In the summer of 2002, I had the opportunity to conduct a telephone interview with Len Brown, one of the guiding hands behind the 1962 Mars Attacks series of non-sports trading cards released by Topps. The series has gained a reputation over the years for ghoulish depictions of Martians annihilating cities, dogs, soldiers, and civilians, all gleefully painted by Norm Saunders.

Brown was responsible for writing the narrative that appeared on the back of the 55-card set, truly a labor of love. My interview provided quotes for a sidebar story to accompany a piece on M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, and I always regretted that more of Brown's comments about the contributions of Wally Wood, Bob Powell, and the uproar the cards caused upon first release could never see the light of day.

But now they can. So enjoy this interview from five twenty-four years back, and try to ignore my open gushing in the telephone presence of one of the movers and shakers behind ... MARS ATTACKS!

--Chris Schillig
January 2007 July 2026

[Chris from 2026 here: I decided to rescue this interview from the backwaters of my old blog and share it here. Maybe in another twenty-odd years, if the fates allow, I’ll post it on some holographic space-time continuum site.

Chris Schillig: What’s the attraction to this card series, over and above so many others that you worked on for Topps?

Len Brown: I’ve met some folks down here in Texas who I didn’t know before I moved down here, and when they heard that I was involved in Mars Attacks—and these are guys in their 50s now—their eyes would light up. ‘My God, you did it?’ It seemed like it just struck a nerve because of its graphic nature, I suppose. There wasn’t anything out like that on trading cards probably for several decades.

There was a series that probably helped inspire this, called Horrors of War, which came out around 1939, 1940, and it told a story of Japan invading China, basically, and it was incredibly graphic in nature. My boss over at Topps back then was a fella named Woody Gelman — like a surrogate father to me, basically, a tremendous guy, hired me, I knew him for the rest of his life until he passed away, and I met him when I was about 15.

Anyway, Woody was tremendously influenced by this Horrors of War set. I remember we would look at these cards, and they were these scenes of politically incorrect, one after another, you know, kids getting killed, hands being chopped off, just really graphic. It was so graphic that we were told that the Japanese representative went to the American embassy to protest these things. This was in ’39, about a year and a half short of Pearl Harbor. I guess that just the graphic nature, getting into kids seeing these images for the first time. If they turned on the TV they wouldn’t see anything like this, things much more benign.

I was on staff [at Topps], and I was helping the creative director, who at that time was Woody Gelman, and we would plot and talk about card series. A year before we had done a very similar card set in the same vein that found acceptance because it was based on the Civil War, and it was called Civil War. It was the centennial anniversary of the Civil War when we did that and it was also very graphic, lotta bloodshed. Because of the historical nature of it, it was accepted a lot better. We got letters from teachers thanking us for putting this stuff out—the complete opposite. We never expected this reaction when we did Mars Attacks. We went from history to science fiction with the same formula.

CS: Just as graphic as Civil War, but more fanciful as far as the topic?

LB: Yeah.

CS: Tell me a little bit about any backlash from the Mars Attacks cards.

LB: We actually, back then, had a file where we saved some of the bad press that was coming in from papers, newspapers. And it didn’t even go nationwide. I’m always surprised that people know about it as much as they do many years later, because we only issued it in the metropolitan area, I remember, in the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut area, and I guess we issued some in California because the people I met down here in Texas grew up in California and had bought it there.

We did get letters from people complaining, ‘This is kids’ bubble gum, and I bought a pack of bubble gum for the kids, and I didn’t expect to get this.’ Of course, they were buying a pack of cards that came with a stick of bubble gum, so they weren’t being completely honest about it. But they were kind of shocked by the dog getting blasted by a Martian ray guns, which, you know, seems fairly benign today, but I guess to a 10-year-old kid it could be a little traumatic.

And then we’d even heard that a district attorney of some town up in Connecticut had contacted the president of the company and said, ‘How can you put out something like this?’ And when the president of the company got, I think, the D.A. card it was almost, like, the straw that broke the camel’s back and decided we’re not going to ship this any further. ‘It’s doing OK sales-wise, but it’s not setting the world on fire, and I really think we should pull it.’ And he pulled it.

CS: What was the time frame? How long were these cards on the market?

LB: I would guess probably six months. Six to nine months. In those days, we didn’t issue a thing nationally; we sort of sent it to a specific market, a territory, and then if it looked good, we’d roll it out further and further. We were in the process of rolling it out, but I guess, like the president of the company had said, it wasn’t setting the world on fire; it was doing OK, you know. And so, that was the end of Mars Attacks, but it certainly lived on.

CS: Who was the president of the company at that time?

LB: Joel Shorin. He made the call.

CS: You wrote the synopsis and the information on the back of the cards.

LB: The copy I wrote. The card set, though, was certainly plotted with me and Woody Gelman, who was my boss at the time. We would sit down and come up with something we would like to see – you know, a scene. First, we had the story, a 55-card story, so we plotted that together. Without Woody almost championing it, this never would have happened. He was the head of the department. Back then, I was about 21-years old. He loved science fiction; I loved science fiction. When we talked about doing a science-fiction card set, we actually talked about what the theme could be, and we came up with stuff like, well ... The Invisible Man was a great concept, and then The Incredible Shrinking Man was a great concept, but we kept coming back to The War of the Worlds theme, and we felt that would be the thing to go with.

Woody was a collector. I remember him bringing in those cards and saying, ‘I think we should have some of this. These cards have impact.’ And they do. You’ve probably never seen this thing called Horrors of War. You might find it if you did a search on the Internet. I bet you’d find a web page where somebody has posted these pictures.

CS: And those were not a Topps set?

LB: No, it was not Topps. It was a company that I guess Topps eventually bought, years later, but it was not Topps.

CS: The [Mars Attacks] cards originally didn’t even bear the Topps name, correct? It was Bubbles --?

LB: Bubbles Inc.

CS: Was that done to distance Topps from what they thought might be controversial?

LB: That could have been, yeah. They did this once before. I remember they did this with Elvis Presley. You know, now Elvis Presley is Amercian pie and clean-cut, but when he came out they couldn’t photograph him on television.

CS: Shaking the pelvis and all.

LB: Exactly. And I remember, I heard—I wasn’t at Topps when we did the Elvis cards —but one of the executives had told the president of the company, I guess, that ‘Hey, are you guys really doing cards on Elvis Presley. That’s terrible.’ So they called it Bubbles Inc. back then, and I think that was the first time it was used.

CS: Then it was used again on Mars Attacks.

LB: Yeah.

CS: Were you still with Topps in ’89 when there was talk of re-releasing the cards?

LB: I was there, sure. I was involved in some of those.

CS: In ’94, they released the set that has art by Zina Saunders and other folks at the end. I guess that was closer to the movie time.

LB: I don’t remember the real reason. We talked about reprinting Mars Attacks for probably the last 15 years before we did it because we discovered this cult fandom that existed around it, and we felt that we’d probably have an audience now. So we actually did paint 11 more cards; we were going to do a set of 66 —I don’t remember [that] it was that many years; five years went by between really doing it—but for some reason, we got the paintings in and we just never moved forward at that point.

CS: Speaking of paintings, describe the art process. I know Wally Wood was involved in some of the layout work, and Bob Powell …

LB: Wally was probably the first fella we called in, who I idolized. He was like one of my favorite comic book artists. And Woody Gelman also thought the guy was terrific, and he had already been doing some work for us. And he used to do these comics for EC Comics called Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, and I remember one particular cover had a picture of an alien coming out of a flying saucer with a brain-like entity —a globe—and we always loved that image.

And we had Wally design—he really designed the Martians for the Topps card set. He was always fairly busy and hard to really line up for a big series, so we then called Bob Powell, who had done a lot of work for us. Bob was a famous comic book artist; he used to draw The Shadow and many, many other comics in the 40s and 50s, and Bob did the pencils based on roughs—almost like really thumbnail sketches, better than stick figures; I don’t want to make it seem that primitive.

We would actually send these rough little sketches that Woody would sketch out, because Woody was an old animator and artist, had a great sense of design. He would send them to Bob Powell, Bob would then do several pencil versions of the scene from different perspectives, then we would choose the one that looked the most dramatic. Like, if we had sent the picture to Bob and it was a martian shooting a dog, it would almost be this very rough design of it, and we’d get three or four little sketches back from Bob and then the one we liked the best we’d say, ‘Do a real tight finish on this now,’ and he would do a finished pencil.

