the Beltline, but we will go out and close our rings.

Mi Esposa and I strung together a nice day of flâneuring in Atlanta a few weeks back. We wandered through the Halcyon development in Alpharetta, and I was impressed by how many of the businesses were local. That requires a real effort on the planner’s part. We had a nice lunch at Gu’s dumplings there, then drove over to Alpharetta, where we walked, had a rooftop cocktail, and popped into some shops. In true flaneur fashion, nothing was purchased. Finally, we ended up in Roswell for dinner and wine. It was a good day. Of course, there were many miles of driving between these little clusters of pedestrian-friendly spaces.

So it goes.

Let’s Do It Right

Flâneuring really only works in a metropolis that invites people to get lost in its tangled streets. This is why a thriving altstadt is a key when I look at retirement destinations. The altstadt, or old town, is core to traditional European cities. Most of these cities allow only limited motor vehicle access in these areas, and the businesses spill onto the streets and sidewalks with flowers, kiosks and café tables. This, of course, is what every American developer has been trying to pull off for the past half century or more. Avalon or Atlantic Station in Atlanta are what we get when we try to build an altstadt but the investor wants Lenox Mall.

For many Americans, the altstadt is the part of a European trip that they enjoy the most. Yes, there’s the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, but a trip to Paris is about just “taking in the city.”

“I just love wandering around the city—all the little shops and cafés,” they say.

Yeah, that’s farting around. But since we’re talking about Paris, they can say they are flâneuring.

Song of the Week

Despite the existence of Dionne Warwick, Dion DiMucci can still get away with just being “Dion.” After an entire post about the art of wandering, and mention of Dion, you’d expect this week’s song to be a certain 1962 hit that made number two on the charts. Nope, here’s the far superior King of the New York Streets.

For traditional newspaper folks, Heidelberg means one thing: printing presses. Sure, our hero Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press down the river in Mainz, but Heidelberg stole the technology, and its printing presses have ruled the newspaper industry for a long time. In fact, I’d bet the presses the Atlanta Journal Constitution is set to shut down in a few weeks are all Heidelbergs.

If you’re not a print nerd, you might know Heidelberg as a university town. Heidelberg University is Germany’s oldest and most prestigious school, and the university dominates the city. Students making up about a quarter of its 160,000-resident population.

Heidelberg is one of three cities that form a little cluster near the convergence of the Neckar River and the Rhine—the others in the triangle are Mannheim and Speyer. The three of them set up like a fractured fairy tale for three very different kingdoms—religious, industrial, and intellectual. With its 1000-year-old cathedral, nearby Speyer is the religious center of the region. Mannheim is industrial, and is where both the bicycle and the automobile were invented. Contrary to popular belief, the Steamroller was not invented in Mannheim.

Philosopher Walking The Planck

The university draws a large English-speaking community and makes for a very welcoming environment for American expats. It also leads to a vibrant cultural scene, with the student population drawing in major touring acts along with stoking its own arts scene. With four Max Planck Institutes based in the city, it has a particularly strong international research community. This place is so caught up in being smart, even the city’s main hiking trail is called The Philosopher’s Walk.

But there’s much more to recommend Heidelberg than the university. For most tourists, the castle is the draw of the city. They have called writers and artists for centuries, and were a focus of the Romantic school of painters. Even Mark Twain toured it and wrote glowingly of it in A Tramp Abroad. Twain had a pretty low tolerance for bullshit, so I take his recommendation seriously. Not surprisingly, the heart of the city is its Altstadt. Heidelberg’s is busy and popular, with lots of great dining options and clubs.

Beyond the castle, Heidelberg has landscape to spare. It straddles the Neckar River and is protected on three sides by moderately sized mountains. That shelter leads to one of the warmer climates in Germany and crops such as figs and almonds grow in the area.

Heidelberg is in the Pfalz region, known by vinophiles as the Tuscany of Germany. The mix of a wealthy international community, an emphasis on local and organic agriculture, and great wine leads to a lot of fantastic dining options around the city.

So let’s take a look at the numbers.

The Scorecard

Overal Score: 4.2

Heidelberg really takes a hit based on cost of living. Renting/buying is tough in the city and not much better in the surrounding areas. Groceries, dining, etc. are also rough. Overall, it costs about 10% more to live in Heidelberg than Freiburg, the most comparable city on the list.

