Back From the Future
But a recent personal milestone caused me to reevaluate what I’m doing here: writing and posting on the Internet for free, under a name both comic and pretentious. Just days before George W. Bush and a few weeks before Bill Clinton, along with the first of our fellow Baby Boomers, I turned 60.

A decade ago, I looked forward to my fifties as my decade of fulfillment. I’d had reasonable success in my 20s and 30s: a writer and editor for the Boston Phoenix and a similar paper in Washington; I moved up to feature pieces in national magazines, and after long struggle, I became the author of a book I am still proud of, The Malling of America.

Now famous for its title if nothing else, it has won something like lasting respect across a wide spectrum. A chapter appears in lots of college and high school anthologies, and in the paperback edition I published with Xlibris, it still sells a few score copies a year. But thanks in part to the non-interest and even hostility of my New York hardback publisher, and to my own inexperience, it got me the reputation as an author who didn’t sell. I went back to writing for magazines, and spent my 40s trying to get another book contract. I never did.

But on my 50th birthday I felt wiser in the ways of the world, and at the top of my game as a writer. I was taking a risk by moving west, but I felt ready to get back in the big game, on the big stage. No one gets very far without help and I’d had some in the past. Though I had no mentor or at 50, an agent or publisher who really believed in me, I felt I could earn that attention.

My fifties, I felt, would be the fulfillment, the justification of everything in the past. They would also set the pattern for my future, for my culminating accomplishments and at last my proper place in the world, with access to the means to be creative and productive. My fifties would be my redemption.

That’s not how they turned out. I did a lot of work in a lot of forms and areas. Most of it was ignored, including what was closest to my heart. Some of it got interest here and there, agents and publishers and media, and then the interest faded. I managed to get articles assigned and essays published that I felt could have opened doors to bigger opportunities. Nothing happened. And as finances became more of an issue, even my efforts on different career paths went nowhere. Instead of being fulfilling, my fifties were humiliating.

I’m proud of what I did get published, like “The Skills of Peace,” and a feature on the commemoration of a massacre that actually had something to do with the city of Eureka, CA deeding back land to the Wiyot tribe, which may be a first. I did some good work: an article and review on Buddhism, my essay before the bombing of Iraq, on Wells and War of the Worlds, and my piece on Star Trek (behind the pay wall at the New York Times but which can be found on my blog, Soul of Star Trek. ) I wrote some good book reviews, which sometimes got at least some attention for deserving books and authors.

I even got a little buzz from time to time when something I imagined presented itself in the real world. A lot of what I advocated in 2002 to make the Climate Crisis a moral issue (including calling it that) is now happening in the wake of Al Gore’s movie. During the 2004 Democratic convention, I hit upon what I thought was the perfect slogan for John Kerry—A Fresh Start--and wrote a memo about it that my one Washington Big Player contact sent on to the campaign. I never learned if anyone read it, but I can’t tell you how weird it felt to see Kerry speaking with “A Fresh Start for America” on banners behind him that final week of the campaign.

But nothing led to anything else, and that’s what I needed to happen.