And from there, that pencil went to the painter, Norm – Zina’s dad, Norm Saunders. So it was a process. I think all the time that was put in on every picture really helped make it have its impact. It was planned and talked about and thought and it just didn’t happen off the top of anyone’s – you know, like at the snap of a finger. We really built it up so that each picture would have as much drama as it could.

CS: I always called these cards the greatest '60s movie that was never made.

LB: Exactly. Really, it was the history of science-fiction movies sort of pulled into one. There’s a point where one card has a giant robot, one card has a shrinking ray, giant insects. We were taking everything out of that genre and doing it as one card set.

CS: What’s your favorite card?

LB: You know, I like the very early ones. There was one card where the Martians are toasting – like, holding up martini glasses, which is pretty ridiculous when you think about it –- you know, their culture designing martini glasses –- and their sort of toasting the launching of their war ships going to the earth. I actually like a lot of those things a lot.

CS: How long did it take to create this series?

LB: Probably under a year, but I would say closer to nine months then six months.

CS: Did the writing go fairly quickly?

LB: The writing would be pretty quick. I don’t remember if I waited until all the paintings were in, but I had a feeling I did not. Probably when groups would come in and they’d be like 1 to 10, I probably would start writing the back of the copy, getting it ready.

CS: What was your involvement with the '94 set that has all the new artwork commissioned at the end?

LB: Well, the earlier, I was involved with, and I did work with Earl Norem and some of the other artists. By the time ’94 came around, I was busy with a lot of other stuff, and a fella named Gary Girani pulled a lot of the art together. He had been a staff member at one point and was now working freelance out in California for us.

CS: Were you involved in the comic book series at all?

LB: Yes. I ended up writing about six of the backup stories—I don’t know if you have any of the comics but we used to have flip covers on the early issues.

CS: I’ve got most of them, yeah.

LB: So you’re a fan of Mars Attacks?

CS: Absolutely.

LB: Not just a reporter doing a story.

CS: Exactly. I always try to pick stories I enjoy; then it’s not like work.

LB: That’s terrific. Jim Salicrup, who was our editor back then, had me write little stories that weren't following the storyline in the bulk part of the book. I think they were like six-page stories, and I wrote five or six of them. Little short stories about the Martian invasion. In fact, what we tried to do if I remember correctly, we took some of the cards –- we looked at some of the cards and told the story of a card in a comic. Because there was definitely a story about a dog, a six-page story, told from the dog’s point of view, either in issue two or three, that I wrote. So I enjoyed that, writing those comic book stories.

CS: Was that your first experience in the comic book realm?

LB: No, I’d written comics in the past, not an awful lot of them. I helped develop a series called T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents that Wally Wood drew back in the late '60s. DC just announced they’re reprinting it. In fact, somebody just contacted me to have me give them a little bio—I guess they’re going to write about some of the contributors. If I get payment for reprint rights, that would be really great.

CS: I was excited to hear they’re being reprinted. I’ve never had a chance to peruse them, but I’ve always heard they’re great comics.

LB: You know, I was in the middle of the beginnings of it with Wally, and I always thought it was a little overrated. I think it sold for a coupla years then the company went out of business. But you know it was Wally Wood, who I think the world of, it was his first attempt. I remember when he would come visit Topps, I would always say, ‘How come you never do a superhero book?’ and he said, ‘Well, one of these days, one of these days.’ And then this new publishing company contacted Wally and because I’d always said superhero, let’s do a superhero, he contacted me and I wrote, I guess, three of the first four lead stories. But what he did do, which was sort of, almost an embarrassment to me at the time although now I kind of laugh, was he named the character—the character, Dynamo, the lead hero in these T.H.U.N.D.E.R. agents—he named the alter-ego Len Brown, which is my name. And I remember going to comic book conventions and (people) saying, ‘Well, why’d you name the character after yourself?’ You know, almost like the height of egotism, and I consider myself a fairly honest guy, and I was always explaining, ‘Wally did that as a gag,’ you know, thinking I’d appreciate it. But I always found it a little embarrassing at the time, but now, I smile, and it’s just kind of funny.

CS: Were you satisfied with the movie version [of Mars Attacks]?

LB: It was campier than my taste would run. I would have preferred a combination of Independence Day and Mars Attacks – [it] would have been the perfect invasion movie for me. I just found it a little too campy. It started out great, and then I thought it got a little bit silly. But I could understand why Tim Burton chose to go that way.

CS: I keep hoping somebody will do it again and do it right.

LB: Oh, boy—thank you. I wish that too, but after being known as a box office disappointment—I think it only grossed about $35 million …

CS: It opened big and died quick…

LB: Yeah. Word of mouth wasn’t good. I mean, I know some people tell me they genuinely loved it, they thought it was hilarious, they liked the comedy aspect, but …

CS: I would have liked it more if it weren’t called Mars Attacks.

LB: Exactly.

CS: But they did manage to get the images in there—the giant robot and the shrinking ray.

LB: Yeah, and there were no giant insects. Remember, it opened terrific, where the flaming cows are actually seen. There were a few things that were right off the card. I remember saying ‘This is great!’ as I’m sitting in the theatre, but then it didn’t carry it through all the way.

CS: Len, when did you start working for Topps?\

LB: Started in 1959, I was 18-years-old. I was actually going to college, and I was just working there. Maybe 12 hours, 15 hours a week.

CS: And just never left…

LB: Never left. Retired about two years ago, when we moved down here. May 2000 was the end of my career at Topps.

CS: What is the future of non-sports card images?

LB: They’re just harder to get one of those out these days. I’d like to think they’ll still be coming out another 50 years from now, 25 years from now. But I understand the problems of doing these things. When we put these cards out, back in the early '60s, where I grew up, which was Brooklyn, New York, there’d be a little mom and pop store every second corner. And you could get these cards distributed all over Brooklyn very easily.

Nowadays, those stores really don’t exist too much, and most of the card sales probably come from comic book shops—although comic book shops these days are not that fond of non-sports cards unless it is Spider-Man or something like that—or Walmart or Target or some of the big chains, the mass merchandisers. Well, number one, I don’t know if they’d put out the real grisly series too easily, Their buyer would probably want to see the whole set before we put it out. Also I think that’s part of the problem: the distribution for cards has changed over the generations and gone that way, to the mass merchandisers, and if they don’t think a kid will know what it is ... a pre-sold concept is a lot easier to put out.

CS: That’s why Spider-Man works and Mars Attacks wouldn’t?

LB: I mean, we’re doing art cards. We’ve done Marvel sets and we’ve done Star Wars sets where we’ve created our own art for them, besides the movie cards. And it almost does seem to need that hook, that it’s a presold commodity, a known license to do it.

That’s not to say. I mean Civil War came out because it was the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. If it was not for Civil War being successful, I don’t know if Mars Attacks would have ever seen the light of day. So is it possible? It’s possible. I wanted to do, before I left, the last few years, because I love working with artists and I love creating cards the way they used to be created, kinda get the company interested in doing Tales from the Bible. You know, typical Bible cards, which can be as violent [as Mars Attacks]. You know, there’s some terrific violence in the Bible.

Mars Attacks images are copyright The Topps Company and used solely to illustrate points made in the interview.

Ah, the halcyon days of summer, when young folks gambol in sunshine well after 9 p.m., while old folks wish it were just a little darker so they wouldn’t feel so guilty about going to bed.

That’s an ageist sentiment, to be sure, as plenty of old folks gambol in those late dusks, too.

Indeed, one of the many benefits of summer is daylight saving time, which begins when we advance the clocks one hour in the spring and ends when we set them back again in the fall.

The House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday. If the Senate takes up the measure and does the same, the initiative would “lock the clock.” The country would remain in daylight saving time in perpetuity.

It’s a rare measure in these divisive days because it has bipartisan and strong presidential support. It also has the backing of law enforcement (lower crime rates) and the hospitality industry (more people dining out and traveling).

“Locking the clock” is a great idea. Unfortunately, the Sunshine Protection Act locks it in the wrong direction. It would be better to maintain so-called standard time year-round.

Stating this instantly brands the speaker as an old fuddy-duddy, a sunshine Scrooge, a Vitamin D derelict.