Song of the Week

In this era of 70s and 80s nostalgia, somehow CB radios and 18-wheeled convoys have largely been erased from our collective memories. In general, I’d endorse that erasure. But given that I made a quip about Mannheim Steamroller, I thought I’d mention that the whole CB radio phenomenon was launched into the public consciousness by the hit country single, Convoy, by CW McCall. CW McCall wasn’t a real person, but was actually a cash grab by Will Fries and his friend Chip Davis, who’d also launched his new age musical entity, Mannheim Steamroller, around the time Convoy spurred a Sam Peckinpah movie starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw.

It’s the Christmas season, so if you happen to go to a Mannheim Steamroller holiday show, be sure to hold up a lighter and shout out “Convoy” like a drunk redneck trying to get the band to play Freebird.

And speaking of cash grab, I’d really like to know what the Rhodes Scholar/musical genius behind Me and Bobby McGee and Sunday Morning Coming Down was thinking when he signed up for this role.

The bright morning light streamed in the front windows and the brass fixtures shone. The bartender wore a clean white shirt and a bow tie. The other men at the bar would talk as they drank their coffee. Once or twice, one made an attempt to include me, but we couldn’t get past the language thing. The customers would come and go, and when I finished my cornetti, I headed out for my own day of exploration and soon some other Italian patron would take my place.

Decades later, that still feels like a platonic ideal way to start a morning.

That place doesn’t exist in a city like Atlanta where cars rule. People do not drive up to a place to spend ten minutes standing at a bar for a coffee and a ‘good morning’ with neighbors. Instead, they wait in the drive-through line and drink their coffee absentmindedly as they navigate traffic.

There is a US phenomena of retirees gathering regularly for breakfast at places like McDonald’s for morning chats. It’s something we need more of, but it’s not the same. Because they made a point of driving there, the group settles in for a while. No one from outside the circle joins in. A stranger might even be welcome, but they will not feel welcome seeing that table of old friends gathered. The standing bar of shifting acquaintances is different. It welcomes strangers, even those that can’t speak the language.

...And Behind Door Number One—A Brand! New! Car!

The other day, my nephew asked me what car I would drive if I had my choice. He said he wanted a fast car, some flashy sports model—I can’t remember which one. I had no good answer. I sold my car about six months ago, and although I’ll probably need to buy another at some point, it’s not something I look forward to.

My buddy Noel and his wife just celebrated their 30th anniversary, and for almost that entire run, they’ve been a one-car family. When Noel still commuted, he did so on MARTA. Of late, he works from home. I don’t pay attention to what car any of my friends drive, but I know that Noel tells the world every day what his priorities are.

My carlessness isn’t based on the kind of discipline it takes to ride MARTA when you could afford a car. Mi Esposa and I both work from home, and she seldom uses her car. My mom lives up the street. She’s in her mid-eighties, but doesn’t want to sell either of her cars. Altogether, the three of us drive less than 10,000 a year, but owned four cars.

I just got exasperated that we were all paying insurance and taxes on depreciating cars and sold my 2017 Tucson in April and put the money in the market. The gains along with money saved in insurance will fund next year’s European cycling adventure.

There’s a t-shirt that says bikes bring the freedom that car ads promise. The promise of those ads—hulking SUVs driving on rugged dirt roads in Big Sky Country—is picturesque but unlikely to go unfulfilled. A recent informal survey of drivers’ expressions on the top-end Perimeter at rush hour confirmed that.

Cars make our lives easier. In Atlanta, they are essential. But they make us lazy, often choosing to drive for something that we could accomplish with a walk or a pedal. Collectively, that choice costs us a lot.

One of my prime criteria for evaluating European cities for retirement is a “thriving altstadt.” These are places where the choice to walk is natural and getting in a car is discouraged.

That trip to Italy was 35 years ago, and the old men that stood at that bar are surely gone now. Some mornings, I walk up to the square in my town and wander around a bit. I get some movement and take in the morning air before coming back home and settling in for work. It’s a good way to start a day, even without the cappuccino.

It is not with nostalgia that I remember that little bar, but inspiration. When I think of the connection of place, the comfort of ritual it offered are things to aim for in the coming years.

Getting an Early Start

I used to think there would be a day when I would close up my laptop and say, “That’s it, I’m done! No more job!” Although that day may come, I’ve begun to think of the line between working and retirement as very fuzzy. I still have several years before Social Security and Medicare kick in and I’m enjoying my work, but there’s definitely a wiff of retirement in the air.

I’ve started modeling the life I want to lead in retirement. I’ve made traveling a priority. I’ve stopped worrying about career paths and promotions. I try to be in less of a rush all the time. And I sold my car. I still have easy access to one when I need it, but these days my default is to walk or pedal. It’s a little thing that’s made a big shift in the way I live my life.

