I don’t know how to process last week’s New Yorker article by Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts. 
In my day, the well-to-do were satisfied sharing nautical space with a handful of their social inferiors on the most basic of three-hour tours. Although, it is true, they were just millionaires, and the wife.
Now it’s all about billionaires, their Pomeranians and superyachts. Continue reading
It’s an easy trope, the old person bumbling with some electronic device. The unwieldy TV remote, a black brick with buttons, useless in finding The National with Knowlton Nash. Long snaking grocery store line-ups as an elderly customer taps futilely away.
“Here?” “No, here, ma’am,” “Here?” “Why don’t we try and insert your card, ma’am, and then enter the security code.” “The what?!” (As a matter of fact, since you’re asking, I can’t use the self-checkout because I’m buying beer here.) Text messages and their endless series of identical screen shot attachments. “Give me your phone for sec, grandpa.”
Ageist? Almost certainly. But in my ripely mature defense, being old allows me great latitude to indulge in a little mockery of the aged. Continue reading
I’ll spare you my Ted Baxter ‘It all started in a little 5,000-watt radio station in Fresno’ origin story about how I came to be writing fiction over the past six years except to say, mid-way through 2016, I was wholly dissatisfied with the state of the city and this blog I’d been operating since 2010. 
Toronto had been seized by status quo maintenance, a return to normal, normal being relentless lip service paid to growing problems of unaffordability, inequality, crumbling infrastructure, malignant, mis-policing, etc., etc., ad nauseum. Never mind all that, we were told. What about our low property tax rates and all those cranes in the sky!
And my little contribution to the ongoing discourse? An empty howling into the void of this misguided political smugness. Continue reading