I’m none of these things. I prefer daylight saving time year-round, but the evidence against it is too compelling to ignore. A 2023 editorial from the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine outlines the challenges:

• Our bodies are wired for early morning sunshine and early evening darkness in a way that doesn’t change once we “get used to” or “adjust” to changes to the clock. Solar time trumps clock time, even if we wish it didn’t.

• Later sunup and sundown times are associated with a variety of physical ailments. Among them are strokes and diabetes. The benefits of additional exercise time from later sunsets aren’t enough to offset these health risks.

• Workers would likely miss more days, have more accidents, and become less productive with permanent daylight saving time.

• School performance is negatively affected. Students in Indiana on pDST (permanent daylight saving time) performed worse on college entrance exam scores than their peers who were not on pDST. The disparity was even worse for students from lower-income households.

But the strongest evidence against locking the clocks in perpetual daylight saving time is that the nation has tried it before, and it didn’t work.

In 1973, Congress voted to put the nation on daylight saving time for two years, beginning on Jan. 7, 1974. By September, just ten months later, Congress voted to restore standard time on Oct. 27. According to The New York Times:

A study on public acceptance of daylight saving time was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago and showed that 79 per cent of those interviewed last December favored the daylight time move. This total dropped to 42 per cent in February.

Part of this drop in support may have had to do with the scandalous Nixon administration (which, according to Vice President J.D. Vance, isn’t so bad by today’s standards) and a public repudiation of anything he endorsed. But support for pDST also eroded because of the reality of dark mornings and children’s safety.

The country has been on a bit of a clock-change rollercoaster over the past few years, with legislation proposed and passed in one chamber and then defeated in the other.

This time, however, momentum seems to be swinging the clock-lockers’ way. In 2022, the Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act, but the House did not. This time, it’s the other way round, with the House giving the initial approval. The switch has led some commentators to believe the current measure has a good chance of succeeding.

Easy to say that we’ll all adjust. But the evidence doesn’t support such confidence.

Come winter, the morning sun won’t make an appearance in some parts of the country on the western edge of each time zone until after 9 a.m. Will that extra hour of sunlight in the afternoon still be worth it?

By then, July’s “no-brainer” could look very different.

Image: Sunset Scene (circa 1875-1885) by Edward Mitchell Bannister. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. Charles Mandell.

As a writing teacher, I found a recent interview with John Byrne in The New York Times intriguing.

Earlier this month, the newspaper spoke with the artist/writer extraordinaire—or is that X-traordinaire?—about his new X-Men: Elsewhen volume. (I share some fan gushing about Byrne at the bottom of this piece, so if you’re looking for that, skip to the end.)

Here’s the part that stood out to me as an instructor (emphasis mine):

Byrne has expressed similar sentiments before, often to the chagrin of fans, who believe it indicates a lack of commitment to his art, that he’s merely slapping words and images on the page and not worrying if they’re his best work.

The rationale, to me, is more complex. In other exchanges, Byrne has noted that fussing over a particular panel or drawing is counterproductive. Part of what makes comics exciting is the energy on the page, and perseverating over one element drains this energy. Better to make the work decent and keep moving. Save the brilliance for the next panel, page, or job.

Comics is a deadline-driven job. I’ve heard enough creators talk about the challenges of making a living in the industry to recognize that doing the best you can right now (good enough, instead of perfect) is how they stay afloat.

Byrne is simply more honest than most in admitting it.

I use a variation of this advice with student writers, augmented by the adage never to let perfect be the enemy of good. The saying is attributed to Voltaire, and here’s a piece that argues “perfect” is a mistranslation, and that the philosopher really meant “best.”

Regardless, the saying is a reminder to put words on the page and not to worry initially if they’re the right words. Not all of them will be, and that’s acceptable. Later, in the revision stage, writers can make changes. But they can’t revise what isn’t there.

Staring at a blank page or screen, waiting for the perfect lead (or lede, to be precise) wastes time that could be better used writing serviceable body paragraphs. Go back later and add the introduction, move lines around, replace inelegant phrasing, cross out redundancies.

I learned this in my brief career as a reporter. Deadlines didn’t allow for fussiness. A reporter has to tell the story accurately, in the clearest language possible, and on time. Sometimes, the stars will align, and the perfect lede and the most evocative words will flow like a geyser from the mind, through the fingers, and onto the page. And sometimes, a feature story will have enough time between draft and deadline for substantial revision and editing.

But, usually, reporters must say it the best they can in the time they have, and then let it go.

Granted, student papers don’t have deadlines that are as strict as a reporter’s—although, for the student who waits until the hour before the assignment is due, the scenario is much the same—but the advice still holds.

I often quote from Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts,” the first chapter in her wonderful Bird by Bird book:

The simplicity is elegant: down draft, up draft, dental draft.

After students read “Shitty First Drafts,” I have to disabuse them of a common misunderstanding. Lamott speaks of the freedom of writing shitty drafts (or child’s drafts) because they are places where the writer can say anything, no matter how silly or off-topic. This is because the drafts are for the writer’s eyes only. Later, Lamott goes back through her child’s draft and picks out the lines or passages that show promise. These, she develops into an actual first draft (or a Draft 1.5, I suppose).

The misunderstanding reveals itself when students come to class with their shitty first draft and not their first draft, thereby defeating the purpose of “letting it all hang out” rhetorically in a version nobody else was supposed to see. The shitty first draft is private and personal. No outsiders allowed.

Writing is also intensely idiosyncratic. One person’s method won’t work for another. Nor will the same method always work for the same person. Much depends on the type of writing, the writer’s mood on a given day, barometric pressure, or the price of eggs in Argentina.

One of my goals as a writing teacher is to teach the process. This starts with the student writer knowing the purpose (to entertain? inform? persuade?) and audience for a given piece.

A second goal is getting the student to produce a complete draft. Not perfect. Not eloquent (although parts may well be). But a tangible something they can, according to Byrne’s philosophy, get right the next time.

And, yeah, I know that Byrne’s “next time” isn’t a second draft of an existing page or panel, but rather the next art job, meaning he has occasionally sent something less than perfect into the world.

Philosophically and metaphysically speaking, Plato is credited with addressing perfection through his Theory of Forms. The theory posits (imperfectly—which is ironically appropriate) a pantheon of mental “blueprints,” where the perfect version of every concept or object—love, beauty, rocking chair, student essay—exists.

In the “real” world, only imperfect replicas of these blueprints reside; people judge these replicas by how closely they approximate the ideal object in the Forms universe. No matter how close real-world objects (whether abstract concepts or physical things) come to this ideal, they won’t get there. Perfection is a will-o’-the-wisp.

Which is another of my teaching goals—to help students be okay with flawed work. To let them know it’s acceptable to submit something that isn’t their best, but is instead solid writing that demonstrates their current abilities. To help them differentiate between revisions that actually make the essay or story better and those that are futzing for the sake of futzing. Are those changes the most productive use of their creative energies? Or are they best served by applying what they learned from this assignment to their next piece?

I also tell students that when the course is over, they can revisit any past assignments and revise at length. The future audience for a revised piece may be bigger than just a teacher. They can submit to literary magazines, paid publications, or self-publish on a blog or Substack (ahem!).

But sometimes, you gotta fish or cut bait. The wisdom lies in recognizing when the extra revisions will lead to something substantially better, or when they will result in something merely different.

I am interested in hearing from any creative folks about your relationships with revision, deadlines, perfectionism, and even the Platonic ideal.

Now, as promised earlier, some words about my appreciation of John Byrne:

Like many a fanboy of a certain era, I worshipped at the altar of Byrne, although not necessarily at the altar of The Uncanny X-Men, where he and writer Chris Claremont made, arguably, their biggest mark on the industry. I came along later, when Byrne had left X-Men to write and draw The Fantastic Four and Alpha Flight. From there, he moved to The Incredible Hulk and eventually to a reboot of DC Comics’ Superman line that landed his artwork (with finisher Jerry Ordway) on the cover of Time.

I followed Byrne from this high-profile work to a masterful gig on his own creation, Next Men, for Dark Horse Comics, and even back to Marvel and DC for runs on Spider-Man and Wonder Woman, respectively. His superpower is locating the heart of a character, writing compelling stories, and drawing them in a style that melds the best of the past with a modern flair.

At some point, however, I could no longer separate his work from his opinions on various political and social issues, so I stopped buying and reading his books. My loss.