Song of the Week

Forty years later, 80s music is having a revival. From Kate Bush to Prince, the 80s charts are being rediscovered by a new generation. I really love some of that stuff, but it’s not what my 80s sounded like.
I was diving into what the messy space between country and rock in that era. Great country acts like Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle, kd lang, and Lyle Lovett made me want to wear bolo ties even as Cowpunks like the Long Riders, Dave Alvin, and X made that seem like a good choice.

Of all of those, the band that hit me hardest has been overlooked completely during this 80s nostalgia: Green on Red. Chuck Prophet, the band’s guitarist, has a legitimate career out on his own, but it’s the sloppy drunk years of Green on Red that still bring me joy.

And this track—Time Ain’t Nothin’, that gets me the most these days. It has become something of an anthem for me as I think about the next step.

When my friends and I hired a tour company for our Irish cycling trip last spring, we were assigned to Wilma, and imagined a young Irish lass in a cable knit sweater. We made Flintstone jokes as her emails about itinerary passed between us.

When Wilma delivered the bikes to us, she turned out to be “Vilma,” a very helpful middle-aged German woman from the Black Forest region. While we were chatting over coffee before starting the ride, I decided to ask her about the one place near the Black Forest I knew. “Should I retire to Freiburg?”

She looked at me like a cult member who had just heard the magic words. “Oh My God, Yes!” She said. You could see the exclamation point floating in the air. She went on to heap so much praise on Freiburg that I’m still not sure why she lives in Ireland.

I first noticed Freiburg im Breisgau when I had a renewable energy writing gig and it came up in my research a bunch of times. Known as Europe’s solar city, its showpiece is Vauban, a district that is almost wholly energy-self-sufficient. Freiburg’s large university is a leader in renewable energy research. Interesting, but not the kind of profile that would drive you to relocate there. But what I read made me do more research, and everything I saw, I liked.

What’s a Freiburg?

Freiburg doesn’t really enter the American consciousness much. A smallish city tucked on the southwest edge of the Black Forest, Americans know it for its university or its futbol team if they know it at all. Germans consider it for its abundant sunshine and excellent red wine—both rarities in that country.

If it’s not already clear, I’m not interested in retiring to a place where everyone else is retired. But if Freiburg wasn’t a hotbed of green tech innovation and research, it might have been one of Germany’s most popular retirement destinations. Everything we want is in close proximity.

There are several fine vineyards just a hike from the city center. Also, the mountains of the Black Forest are a twenty-minute walk from the Altstadt. If those mountains are too soft and green, the spiky, snowy Alps are a short Swiss-train ride away. If you are looking for the arts, Basel is a 40-minute train ride away. Hell, it takes me more than 40 minutes to ride MARTA to the High Museum. Zurich, and its international airport, is a quick two-hour ride.

Okay, but enough about what’s around Freiburg. What’s in Freiburg?

The city’s Altstadt is outstanding and vibrant, anchored by the 800-year-old Freiburger Münster Cathedral. A daily Munstermarkt is held in the Platz, filled with fresh local produce and local street food. There’s a vital music and arts scene in the city, driven by over 30,000 university students. The university draws a large English-speaking community as well.

A central part of the city is the Schlossberg, a forested hill adjacent to the Altstadt. Over the millennia, it’s hosted castles and fortifications, but now it has an excellent restaurant, a beer garden, and music venues. There are lots of ruins and historical markers as well as a new observation tower with fantastic views. There’s lots of hiking trails as well.

The city has built a lot of infrastructure to promote walking and cycling and cars are discouraged in much of the city.

Food? Multiple Michelin stars in several high-end spots along with high standards in the everyday wine bars and small pubs.

Cost of living? 16.4% less than Atlanta. Housing can be a bit of a challenge, but still cheaper than Atlanta.

So let’s take a look at the numbers:

Overall grade: 4.6

That very high score makes Freiburg the new leader by a considerable margin.

Seriously, I was tempted not to publish this post lest it drive too much interest in the place and drive up costs. One of the main challenges of this project is finding a place that would be great to settle down in, not just visit. I want to know what it’s like to buy groceries and deal with the day-to-day.

Freiburg looks like it has one of the best lifestyles in Germany—sunny, engaged, beautiful, and cultural, all with the best of the natural landscape at its door.

