Author: rmkeville@gmail.com

Sweating In The Sun

I’ve been listening to that song a lot lately.  And watching the video; the video adds whole new layers of meaning that I didn’t know were there, as a good music video should.  The ghosts of those teens looking through the passing freight train at the grown man as he’s clearly remembering when he was them really drives something home to this particular middle-aged small town boy. 

(By the way, I think it’s kind of funny that “twenty years” after eighteen – i.e., thirty-eight – seems to be the default age for songs like this, where the singer is lost in bittersweet memory about their long-ago youth.  I’m almost five years past thirty-eight myself, and of course Bob Seger is way past it by now.  Thirty-eight doesn’t seem that old.  But I suppose twenty years is a nice medium number when you’re talking a human time scale, where ten years isn’t enough to even realize that time is passing and thirty makes it ancient history.  Twenty years is when you realize that time really has passed, that the world has changed and so have you, that you really aren’t young anymore, not like you were back then, and you’ve actually been dealing with adult things – good and bad – for some time now, and you’re past the scrambling-to-survive stage and maybe have a few moments to count the cost.)

Continue reading “Sweating In The Sun”

Two Important Links

This first one is just beautiful and inspirational:

Nancy Pelosi and Ilhan Omar (and 13 Members of the Congressional Black Caucus) Walk Through the “Door of Return” in Ghana

This next is a bit more troubling and thoughtful. I’ve often been deeply troubled by media, viral memes, and the like that glorify a “warrior class” as somehow wiser, more deserving (especially more deserving of rule), and generally superior to the rest of us. The “sheep and sheepdogs” meme that went around a few years ago, where the Warrior Class was literally a superior species was particularly disturbing. But I’ve never had an answer for it.

The Angry Staff Officer does in “Stop Calling Us Warriors”.

My Last Summer In Camden

I’m going to start this essay by admitting that the title isn’t entirely accurate.  The summer of 1995 was not the last summer I spent in Camden, New York.  It was the summer just before I left for college, and I would return the following three summers before finally moving to Boston after graduation in the summer of 1999. 

And yet the title is as true as it is inaccurate.  In retrospect, 1995 was the last summer that I was a true resident of Camden before I rode off into my wide-open future beyond the hills and the horizon.  The next four years, as far as I was concerned, I was a citizen of St. Lawrence University, only coming back to Camden over Summer and Winter Break to visit the family, recover from the semester, and make some money before I returned to my real home.      

That was a special summer, like none other before or since.  Usually, an opening like that announces the beginning of a summer love story, but that love story – the love story that would define my life for the next thirteen years – didn’t begin until I actually got to college.  That summer was a time for a different kind of romance.    

Continue reading “My Last Summer In Camden”

Two Summers

I’ve been thinking a lot lately.  Thinking about Summer.  Two particular summers, in fact.  Two special summers, long ago.  Sometimes they seem long ago, anyway.  Sometimes they seem like yesterday.     

I visit these summers from time to time anyway.  Sometimes I think that’s what summer is about, once you get to a certain age and summer mostly just means that it’s the air conditioner that’s on in the office instead of the heater – remembering summers when it meant more than that.  But right now they’re haunting me hard.  That’s what happens when you visit home, I guess.  You walk the country roads, you listen to Strawberry Wine and Chattahoochee and Like A Rock, and you think about the summers when you were young and this was your home.

So what to do?  How to put those ghosts to rest?  I’m a writer, so I write.  I tell the stories of those summers.  Except there is no story, exactly.  No grand romance or quest.  The only adventure in these stories is being young.  These stories will be more poetry than prose, trying to capture a feeling instead of a series of events.

Stay tuned. 

(And be on the lookout for other, older Stories Of Me.  I’ll be importing those from my other blog soon.)

FoodFight Episode 1: #NoPlant19

My dear friend Emily H. has posted what she hopes will be the first of a series of Youtube posts on food injustice. The first is about the disaster that is this year’s planting season in the Midwest and its connections to Climate Change.

Please check it out, like, subscribe, share, and – if Ko-Fi has corrected its issues – donate. Let’s help an independent documentarian get off the ground.

A Friend In Need

Fred Clark, the Slacktivist, whom I consider to be both a friend and teacher, has had an absolutely terrible June. His father passed away, and then…well, he experienced the string of events recounted at this linked post. Please help if you can, or share if you can’t.