Nevertheless, I still believe that few creators in any genre are more deserving of one last hurrah than Byrne is currently receiving with X-Men: Elsewhen, which charts an alternate course for the comic-book mutants, branching off from the pivotal “Death of Phoenix” storyline in the early 1980s. The first volume sold out, bringing him many accolades and renewed attention. Good for him.

Images:

Top of page: Self-portrait of John Byrne done as an homage to Fantastic Four #1. Detail from Marvel Age #14, cover dated May 1984.

Bottom of page: Image of Superman from the cover of Time, dated March 14, 1988, by John Bryne and Jerry Ordway.

Randolph Mantooth wasn’t exactly a household name, but for people who grew up in the 1970s, he is a familiar face.

Mantooth, who died on Thursday, starred as John Gage, a firefighter and paramedic, on Emergency!, which aired weekly on NBC from 1972 to 1977 and continued as made-for-TV movies until 1979. He later starred on soap operas and became an advocate for real-life heroes.

He’s also the person on the left of my grade school Emergency! lunch box (above), which escaped the dumpster fate of all my other lunch boxes because Mom stored her cookie cutters in it for about three decades. Here’s the other side of the box, with Mantooth’s character on the right:

The episode that made the biggest impression on me was one where Gage and his teammate, Roy DeSoto (Kevin Tighe) help a victim in a polar bear costume who is suffering from heatstroke. See my barely—ahem!—serviceable screenshot.

This is moments before Gage removes the mask and utters the immortal line, “Uh, Roy, this ain’t no man.” The victim is indeed a woman in a two-piece bathing suit. Because network TV.

According to the Hollywood Reporter:

That’s a pretty cool legacy. R.I.P. Randolph Mantooth.

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Cleaning out a relative’s basement earlier this summer, I came across a reminder of a kinder, gentler America—a six-pack of Billy Beer.

The can proclaims it was “brewed expressly for and with the personal approval of one of America’s all-time great beer drinkers—Billy Carter.” It also trumpets a quote attributed to Billy himself: “I had this beer brewed up just for me. I think it’s the best I ever tasted. And I’ve tasted a lot. I think you’ll like it, too.” Beneath the endorsement is Billy Carter’s signature.

James Earl Carter Jr., a Democrat, was elected in 1976, when I was eight years old and in the third grade. His opponent was Gerald Ford, who had become president two years earlier, following the resignation of Richard Nixon.

Not surprisingly, given my age, I wasn’t too focused on politics. I knew about Watergate because the televised hearings preempted the cartoons I usually watched. Replacing Bugs and Daffy with a bunch of talking heads didn’t strike Childhood Me as a fair trade. Still doesn’t.

One of the only things I remember about Ford v. Carter is getting into a shoving match with a classmate over who was better. She was a girl, so I obviously wasn’t very chivalrous. She also shoved really hard. I remember her name but won’t share it here in case one of the four people who reads this knows her. I can only speculate about how much harder she shoves as a full-grown woman, and I’d rather not find out firsthand.

What I don’t recall is whose side I was on. I championed the candidate she didn’t like, not because of any deep-seated beliefs but just because I liked to argue and really didn’t like her.

A teacher broke up the kerfuffle pretty fast—probably the only time in her career that two third-graders had almost come to blows over political ideology, even if the “debate” consisted only of shouting “Carter!” and “Ford!” at higher and higher decibels with each push.

The other thing I remember about the campaign was a Jimmy Carter coloring book that somehow came into my possession:

My copy is long gone, but I had a jolt of recognition when I looked it up. Yep, I definitely had one. Don’t recall ever coloring in it. Surprisingly, the cover image is signed by Neal Adams, a prominent comic-book artist whose career included influential runs on Batman and Green Lantern & Green Arrow, among many others. He drew one of my favorite Superman stories, in which the hero meets Muhammad Ali; together, they foil an alien invasion. Not sure why Adams was involved with the coloring book, but maybe the pay was good.

I can’t imagine I spent precious allowance money on this (I was well past the coloring age), so it must have been a gift. As for the intentions of the giver, I can only speculate. Maybe they supported Carter, or thought that my family did. Maybe they were attempting to ignite my political aspirations. (Spoiler: It didn’t work.)

Or maybe they didn’t like Carter. The book's interior lends credence to this explanation. Here are a few images I found online that claim to be from the book:

The first takes a pot-shot (pun intended) at Carter’s liberal leanings (imagine a world where you didn’t go to jail for smoking pot—oh, wait). The second points to the candidate’s relative lack of charisma, so much so that Americans would rather vote for his spouse.

I don’t know Adams’s style well enough to say if these interior pages are also his work, and I can’t say for certain there weren’t two separate Jimmy Carter coloring books in the 1970s. In any event, the pages are Mad magazine-level satire, albeit in a format that could foster confusion over who the true audience was.

Billy Beer, meanwhile, didn’t debut until November 1977, when a regional brewer licensed the name of Carter’s younger brother and had him taste-test several beers and pick the best one, as this entertaining history reveals. Billy, it seems, had aspirations to “become the Colonel Sanders of beer.” Not the worst career goal ever.

Speculators tried to hype the beer as a collector’s item once Carter left office, but it didn’t take. Today, you can find unopened cans online for a few bucks. Apparently, an unopened six-pack like the one I have could be worth $50-$100, which ain’t peanuts, but only if you can find somebody willing to pay that much. I’m not holding my breath.

Both products seemed designed to poke good-natured fun at Jimmy Carter’s humble beginnings in rural Georgia and to capitalize on it at the same time.

Carter would have the last laugh, though. While he will likely never be considered the nation’s greatest president, he was far from the worst. And his post-presidential life was filled with acts of philanthropy and a concern for human rights via Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center. The man was still pounding nails on homes for the less fortunate at age 95, for heaven’s sake.

It’s almost enough to make me pop open one of my Billy Beer cans and toast the possibility of outlasting one’s enemies.

Including that pushy little classmate from 1976.

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Images of the Jimmy Carter coloring book were taken from multiple online sources, including several copies for sale on eBay and elsewhere. Image of the six-pack of Billy Beer taken by the writer.

A few days after I’d finished reading the new Incredible Hulk: Return of the Monster omnibus by Bruce Jones and a murderers’ row of artists, I ran across this quote in a Jim Thompson novel:

There’s something inside of every man that keeps him going long after he has any reason to. He’s no good to life and life is no good to him, and he knows it will always be that way. But still he can’t quit. Something keeps prodding him, whispering to him—making him hope in the face of hopelessness. Making him believe there’s a reason to stay in there and pitch, and that if he fights long enough he’ll stumble onto it.

—After Dark, My Sweet

Library of America edition, pp. 274-275

The lines are a perfect summation of this iteration of the title, originally published from 2001 to 2006 in The Incredible Hulk 34-76. Jones has written a hard-boiled epic that just happens to star a Marvel Comics mainstay. But that mainstay is not the Incredible Hulk.

Instead, the focus here is squarely on the green giant’s alter-ego, Bruce Banner. Jones clearly announced the perspective shift in an interview published in his first issue (#34), where he states, “More than anything, I want the reader to get inside Banner’s head, to be Banner.”

To accomplish this, most of Jones’s run does more than flip a long-standing Hulk formula on its head. Instead, it annihilates it. If past issues of the book were two-thirds Hulk and one-third Banner, Jones makes the stories one-tenth Hulk and nine-tenths Banner.

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He accomplishes this in a few ways. First, for most of the run, Jones ignores the rest of the Marvel Universe. Characters who have appeared in The Incredible Hulk since Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created it are still fair game, but the wider Marvel Universe may as well not exist. Until Tony Stark/Iron Man shows up in the penultimate arc, the Marvel Universe does not impinge on the story.

Secondly, Jones channels what was, at the time, the best-known version of the character: the Kenneth Johnson television show from the 1970s and 1980s starring Bill Bixby as Dr. David Banner (“Bruce,” legend has it, sounded too feminine), Lou Ferrigno as his raging alter ego, and Jack Colvin as investigative reporter Jack McGee, who pursued Banner across the country in hopes of landing the ultimate tabloid story. (McGee could have just made up something a la Bat Boy of Weekly World News fame, but I digress.)