Song of the Week

The band Hem announced that they are re-releasing their debut album, Rabbit Songs, in the coming days. They were a favorite of mine when they were active a couple of decades ago, and I’m hopeful this means they’re working on something new.
This instrumental cut, The Burnt-Over District, is pivotal for me. Around the time it came out, I was publishing my audio literary magazine, Verb. I loved the cut and asked the band for permission to include it as an interlude between stories, and they approved.
But the name intrigued me. “Burnt-Over District” is such an odd phrase. What the hell is a burnt-over district?
It turns out to be a name for Western and Central New York, inspired by the region’s early 19th-century religious radicalism. Although I grew up in the heart of that region, I knew nothing of the name or that history. It led me to research the place where I was born. I went down a deep rabbit hole that taught me what a strange and remarkable place I was born to. I couldn’t stop, and ten or so years later, I published a novel, The Hidden Light of Northern Fires, rooted in that research. So this song changed my life.

There, I said it. You can wheel me off to the memory care wing now.

A trio of friends and I cycled a chunk of Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way earlier this summer. There were delightful accents, cliffs, whisky, beer, and lots of laughing. Uncontrollable fits of laughter.

And stewed prunes.

Breakfast was provided at every hotel. Porridge served with stewed prunes was on each menu. I liked the meal well enough that when I came home, I bought some prunes and developed my own little recipe. I have them over steel-cut oats a couple of times a month. And they make me think of riding with friends. And yes, they do all the other things you think they’d do.

No, I Don’t Need Help Taking These to My Car

I’ll turn sixty in a couple of months, and I fully embrace my age. If the Kroger check-out lady wants to give me the seniors discount without checking my i.d., she can go right ahead. But I do resent the law that makes me pull out my i.d. to buy a six-pack when I clearly look like I was an active participant in the last century.

I’m no spring chicken, and I sure as hell don’t want anything to do with being young in this era.

Here’s the thing: youth culture is, as they say, cringe. It always has been and always will be, but it practically unbearable these days. Whenever I get a glimpse of it, I feel the need to avert my eyes, just in case the abyss is gazing back. There seems to be nothing but madness there.

Mom Jeans and Dad Jokes

Social media has amplified all the worst things about being young. There seems no measure of success other than attention. And how attention is attained is of no importance. But we suddenly care when this nonsense gets catapulted into our consciousness while we’re scrolling. And when it does, it makes us adjust our aim. We lose our way because the abyss is calling us by name.

But the trick isn’t ignoring what the cool kids are doing, it’s outwitting our own judgment. Whereas the younglings make fun of unhip clothes and music because they want to be arbiters of fashion, those approaching retirement are worried that one blue-plate special is going to send them down a slippery slope to senility. Soon, we’ll be cashing in the Birthday Club free buffet reward at the Golden Corral.

The real joy is finding the things that are a pleasure that we think makes us old. In denying our aging process, we sometimes deny ourselves things that we think only old people do. Like stewed prunes.

And $60 jeans without ragged holes pre-installed. (Distressed jeans seem like some sort of ecological crime to me. To manufacture a perfectly good pair of pants and then abuse them so badly they won’t stand up to the wash machine more than a few times. And do not ask me to distinguish between a standard pair of Levi 501s and $350 worth of selvedge denim.

Also, give me comfortable shoes. And a warm cardigan sweater.

Oh, wait. I’m being told that Taylor Swift has proclaimed cardigan sweater cool. That leaves me in no man’s land on that issue. Also, it turns out that a 1976 El Camino is very cool. I happen to know, through extensive first-hand research, that driving an El Camino in the 80s not make one cool.

Honestly, I’m more bothered by the things that make me retroactively cool than the things that make me uncool.

In some ways, it makes sense that the identity issues that plagued us in high school plague us again as we approach retirement. Work and family have occupied all of our time for so long that when the work ends and the nest is empty, we struggle to say who we are outside of those roles. Suddenly, that Golden Corral birthday dinner looms like an open casket. And anything that looks like it sends us fleeing.

But those things don’t make us old. The way we engage in the world does. When we become rigid and fixed in our thinking, we’re doomed. When we engage our surrounding with curiosity, we are still capable of adventure. The way forward is to stay open.

Even to stewed prunes.

Oh—and try them with some orange peel, a cinnamon stick, and a dash of vanilla. Take that, you pumpkin spice fiends!

Song of the Week

Speaking of sounding like an old fogey, here’s the signature song from what is probably the most iconic American album (cover) of the 60s.

I considered doing a photo shoot of myself covered in prunes, but Mi Esposa talked me out of it.
These days, hearing Herb Albert makes you think that it’s time for a Dating Game rerun, but the man was a force to be reckoned with once upon a time. He even wrote a hit for Sam Cooke. Then founded A&M records, which had a hit or two over the years. It’s really a miracle what a little whipped cream can do.