Or even if you can. The farther this reaches, the better.

‘Hot water heater’ is redundant, and also it’s leaking all over the basement

How the Trumps Brought Death and Destruction to Coney Island


Charles Denson is a historian and former (current?) resident of Coney Island.  He’s one of my primary sources for Dreams of the Boardwalk and my upcoming fantasy novel City of Dreams.  He’s here today to talk about how Donald’s Trump’s father mutilated an iconic New York neighborhood; literally killed people with his greed and racism; destroyed a landmark in one of the most cruel, petty and vindictive manners possible; and raised his son to be just like himself.  

What It Takes To Be A Good Person

This viral Facebook post by Matt Norris says everything:

Disapproving of people who aren’t “Normal” went from a virtue to vice within my lifetime.

I still see a lot of baffled resentment about that shift in public morals.

I still read a lot of pushback, and a sense that something’s gone terribly wrong.

If you strip away all the rhetoric and conspiracy theories that call marriage equality and gender neutral restrooms a subversive attack on normative institutions in prelude for the ushering in of a totalitarian state that demands full ideological compliance at all times, you’re left with a portrait of some very simple, wrong, but simple feelings underneath:

People miss being socially rewarded for conformity.
People miss being socially rewarded for enforcing it.
People resent being punished for what they were once rewarded for.

The shift in public morals changed the rules on what it took to be seen as a good person.

It used to be about not doing anything weird, and looking down on anybody who did.

Now it’s about not doing anything cruel, and looking down on anyone who does.

There used to be people it was not only OK to be cruel about, but REWARDED to be cruel about.

People fear the loss of unity that a loss of conformity-as-a-public-moral represents to them. They don’t understand what that unity cost, and don’t understand that it was a facade that was no more true then, than it was now, and just required a lot more people to hide, pretend, live unsatisfying inauthentic lives, and often suffer anyway, because the people who fear this were the ones conformity came easily to. They were the ones around whom the idea of “normal” was designed.

They built their senses of self partially on a bedrock of pride at being “the right kind of person.”

They see the idea that there even IS a “right kind of person” going away, as a threat not only to the unity of their nation, but to the socialvalue of the principal virtue from which they’ve always derived their standing and self-worth. Public tolerance of nonconformity, and public intolerance of intolerance toward it, feel like an existential threat.

If you’re wondering what animates and underwrites some segments of the modern Conservative outrage over ostensibly harmless live-and-let-live tolerance being adopted as the norm, and why they cast objection to them as FreeSpeech issues on THEIR behalf rather than HumanRights issues on someone else’s, this is how that logic works.

Within their lifetimes, whole swaths of the belief systems they were raised with and feel religiously and culturally virtuous for espousing, changed entirely without their buy-in from things everybody was supposed to agree with Or Else, to something you’d be treated badly for asserting.

Practically Overnight, as far as they were concerned.

And since these changes came from outside their communities –

And since these changes regarded discrimination and basic human rights –

They were accompanied by changes to the law regarding who it was ok to shun and treat differently.

That answer used to be “Someone”
That answer is now “No One”

BUT

All they know is they got a taste of what it was like to suddenly feel like pariahs at the hands of people who suddenly asserted influence over the laws of the land and didn’t respect their values or beliefs, and accomplished all of this without their consent or agreement, practically overnight.

It became NOT OK to hold beliefs that they held dear, not just on a social level, but also on a legal level, where those beliefs meant engaging in discriminatory practices against “the people it’s morally appropriate to treat badly.”

And That Was Terrifying.

It was the closest thing they’d ever felt to persecution.

Legal protections granting equality to the people they felt dutybound to shun and look down on felt like the government, acting at the behest of radicals who “didn’t love this country” (read: love it exactly how it was) felt like an attack not just on the character of the nation but on their individual right to self-determination and free thought.

So the next time you’re on a comment thread and you encounter someone dashing off manifestos about liberal nazi thought police, while you still won’t (i hope) respect and agree with them, you’ll at least know how they came to be as freaked-out as they are by things that nobody should mind, and why they see nothing but tyranny and totalitarianism in a public morals shift that says cruelty’s not ok.