The Hulk’s TV series clearly borrowed its premise from The Fugitive series of the 1960s, where doe-eyed David Janssen played another doctor, Richard Kimble, in pursuit of the one-armed man who killed his wife, while running (fugitiving?) from Barry Morse’s intrepid Lieutenant Gerard.

And The Fugitive, it’s been argued, owes a debt to Dark Passage, a 1946 novel by David Goodis that is part of the same hard-boiled school as Jim Thompson’s work. So it all comes full circle, yes?

A key difference between the TV Hulk and Jones’s take is the addition of some X-Files-themed paranoia and supernatural shenanigans. As the run opens, Banner is in St. Louis, keeping a low profile in a seedy hotel after being accused of the death of a nine-year-old during a recent Hulk-out in Chicago. He communicates via a sophisticated laptop with Mr. Blue, an ally whose origins the reader will wait years to discover (or, in this newly collected omnibus, more than 500 pages).

The panels above, penciled by John Romita Jr. and inked by Tom Palmer, give a sense of the isolation, loneliness, and just plain quirkiness in Jones’s scripts. They also indicate a pacing issue that would hound the book throughout this period. Fans were certainly discussing decompressed storytelling and write-for-the-trade syndrome before this run, but Jones’s scripts became a flashpoint for this criticism.

That grumbling is understandable, to a degree. Compared to the average Marvel book of the time, precious little happens in the average issue of The Incredible Hulk, where an entire page can be dedicated to Banner and a little girl staring at one another through a diner window.

With twenty-plus years of hindsight and the entire saga between two covers, it’s easy to dismiss such criticism. But when a reader has to wait a month between installments, the sometimes glacial pace of a book can be harder to overlook. For my part, I was buying the monthly book as it was published, but saving it to read in four- or five-month intervals, so the decompression didn’t bother me.

It’s worth noting that this hyper-focus on small details is also one of the run’s greatest strengths, especially in the first few years. Jones is developing a world where the supposedly mundane moments serve as counterpoints to the explosive action. This is a world where the day-to-day craziness of the Marvel Universe does not exist (or passes unremarked). It’s an isolated island, if you will, where a hostage situation in a convenience store—as seen in the Lee Weeks and Palmer page below—draws the same attention as it would in the real world (when it definitely wouldn’t in the Marvel U proper, where one of eighteen hundred super folks could easily defuse it).

As the run progresses, the reader learns more about the mysterious forces both helping and hunting Banner. These include Sandra Verdugo, a survivor of her own execution, and Jink Slater, a highly skilled mercenary and the poor man’s Bullseye. Also shades of The X-Files, every new revelation in the story opens the door to further complexities, layer upon layer of fictional bureaucracies that become more difficult to untangle. To Jones’s credit, it all seems to fit by the end, if the reader has the patience to follow all the byzantine passageways of exposition.

Of course, the book is called The Incredible Hulk, and the green goliath definitely makes himself known, but these appearances, as noted above, are few in comparison to past creative teams. When the Hulk shows up in his own book, it is an event. Occasionally, the reader sees only the aftermath—the destroyed infrastructure, the crushed automobiles, the dazed pedestrians. When the camera swings definitively to the Hulk, it’s a money shot, like this one from Stuart Immonen:

Again, every month, this withholding of the monster (once a defining aspect of B-movies due to budget concerns) could be maddening. In a collected edition, however, a reader can better appreciate the decision to delay the Hulk until the last possible moment, orchestrating the maximum dramatic reveal.

Pacing concerns aside, the run manages to give us nearly every major match-up, albeit always with a difference. The Abomination is here, but this time he’s seeking revenge against the Hulk because Banner has slept with his wife. Crusher Creel, the Absorbing Man, makes an appearance, but now he can steal minds.

Eventually, whether by editorial fiat or on his own, Jones speeds up the narrative and the action, conforming to a more typical Marvel template. As the book becomes more conventional, my interest wanes. I prefer the focus on Banner the outcast, the loner, the man “hop[ing] in the face of hopelessness,” as Thompson once explained it. By the time Iron Man shows up, in a story that feels like Jones is auditioning for a gig writing that character, what makes this run special is almost completely obliterated.

Fortunately, one last arc remains, giving Jones a chance to tie up loose ends, reveal the secret villain (who is not all that surprising for long-time fans), and clear the deck for the next creative team.*

Jones is blessed with an abundance of artistic support. I initially believed the change in artists after each arc was a planned occurrence, but the author’s introductions to the paperback collections, reprinted with this edition, reveal Jones’s surprise each time an illustrator leaves the book, and his gratitude when a suitable replacement is found.

His appreciation should be bountiful, because the art is seldom less than stunning. In addition to Romita Jr., Palmer, Weeks, and Immonen, the book is graced by the stylings of Mike Deodato Jr., Leandro Fernández, Doug Braithwaite, and Darick Robertson. Each brings his own design sense to the book’s aesthetic and characters’ faces (sometimes, given the number of female characters who find themselves in bikinis and undergarments, a definite idée fixe for Jones, this can become confusing),. Jones appears to write to each artist’s strength while nevertheless maintaining a remarkable consistency with the overarching storyline.

The back matter of the omnibus includes, for completion’s sake, a Hulk/Wolverine mini-series and a Hulk/Thing mini-series, both scripted by Jones. The Wolverine issues are fun if inconsequential, while the Thing story is protracted and forced, almost as if Jones were channeling Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by having the Hulk and Thing meet and endlessly battle in some absurdest desert café.

But those ancillary books are just that—ancillary. The main event, issues 34-76, is among my favorite Hulk stories ever, a monument to what can happen when a creator intentionally puts on blinders in a shared universe to tell an idiosyncratic story his way.

Near the end of the main run, Banner voices a sentiment that could have come straight from a Jim Thompson protagonist:

Two panels that perfectly encapsulate the aesthetic that permeates the best parts of this collection—the parts not with a raging monster, but with the man afraid to let that monster loose.

It doesn’t get any harder-boiled than that.

*An observation only tangentially related to this collection: Mainstream superhero comics are almost always fated to this type of resetting when teams change. The economic reality is that characters must go on in perpetuity. Part of the challenge of reading such stories is a suspension of disbelief, not only about the sketchy science or the lack of repercussions when multiple aliens attack in multiple separate storylines in the same month, but about the inevitable non-ending, where whatever life-altering stakes have been presented in the latest storyline will be revealed as something far less. I suppose when the realization hits often enough, the reader needs to move on from a given book, shared universe, or publisher’s output. It’s why I don’t read many monthly comics anymore.

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I had a weird impulse a few days ago: I wanted to write a song.

In my fifty-eight years, that hadn’t happened before. True, alternative lyrics to songs often echo through my brain—Blue Öyster Cult’s “Burnin for You” often becomes “Urine is Blue” in my head canon, for instance—but they go no further. I’m the perfect cross between parodist Weird Al Yankovic and daydreaming Walter Mitty.

Yet from nowhere came this desire to take my musical ambitions to the next level. I bet gamblers feel the same urge before risking their life’s savings at a craps table.

In about five minutes, I had written some lines about my subject (fighting on Facebook) and located an online platform. I pasted in the words, specified “country with jangly acoustic guitar,” and went to let the dogs out (thereby answering Baha Men’s question).

When I came back, a song was waiting, complete with instrumentation and a generic-but-passable male country voice.

I, who know “tempo” only as a Ford and a bridge as a way over troubled water, had facilitated the birth of a song.

Notice I didn’t say “composed” or “wrote.” Other than the lyrics, everything was generated by artificial intelligence, likely trained on the blood, sweat, and tears of real musicians who made not a dime.

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I have to admit, though, I was pretty stoked, playing the clip over and over, sharing it with a few friends (always with the proviso that it was made with A.I.).

For the first time, I could empathize with people who were giddy from working with tech this way. In the past, when such folks gushed over finally unleashing their creativity with A.I., I would roll my eyes.

After all, telling a computer program to do something isn’t the same as doing it yourself. It’s the difference between painting the Mona Lisa and completing a connect-the-dots drawing of her enigmatic smile.

Still, it was … liberating.

The language teacher in me pondered the applications. Students could write songs after reading a story or novel. They could set their own poetry to music.

If the objective isn’t to turn students into musicians, but rather to provide them with a new way to respond to literature, the assignment doesn’t endorse the technology as a replacement for conventionally made music.

Or is it that simple?