Hamburg—Honestly, I’m not sure how Hamburg ended up on this list of places we might retire. Mi Esposa and I sat together one Saturday night at a table on the square here in Decatur and made a list of places to consider, and Hamburg was on there. So I’m diving in.

But like Manhattan or Philadelphia, it looks much more like a place to retire from, not to.

That’s not to say Hamburg isn’t a great city. It’s a vibrant, culturally rich metropolis which can make legitimate claims as the birthplace of everything from Brahms to the Beatles. It’s got it all, but it’s fast, grey, and expensive.

The Naughty Bits

In fact, the Beatles time in Hamburg sounds pretty emblematic for the city overall—four one-hour sets every night, seven days a week. Four hours of the Beatles in one night sounds like a lot of fun, but doing it seven days a week also sounds kind of exhausting. George Harrison called it the “most naughty city in the world.”

I think “naughty” has a darker overtone for that Liverpudlian than it does for us here in the US.

The city’s population of 1.7 million is about the same as Manhattan. Sitting about 70 miles upriver on the Elbe from the North Sea, Hamburg is Germany’s largest port city and its gateway to the world’s oceans.

It has been a major cultural crossroads for most of its twelve-century history, but is most noted these days for its classical, opera, and jazz scenes. Of course, there’s a thriving independent music and club scene that has little in common with the world-famous Elbphilharmonie concert hall. As an international hub, it also features some of the best dining in the world.

One of my evaluation categories is the need for a thriving altstadt. Hamburg certainly has one, but in a city as modern and international as this, it comes off as a Six Flags Over Hamburg affair.

But it doesn’t offer much in terms of scenery. Of course, the North Sea is a short drive or cruise away, and that’s beautiful in an Ingmar Bergman kind of way, but there’s not much as far as mountains and vineyards to be had.

Let’s check the board.

Overall score: 3.89

I’m not surprised by the overall low ranking. Hamburg looks like a Mercedes convertible. Sure, it’s a gorgeous car, but that high-tech engine does no good to someone who seldom tops 75 mph. I’m interested in a vibrant cultural scene, but I imagine living in a place like Hamburg would mean that there was some vibrant culture happening every damned day and night. And most nights, I’d rather Netflix and chill. And by “chill,” I mean fall asleep on the couch. I already live in a busy, hectic international city.

And although I dislike the heat in the South, Hamburg’s grey winters don’t seem like much of a draw. Hell, I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and I have a sentimental, nostalgic appreciation for them, but Mi Esposa has a touch of seasonal affective disorder, and a home on the North Sea seems like a bad choice.

Like that Mercedes, it’s also very expensive. In many ways, this feels like evaluating a move to New York City.

I think Hamburg is for engaging, weeklong visits during the summer, but I’m voting no.

Song of the Week

You thought there was a Beatles song coming, but no.

For something around fifteen of the last twenty years, I’ve posted Bob Dylan’s Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts to Facebook around this time of year.

This year is no different.

It’s a ritual for me. As a professional festival director, I am forever grateful to Dylan for opening one of his best, most intriguing songs with the line, “The festival was over, and the boys were all planning for a fall.”

This past Saturday, we held Ideas Festival at the Emory’s Oxford Campus. It was a lot of fun, and we all got to close out the day with a singalong with Rosanne Cash to Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

As you might expect, the days after a festival present an interesting opportunity for someone whose work is tied to an annual event. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I do make post-festival commitments. It’s a time to reset and refocus on what’s important. In some ways, it’s like working a night shift. You set your schedule differently than the rest of the world. The morning after you wrap up a festival, the rest of the world goes back to work, and I sit down with a pad and write down the things I want to make happen in the coming year. I think of it as the starting gun for a year’s worth of “I should try that someday” stuff. Jack of Hearts Day is my own private holiday—it’s like Festivus, but without the airing of grievances.

Okay, that’s more of a stick figure drawing, but you get the idea.

On a dull and grey Sunday with nothing much to do, mi esposa and I found ourselves roaming the bowels of Atlanta Vintage Books. We petted the cats, dug through the bargain shelves, and marvelled at the maze-like and sometimes arbitrary organizational scheme. It was glorious. We emerged with a stack of books almost a foot high.

I’ve spent a lot of time in bookstores. Not just shopping, but as a business partner with a bookseller trade group and even as a touring author. I love all types—the tiny, well-curated stores that let you know exactly who the seller is. The efficient ones, that have the Times fiction list on a table at the entrance. But the ones I’ve always loved the most are labyrinthine—converted houses or even barns, with rooms full of forgotten titles that have been out of print for decades. That’s what Atlanta Vintage Books is, despite its strip mall storefront.