A saying sometimes attributed to Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin (but expressed similarly by others, before and after), goes:

If I permitted a song-generating option, students would likely have fun. But would I be promoting A.I. usage at the expense of other creative folks? Would my allowance be an encouragement? My condoning, an owning? If I tolerated A.I. for this assignment, was I giving students approval to use it in other, less acceptable ways in a writing class?

So I brainstormed alternatives and add-ons. If students generated the song, could they write about some of the concerns in the preceding paragraph, making the result less about song-as-product and more about a critical analysis of the process? This is similar to what I am required to do in a college composition course I teach, where students must feed a published essay into A.I. and then report back on the technology’s response.

Interacting with A.I. discerningly is a twenty-first-century skill, to be sure. Yet some educational usage is legitimate, and some is frivolous. Obviously, recording a one-off country song is the latter. The legitimacy of other A.I. integration in the classroom is more difficult to parse.

But one thing is for sure: Some students are experiencing the same rush of adrenaline when they complete an assignment with A.I. that I had when generating my goofy song.

How does the world combat that feeling? Or should it?

And how do we balance even the unarguably meaningful uses of A.I. (such as helping to identify pancreatic cancer years earlier than previously possible) with the reality of offloading more and more of our creativity to programs that steal from the talented, use an unconscionable amount of water and energy, and hurt the communities where their data centers are located?

Educators continue to wrestle with how to teach responsible usage, just as the rest of society navigates the realities of A.I. as job-killer and job-creator, savior and destroyer.

The answers might not be one or the other, but both. Are we doing the right thing? Or are we allowing a technology with a 15-to-20 percent error rate (or more) to creep further into our lives at the behest of salivating tech bros and investors?

Are we, like Nero, fiddling* while Rome burns?

But if you can’t fiddle, don’t sweat it. These days, a computer can do it for you.

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Image: Violin Player with a Wine Glass. Artist: Dirck van Baburen, 1623. Location: Cleveland Museum of Art. Description (from the CMA website): Baburen, a native of Utrecht, was among the first to introduce Caravaggio’s revolutionary style to the Netherlands. Half-length figures positioned close to the picture plane project a lively spontaneity. This musician’s loose, colorful dress marks him as a figure at the edges of society, unbound by behavioral norms—associations enhanced by his bold gaze, unshaven face, and cheeky grin complete with broken tooth.

*Nero couldn’t fiddle while Rome burned because he lived long before the invention of the fiddle. Maybe he played the lyre.

This was first published, in slightly different form, in The Alliance Review on July 3, 2021.

Edward Everett Hale almost did it.

The eighteenth-century minister and writer almost achieved literary immortality with his short story, “The Man Without a Country.”

There was a time, according to a piece by Alexander Zaitchik in the Los Angeles Review of Books, when Hale’s tale was ubiquitous in American public education — a patriotic flag-waver perfect for the Fourth of July.

The story’s titular character, Army Lt. Philip Nolan, swears allegiance to Aaron Burr — of the famous Hamilton/Burr pistol duel — and is tried for treason. At the trial, Nolan renounces his country: “D--n the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” (“Damn” being such strong language in 1863, especially when used against one’s nation, that it was editorially obscured.)

Like a character in an O. Henry short story or a Twilight Zone episode, the judge grants Nolan’s request. He is sentenced to live out his life on a series of ships at sea, where officers, sailors and guests are never to mention the United States or tell him news of his former country. He is forbidden to see maps or receive updates on its citizens, including his family.

He becomes … dum dum dum … the Man Without a Country.

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(Spoiler alert: The next two paragraphs reveal the ending of a 163-year-old story.)

Predictably, at least by jaded twenty-first-century standards, Nolan has a complete change of heart. Fifty-six years on a boat will do that to a person. On his deathbed and still at sea, he displays a self-made map of the U.S., complete with educated guesses about which territories have become states. The captain reneges on the judge’s long-ago order and tells Nolan news of the nation, including as much as he can recall about the Civil War, which Nolan missed completely.

An hour later, Nolan is dead, but not before tucking into a nearby Bible his request for an epitaph: “He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands.”

For obvious reasons, the story is a good choice to teach a particular type of patriotism that advocates never questioning one’s superiors or criticizing authority. The Man Without a Country learns to value his nation above all.

One can see how the story would have appealed to certain audiences during two world wars and their aftermaths, when belief in American exceptionalism was at its zenith, and how it would have fallen out of favor in the decades since, as the nation has had to interrogate its shortcomings.

But the story’s obscurity is a shame, because beneath its jingoism and obvious moralizing are complexities that deserve exploration.

The story’s narrator, a younger man, attempts to have Nolan pardoned, yet can find nobody in the government who even remembers the man’s name, let alone his crime. “They pretended there was no such man, and never was such a man. They will say so at the Department now!” the narrator writes. “Perhaps they do not know. It will not be the first thing in the service of which the Department appears to know nothing!”

The story further hints that Nolan’s trial was performative in nature — “to while away the monotony of the summer” — and that other conspirators, perhaps those of higher rank or from better families, escaped punishment. Or, as the narrator puts it, “The big flies escaped — rightly for all I know.”

The appropriateness of Hale’s sentence, both its excessive length and his country-club prison aboard a boat, is worthy of discussion, as are the reality of scapegoating and the advantages of wealth, power and rank.

These topics need not be debated to the exclusion of a larger moral — the importance of loyalty to one’s country — but alongside it. The story makes a point of calling out the likes of “every Bragg and Beauregard who broke a soldier’s oath two years ago, and of every Maury and Barron who broke a sailor’s,” referring to U.S. Army and Navy leaders in the South who renounced their country and joined the Confederacy.

In a modern era that has forgotten the honorable, vital role that protest played in forming our nation, and where too many of our friends and neighbors are willing to turn a blind eye to the flying of the Confederate flag or the insurrectionists that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, maybe “The Man Without a Country” is more worthy of a literary reevaluation this Independence Day than ever before.

Note: I first learned of this story from its radio adaptation:

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Image: Luce Center Label, unidentified artist, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr.; museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson. Description (from the Smithsonian website): In this piece, made in the nineteenth century, the artist painted three stars around two crossed American flags. The flag on the right has twenty-one stars, while the other has twenty-two. This may symbolize the twenty-first and twenty-second states, Illinois and Alabama, who joined the Union in 1818 and 1819.

I recently reread The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s Depression-era classic about farm families forced west after both the Great Dust Bowl and greedy bankers pushed them off their land. Steinbeck focuses on one family in particular, the Joads, but alternating chapters cast an omniscient eye on the larger picture, capturing how the tragedy impacted and changed the West—and the nation.

It has been decades since I’d first read the novel. In the intervening years, I’ve read more Steinbeck, including many of his short stories and multiple returns to Of Mice and Men (an occupational hazard of teaching high school). But until recently, I had not attempted his most revered novel again.

Would I still appreciate it? Yes, as it turns out.

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I don’t have the time or energy for a thorough critique, but here are some impressions:

An author’s prescience. Steinbeck’s immediate recognition of the Dust Bowl as an issue worthy of study and writing is laudable. He wasn’t writing about an event decades or centuries in the past, but rather about an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe unspooling before his eyes. In 1936, he was commissioned by the San Francisco News to produce a series of stories about migrants in California; just three years later, he was sparring with his agent and publisher over language changes to the completed novel. For a writer to go from boots-on-the-ground reporting to a finished draft on a contemporary social issue so quickly is astounding.

Powerful protagonist. Tom Joad’s character arc is from rugged individualist to community catalyst. The novel opens as the prodigal son returns to Oklahoma after a stint in prison—he killed a man in self-defense—and he tells his mother that survival behind bars meant taking each day as it came—“jus’ puttin’ one foot in front a the other”—with no expectations for the future. His mother allows that it’s a good philosophy.

By the novel’s end, because of his conversations with Jim Casy, a former reverend, and his experiences in the government camp (where the residents police themselves), Tom recognizes that a group can accomplish much more than an individual, that a person alone is separated from the “great big soul” that unites us all. Whether this epiphany will be permanent is a question the novel does not answer.

A voice of the people. Tom may be the novel’s main character, but Casy is its conscience. While he hitches a ride with the Joads to California, Casy shares how his worldview has expanded since he left traditional religion behind. While consoling Uncle John, who holds himself responsible for the death of his wife, Casy notes:

Later, Casy allows himself to be arrested in Tom’s place, and later still, he is martyred while organizing migrants to strike for better wages. His last words, “You don’ know what you’re a-doin’,” are an echo of Jesus’ “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Timeless tragedy. Chapter Five’s observations still apply to situations where the System chews people up, while those in the System decry its existence and claim they cannot stop it. The first is a conversation between a tenant farmer and a land owner, where the latter, defending the removal of the farmer from the land, says:

Later, the tenant farmer appeals to the tractor driver, himself a former tenant farmer, begging him not to plow under the farmer’s house, telling him that a hundred people a day are displaced because of his actions. The tractor driver responds:

The lines still hit hard. Decades after the same excuses for modernization were used to eliminate blue-collar factory jobs, they are now offered to explain and excuse massive white-collar layoffs due to artificial intelligence. Today’s tractor drivers are those deluded enough to believe that the relentless drive to consolidate more money and power into the hands of a few elite oligarchs will somehow bypass them, as though their skills are special enough to merit continued employment. Steinbeck saw the truth ninety years ago.

Pink Floyd. Several times in the book, Ma mentions real-life bank robber and cop killer Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd. She claims to have known him and his parents, saying Floyd was “full a hell, sure, like a good boy oughta be.” She blames his crimes on a system that “hurt ’im so he was mad.”

Floyd was killed in an Ohio cornfield by “federal agents and members of the East Liverpool Police Department” in 1934. The two-sided historical marker is about an hour away from my house, so my family and I made the trip recently (see images below). Coincidentally, the Conkle farm where Floyd was killed was in my wife’s family at the time.

Switching it up. Science fiction editor Damon Knight, in his seminal Creating Short Fiction, noted that “[r]eading a story, even a tragic story, ought to be a succession of sweet pleasures, like beads on a string—vivid images, excitements, anticipations, surprises. ‘Serious’ doesn’t have to mean dismal.”

The Grapes of Wrath exemplifies this. Moments of levity can be found in the antics of Grandpa Joad, whose trousers are seldom buttoned straight; the relative (if short-lived) happiness of the family in a government camp in California; and Ruthie and Winfield’s discovery of indoor plumbing at the same camp.

Women’s lib. Ma Joad is the matriarch and leader. Steinbeck mentions, at several points, Pa’s ineffectualness once the family leaves their farm and heads west. Mired in the past, he can no longer see the future clearly, which paralyzes him and many of the other adult males. One dies, one abandons his wife, and one just walks away, mesmerized by the Colorado River. Pa, to his credit, never leaves, but he is reduced, by the book’s end, to being ever more awestruck at his wife’s growing fierceness.

The men who remain vital are those who can see beyond traditional gender divisions. This includes Tom and Casy. When Ma notes that salting down meat is women’s work, the former reverend replies, “It’s all work. … They’s too much of it to split it up to men’s or women’s work.”

Indeed, despite Tom’s much-ballyhooed speech near the end of the book (“I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look,” etc.), it is Rose of Sharon, Tom’s pregnant sister, who gets the final word. Moving beyond her own pain and loss, she offers succor to a dying man, leaving the fate of the Joads uncertain yet giving the reader hope that life for the Joads will go on.

Have you seen the Straight Pride flag?

It’s black and white — because gays, those greedy devils, have already claimed all the other colors of the rainbow for their own flag — with the traditional symbols of Mars and Venus at the center.

The Straight Pride flag is also very boring, as befits a similarly boring cause.

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During June, which is Pride Month (formerly Gay Pride Month), a smattering of very concerned citizens has decided that July needs to be Straight Pride month. Apparently, they feel their rights are being trampled by the many LGBTQ+ demonstrations around the country and world.

As a straight man, maybe I should join the straight pride movement. After all, how fair is it that being straight has never gotten me a parade?

Hmmm.

Let me tell you some other things that being straight has never gotten me.

It’s never gotten me shot or lynched.

It’s never gotten me made fun of in school.

It’s never gotten me harassed by the police.

Or denied housing.

Or cried over by a parent.

Or told I couldn’t marry the person I loved.

Or subjected to shock treatment.

Or thrown out of the military.

Or discriminated against at work.

Or made the butt of jokes on TV.

Or prayed for by people who claim to love the sinner and hate the sin but who would be overjoyed if I could somehow change the essence of my being.

I guess, given all these things that being straight has never gotten me, I can accept that I’ve never had a parade.

Or haven’t I?

It is fair to say that heteronormative values have been celebrated in this country and around the world for centuries.

They’re celebrated every time a man and a woman get married.

Every time a child is raised to follow traditional gender roles.

Every time male and female actors lock lips on the big screen and the audience sighs.

Every time a picture is snapped of a prom king and queen.

Every time we can walk down the street holding hands without some jerk in a car doing a double take and looking in the rearview mirror.

Every time we don’t have any doubts about safely using a public restroom.

Every time we are accepted, without question, by friends and family who understand and “get” us.

These are the Straight Pride parades that heterosexual people march in, the ones that step off each morning when our feet hit the floor beside our beds.

Heterosexual people don’t need a special day or month or flag because we don’t face the same hurdles that gay people do. Because our accomplishments have never been scrubbed and sanitized out of history books. Because the world doesn’t look at us as a psychological illness that can be cured with a little — or a lot — of effort.

Maybe, someday, LGBTQ+ people won’t need a special month or flag either.

But the world isn’t there yet.

And as long as people keep having dumb, knee-jerk reactions like Straight Pride Month, it never will be.

This column originally ran in June 2019 in The Alliance Review, in Alliance, Ohio. With a few edits, I thought it was worth dusting off for 2026.

My wife and I were at an appointment recently where an employee was getting to know us through idle chatter.

Anybody who’s been around me long enough to learn my name recognizes that I am chatter-impaired. Silence is always preferable. Really.

But this poor thing didn’t know, so she bravely bumbled into the Zone of Toxic Superficiality.

“Are you going on vacation this summer?” she asked.

Uh-huh.

“Where?”

We told her.

“I love that for you!”

Despite myself, I was impressed. “I love that for you” is more original than “Oh, that sounds like fun!” or “How neat/cool/exciting!” I even filed the expression away for future use, thinking it was a snappy comeback that isn’t quite the same as acceptance.

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After all, loving something for somebody else isn’t endorsing it or believing it would be appropriate for me. It felt like the perfect coda to a surface-level chat, one where you never expect—or want—to see the other person again.

But then came her follow-up questions: “Do you have any kids?” and “What are you doing later today?”

The answers—not that they matter—were yes and getting breakfast at Dunkin. What is more germane is her comeback to each: “I love that for you.”

From delight to trite in less time than it takes to drop an F-bomb after hitting your head with a sledgehammer.

My wife and I spent the rest of the day—really, the week—using “I love that for you” in a variety of insincere contexts.

“I’m going to the store.” I love that for you!

“I think I have an ingrown toenail.” I love that for you!

“I’m pretty sure AI is an existential threat and that we’ll all be dead in twenty years or less.” Well, you get the picture.

Turns out, the expression isn’t so fresh, anyway. The website Social Cat notes “love that for you” is an influencer term that provides a “quick, friendly way to boost engagement and foster community online.” The site also warns against using it sarcastically. Oops.

Apparently, “I love that for you” can also become “love that for me” and “love that for us.” Stick some emojis around it for maximum hipness —🙌 love that for me 🙌.

Worst of all, it has its own abbreviation. LT4U is designed for use in “fast-paced DMs.” Ugh. If there’s one thing I loathe more than idle small talk, it’s fast-paced DMs.

The experience has inspired me to create my own slang: JUST4N. As in, “Just You Stop Talking for Now.”

I mean, not forever, JUST4N.

Feel free to sprinkle it among your conversations and fast-paced DMs. Love that for you!

In real life, Chris Schillig is slightly less curmudgeonly than his online persona. But only slightly.

My daughter never had chores per se. She would make her bed, wash dishes when she dirtied them, and vacuum the floor when she made a mess. But her mother and I didn’t equate a certain number of household jobs with an allowance, probably because we never gave her an allowance. (Man, we sucked as parents.)

But that’s not what I’m apologizing for.

See, the one task I asked her to complete, without fail, was picking up dog poop in the yard before I mowed. Back then, we had only one dog, Molly, a pig-headed, spiteful, but somehow still lovable husky mix. She would poop, without fail, twice a day.