It’s Time, Time, Time that You Love

These stores almost always cats. And charming little signs with quotes, like, “Books are mirrors: You only see in them what you already have inside you” or “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” For years, I’ve joked that the worst possible quote to hang in a bookstore would be, “We buy books because we think we’re buying the time to read books.”

The truth of that idea is enough to send you out of the store empty-handed and depressed. It’s a reminder of all those unread books on your shelf, those unkept promises to yourself to sit and immerse yourself in another’s imagination.

According to the internet, that quote is either Arthur Schopenhauer or Warren Zevon. Part of me wants it to be Schopenhauer, because it makes me sound smarter to quote him. On the other hand, I have all of Zevon’s records on vinyl and he used to hang around with Igor Stravinsky, so maybe he makes me sound smart too. All those guys are sleeping now.

Wake Up Child, Pay Attention!

In the internet age, the thing that stops us from reading is not only the lack of time, but the lack of attention. We have, for years, allowed glowing screens and the endorphin hits of social media to drain our ability to focus on a simple page of text, like Daniel Day-Lewis drinking our attention milkshake. (Of course, you are reading this on one of those glowing screens. Irony is not quite dead yet.)

This drain in focus has been insidious, and in retrospect, infuriating. I don’t remember signing up for it, but over the decades of constant smartphone screens and social media posts, we’ve traded our ability to fix our mind on a quiet thing for fleeting little endorphin hits.

Reading isn’t as easy as it once was. Like a sugar-high eight-year-old at a fancy adult dinner table, we squirm and fidget after a few minutes with a book. Maybe the Zevon quote should be that we buy books because we think we’re buying the ability to read them.

The ability to focus cannot be bought, though. It must be reclaimed, nurtured, and protected. Nurtured. Protected. There’s no shortage of advice on dealing with our screen addictions. I like to take a more carrot than stick approach, bribing myself into prolonged time with just the page.

Reclaiming My Time

Recently, I’ve set aside a space in our home for reading—a largely device-free room. A couple of early evenings each week, I’ll put on some good music, pour myself a drink, make a snack, and sit in my favorite chair. The Yankee child in me looks out into the sunlight and thinks I should be outside, but the Atlanta heat tells me to sit inside for a while. Call it an old man’s happy hour. Sometimes, I can feel time is stretching for me, that I’m finding myself in that long-lost flow state. It feels like a triumph.

For many, this time surely sounds like an absurd indulgence. There’s so much to do. Who has the time? After all, we’re buying the books, not the time to read the books.

But the real measure of our lives is the way we choose to spend our time. I understand that we all have our responsibilities, that they come to us unbidden and often unwanted. The truth is that we prioritize other things, or allow them to claim our time. We become the things that we allow to consume our days. And that ability to sit and concentrate on the printed page is who I want to be.

Holding onto these simple things is a challenge. It requires a deliberate, intentional effort. It’s not nostalgia that draws us back to the simple things—it’s instinct. It’s the sense that they are the genuine, worthwhile pleasure.

Song of the Week

Richard Thompson converted to Sufi Islam in the early 70s, and many of his songs come off as a type of secular prayer. How Will I Ever Be Simple Again? moreso than the rest. I was working at Chelsea Records in Ithaca, NY when this record came out, and the store’s owner played it over and over. The whole album has become part of my DNA in the years since, but this song stands out among so many great ones.

Who would think of Düsseldorf as a place to retire? First off, the name is a problem. Just the way it sounds.

I have a habit of noticing places in the US named after European cities. It’s a way of thinking about early American immigrants. Their hopes and dreams are tattooed on the map of the US —New London, New York (formerly New Amsterdam), New Orleans, Toledo, and countless Athenses. For most big cities in Europe, you can find places named for them in the US. There’s even a bunch of little neighborhoods and communities throughout the US named “Innsbruck.”

Düsseldorf, though? Nein.

Nobody got off a ship in America, headed off into the great unknown west, found a piece of land by a river and said, “Let’s build our own little Düsseldorf here!”

For most Americans, if they think of Dusseldorf, they think of an industrial city—steel, machinery, and chemicals drove the city’s economy for much of the post-war twentieth century.

That’s fine. Maybe it will help keep the tourists away.

Keep Düsseldorf a Secret!

Düsseldorf is a magnificent city.

It’s awash in culture—music, theater, arts, festivals, museums, and food.

One of its main financial drivers is its convention and trade show business, and that’s facilitated by fantastic transportation infrastructure. It’s a nexus for trains, with over 1,000 departures per day.

My dreams for life in Europe always involves lots of train travel. I imagine heading out to Paris, Amsterdam, or London for an easy getaway. We ride in comfort, avoid the misery of security, have a drink in the dining car, and arrive in city center with the hotel just a walk or short tram ride away. Living in a city like Düsseldorf makes that vision much easier.

Also, Düsseldorf airport is a major international hub, so getting back and forth to the US wouldn’t be too bad.

It’s one of the most international cities in Germany. Düsseldorf has one of the largest Japanese communities in Europe, and the city’s Little Tokyo district is a vibrant, major attraction. There are sizeable Greek, Turkish, and Italian communities. And let’s not overlook the significant British and American expat population.

The Longest Bar in the World

I spent a couple of days in Düsseldorf last summer. It happened to be during Euro Cup, and there was a big match in town the next day. Euro Cup is a big deal and fans flock in from all over the continent. In the US, they would tailgate—gather in parking lots, drinking and eating out of elaborate barbecue/kitchen setups attached to their cars or RVs. In Germany, they swarm the old town. This, combined with the fact that Düsseldorf’s Altstadt is known as the Longest Bar in the World, made for a raucous couple of hours during my time there. All of the area’s 250 bars and pubs were packed. I managed to get a good meal in the midst of all of it, and met a couple of friendly Irish hooligans to boot. I had a lot of fun in the midst of the chanting and all, but it should be noted that the madness was pretty well contained. A few blocks away, everything seemed pretty normal.

If there’s a knock on Düsseldorf, it’s that it is so urban. It’s not an outdoor playground like Innsbruck or even Bern with its looming mountains. But it’s a great place to see music, theater, and interesting people. It’s right in the middle of Western Europe and a great base for visiting the rest of the continent. But it doesn’t have the majestic landscape and the weather tends to be a little grayer. It’s cloudier than the places that retirees flock to.

But all is not lost. Koblenz, the heart of Germany’s largest wine region, is about a ninety-minute drive south. Living in Atlanta, that feels like little more than a daily commute. And there are lots of castles down that way, too. Lots.

And of course, there’s the Rhine itself.

A few decades ago, the city dug a tunnel for a big highway and reclaimed its waterfront. Now that stretch is Rheinuferpromenade, miles of shops, restaurants, event venues, and green spaces. When I was there, the area was packed with local families quietly relaxing in the sun at the same time the Altstadt was earning its “longest bar in the world” title with soccer festivities.

Two Wheels Good

For a cyclist, the city has a lot to offer. There are lanes and trails everywhere, and the laws protecting cyclists are enforced, leading drivers to pay close attention. And of course, there’s Eurovelo 15. That’s the biking route I was on last summer when I stopped for a couple of days, and it’s one of Europe’s cycling highways, running from the Swiss Mountains all the way to the North Sea. It crosses other major routes along the way, so there are endless possibilities.

One of the questions that comes to mind when picking a really scenic location for retirement is, “What am I going to do when I get there?” Hiking and winter sports are central to places like Innsbruck or the Allgau, but will I want more to engage me than that? That’s not a question in a city like Düsseldorf. But that’s the balance. How much peace and quiet do I really want? If we end up in a city, Düsseldorf feels like a perfect fit for me—livable, relatively affordable, engaging, central, and friendly.

Okay, as they say on that show on public radio, let’s do the numbers:

Overall score: 4.2—We have a new leader.

When I first mentioned Düsseldorf as a possibility, my wife looked at me shocked. Not because she dislikes it, but because she still has many family connections just over the river from there, so it would be a favorite option for sentimental reasons. It turns out to have a lot to offer outside that consideration.

Song of the Week

I was going to post a Clara Schumann Scherzo. She lived in Düsseldorf for some very productive but tragic years, but I copped out and went with Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert.

Köln and Düsseldorf are separated by just 25 miles and a whole lot of friendly animosity. Don’t order a Kölsch beer in Düsseldorf or an Altbier in Köln unless you’re prepared for verbal abuse.

Despite that, I don’t expect to review any places closer to Köln than Düsseldorf, so this is my only opportunity to post one of the most sublime recordings available to humankind.

No, this was for closing all my rings for the 1,750th time on my Apple Watch. In other words, I’ve done my allotted amount of exercise, movement, and standing daily for nearly five years’ worth of days.

The award, I should say, was nothing more than some colored pixels.

Here, I’ll share it with you without requiring you to stand even once.

Yes, I’ve been sucked into Apple’s activity app for years now, and I let it control big portions of my life.

This is largely due to gamification, which uses all the psychological tools developed by video games over the past 40 years to draw you in and keep you engaged. Quests and goals, periodic awards, reminders, little attainable challenges, badges, and progress tracking are just a few of the mechanisms. Apple has lined all these up to keep me moving.

Instinctively, I resist being manipulated even as much of the technology we pay money for is designed to do so—to envelop us and to make giving it our attention a constant habit. Facebook and its endorphin hits are the most obvious perpetrator, but all the notifications and reminders on our phones and desktops are no better. We all dislike being treated like automotons that are going to react in specific ways to specific stimuli.

But then there’s the fitness app. I’ve given in to it wholly. I check my stand goals constantly, plan time to close the movement and exercise rings, rally to double or triple my movement goal when I’m riding or running.

In some ways, I feel like Apple should send me an award for being the world’s biggest sucker.

But the thing is, it’s made a big difference in my life. I’m unquestionably healthier than I was a decade ago. I eat better, I sleep better, my weight’s down. I feel better about myself. Because of this damned watch.

As I take on the old man’s shake of fist at clouds personally, I resist technology more and more every day. I intentionally look for chances to step away from the keyboard, the screen, and the phone. I take time to read paper books in quiet rooms with no screens. I cook everything from scratch. Rather than ride a sleek new carbon fiber bike, I built up a 40-year-old steel one to be just the way I like it.

I haven’t always been such a crank. I used to be an early adopter. I had a TRS-80 Model III when I was 14. (Look it up, younglings.) I built my first Pro Tools sound rig in the mid-nineties, stringing together enough loose hard drives using SCSI cables to master my first radio series. I once read all of Twain’s Roughing It on a Kyocera 6035 Palm phone, the Frankenstein’s monster of a predecessor to the iPhone.

Hell, I convinced Jeff Bezos to underwrite my first public radio series six months before Amazon went public. (True story.)

But somewhere along the trail, the wind shifted. I can’t remember the last time a new technology came around that made my life better.

Sure, there’s much more of it. And all this innovation is around making us “more productive.” But more productive doesn’t mean better.

Technologies that came out of Silicon Valley used to make our lives easier. I use maps all the time. I couldn’t/wouldn’t have written a novel without a word processor. I like having all the music in the world at my disposal. But those innovations are a generation or two old.

I Do Not Welcome Our Robot Overlords

Instead, it feels like technology is increasingly makes life more difficult in small ways and large. Everything from having to order food at a kiosk to tracking endless passwords to having AI and social media chip away at the sense of shared experience, the trust in news, and faith in public information.

Cory Doctorow may have coined the term “Enshittification” in 2022, but it is more relevant every day. From Merriam-Webster:

Do you remember when you could search for something in Google and the first page of results were not all someone trying to sell you something? Or when you entered a product name in Amazon and the first results were the actual product and not a sponsored substitute? If so, then you’ve experienced enshittification. And it’s the way with most technology these days. But it’s the water we swim in.

Short of going full Ted Kazynski, it’s nearly impossible to leave digital technology behind. But over the last decade, my default switch for automatic updates has slid from yes to no. I probably don’t want it or need it, and almost certainly won’t pay for it. I become more and more skeptical of the marketing machine that is trying to create need in me for something.

It’s an old-man shift, shaking my fist at the cloud. But it’s more than that—it’s part of the process of building my handbasket.

Taking Me for a Ride

Then there’s Apple Fitness. It’s a tool, now a decade old, that has made a measurable improvement in my life. The technology and the psychological manipulation that it expresses got me on my bike this morning and conned me into riding 20 miles. Yesterday, I ran 5k for the sake of one of those silly little badges made out of pixels.

What do you call it when you let yourself be manipulated every day for years straight. Apple will call it “encouragement,” but even now it feels sinister.

I’ve never had the discipline to exercise regularly before, but I’ve closed all my rings for nearly three years straight now and that streak is ongoing. I am both proud of myself and feel like a dupe. This is by no means a sales pitch. Find the discipline some other way if you can.

Do I think this is all going to bite me in the ass somewhere along the way? Will Apple sell of all its fitness data to the insurance companies? Who knows? If it has value, it’s going to be sold sooner or later.

I’ll tell you this—I’m not recording my alcohol consumption anywhere.

Song of the Week

Bob Welch jumped from Fleetwood Mac just before the album Fleetwood Mac came out, making him the Ronald Wayne of 70s Rock. For most, he’s something of a footnote these days, but he was dropping hits at the same time Rumours was doing its thing.

I kinda wish someone had recorded a video skateboarding and drinking Ocean Spray Cranberry to Hypnotized instead.