An algebraic expression to determine how many piles my daughter had to pick up each week looked like this: 7(2x), where 7 is the number of days in the week, 2 is the number of times the dog defecates each day, and x is the number of dogs in the house.

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I know pooping is not an exact science. Sometimes, dogs, like their owners, get a little bound up, meaning no production. And sometimes they eat a little something extra. Like a sock, or an entire dish of beef stroganoff. In those cases, the deposits are more frequent.

Nonetheless, the expression was a good rule of thumb. One dog equals fourteen piles each week.

But when I mowed in those halcyon days, I discovered many unclaimed treasures. Sometimes this occurred before a catastrophe, but other times, only after I had rolled over said piles with the mower.

Which would always lead to a Fatherly Intervention, where I, with much peace and love, would lecture my sole offspring on her lack of attention to detail and poor math skills. “If you haven’t found fourteen droppings,” I would scold, “then keep at it until you do.”

And yet, the shitastrophes continued.

These days, my daughter has long since fled the nest and busies herself by picking up, or not picking up, poop in her own yard. Molly has shuffled off this canine coil, but other pets have trotted along after her (and I’m playing on both meanings of “trots” here). I no longer have the luxury of a poop picker-upper and must do the job myself, with not one dog, but two.

My algebraic expression now yields an answer of 21, which is almost more deposits than fit in a standard Walmart shopping bag (if you’ve ever wondered).

Which brings me, at long last, to the apology.

Over the last few weeks, despite scooping what should be the correct number of droppings, I am still encountering multiple instances of miniature colon bombs lying in wait to squish beneath the mower’s tires or be caught up by the whirring blade.

And each time I stop the mower to clear the path in front of me, which happens so often that I now carry bags on my appointed rounds, I feel a little guiltier.

Because maybe the expression wasn’t 7(2x). Maybe it was 7(3x) or even 7(3.5x) all along.

Other variables, I’ve learned, include a dog’s tendency to move about while transacting its business and the height of the grass.

I’ve witnessed our new puppy performing a waltz in the yard, spinning and dipping while the storm erupts in the rear. This means that one deposit could hypothetically be made at several branches—east side, west side, and central.

As for grass height, if I’m cleaning the yard when it’s high, then finding all the trouble spots can be challenging. The green is surprisingly effective camouflage. Even if I map the yard into quadrants, I can miss one, two, three, or seven turds.

And this is Contemporary Me talking, officially in late middle age, when taking care of the yard has moved from a boring necessity to a cherished hobby.

In the old days, my only mowing goal was to see how fast I could finish, and to hell with any skips or divots. If I could get away with mowing only twice a month, I did. No wonder the poor kid couldn’t find any turds in the yard. Heck, she probably couldn’t have found a dinosaur out there with grass as high as a corn field in August!

My equation doesn’t account for any of this.

I set my kid up for failure, refused to see the error of my ways, and—worst of all!—recognized my faults years ago but am only apologizing for them today, June 5, 2026. And not even in person, but via a crummy Substack article.

I should retroactively double her allowance, I guess.

Some people say the hardest part of being a pet owner is saying goodbye, but that's not true.

The hardest part is knowing WHEN to say goodbye.

Lilly came to us when she was six years old. A former breeder dog who had whelped more than thirty puppies, she didn't know how to be a pet. That first day with us, she stood in the middle of the living room, trembling. Holly sat with her for hours, petting and talking to her.

That night, Lilly slept in our bed.

Over the next few months, she learned to walk on a leash, to play, and to ask for belly rubs. She experienced the joy of chasing ducks at Silver Park, walking along the Iron Horse Trail, and rolling on her back in the yard.

Most importantly, she found a new calling. The former breeding girl became a greeting girl, going to work with Holly at least one day a week in two different extended-care facilities (nursing homes, for the uninitiated) and visiting residents, families, and co-workers. Residents asked for her to visit their rooms, visitors poked their head in Holly's office to see if it was a "Lilly day," and co-workers spoiled her with secret treats hidden in desk drawers.

A few weeks ago, Lilly started getting selective about eating, and a week ago, she stopped eating altogether. After two appointments at her local vet and an overnight stay at an emergency clinic in Akron, multiple tests, an X-ray, and an ultrasound, we were no closer to a diagnosis. We brought her home and treated her for the most likely cause, pancreatitis.

After a weekend of boiling chicken and rice, rubbing special nutritional gels and pastes on her gums, grinding up hamburger, and using first a syringe and then a turkey baster to force her to drink, Holly and I both looked at each other and recognized we were doing this for us, not her. We wanted to keep her a little longer, but that wasn't fair.

She left us with Holly's lipstick on her head.

I'm not a spiritual person. However, I do believe that the good we do in this life, the encounters we have with others where we can choose to brighten their day and help them, radiate outward like the spokes of a wheel. Lilly was just a dog, but through her work first at McCrea Manor and then at The Orchards, she touched hundreds of people, and those spokes touched hundreds more.

We will miss Lilly like crazy, but we were so fortunate to have her for as long as we did.

This column was originally published in the summer of 2009, shortly after our daughter’s high school graduation party. It struck a chord with me today, on her thirty-fifth birthday.

As my wife and I were walking on Sunday morning, we passed a young mother pulling her son in a wagon. Suddenly, he jumped out and raced through what was evidently his yard. “I’ll see you ’round back,” he shouted over his shoulder. Then he was gone.

It is as apt a metaphor for raising kids as I can think of. One moment you’re pulling the wagon, keeping one eye peeled for what’s ahead and the other on the precious cargo behind; the next, you’re staring down at the handle and the remnants of the dependence, wondering what happened, stunned at how quickly the change occurred.

The night before, my wife and I and a few family members and friends had been sitting around a picnic table in the dying light of a beautiful summer’s day, watching as our daughter opened high school graduation cards and gifts. I realized that a major part of our lives as parents was coming to an end. We’d navigated the stormy seas of adolescence: the first love and heartbreak, the academic and athletic successes and failures, the mood swings that took us up and down like yoyos. We’d survived the driver’s license and the dances, the sprained ankles and pulled ligaments, the auditions and ruminations and recriminations (whoever decided it was important for kids to know at age 18 how they will spend the rest of their lives was crazy) that go along with shepherding another life until he or she can start making intelligent decisions without you.

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All those times when she and her friends would turn the front porch into a tent city with help from blankets and bed sheets, or we would hand out Popsicles or hot chocolate at the breakfast bar, or play backyard badminton until the grass was wet with dew and it was too dark to see the birdie – those times were gone, proof as always that the days and weeks go slow, but the months and years go fast.

And it occurred to me then that somewhere in the last year, our role had shifted from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side,” that while she might still come to us for advice and financial help, our days of pointing her in one direction and saying march —and with a headstrong young lady, I could count those days on one hand and have a few fingers left over, anyway—were over.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I know parents who want to wind back the clock and keep their children forever young, dependent, and innocent. If I were like Peabody and his boy Sherman and had access to a Wayback Machine, I’d want to relive an hour or two now and again, but I wouldn’t want to stay there.

For one thing, there are too many cool things coming up to spend too much time looking back. I don’t know what shape those things will take, whether they will be the traditional college graduation, wedding, and grandchildren, or if they’ll be more off the beaten track. Likely, there will be a few heartbreaks and unexpected detours (expected detours hardly qualify, do they?), because we forget that the Chinese expression “May you live in interesting times,” is really a curse. Nobody has a guarantee on anything other than this moment, right now, today, anyway, but I’m cautiously optimistic, because it doesn’t pay to be anything else.

“You know,” my mom said to me that Saturday night, “it wasn’t all that long ago that I was planning your graduation party, and now here I am again.”

Parenthood is like that, I guess. I talk to some people who are a little farther along the road, and they tell me to wait until my daughter turns 21, or 30, or 50. And I know I won’t have long to wait, because I just blinked and went from 18 to 41, myself.

So my heart was full last Sunday when I saw the little guy jump from the wagon and make his break. I wondered if it would be the last time his mother would ever pull him in a wagon, and maybe she didn’t even realize it.

If I were the advice-giving kind, I would tell her to hop into the wagon herself and hold on tight. It’s the bumpiest, most wonderful ride in the world, and she’ll need all four wheels just to keep up.

Whenever I start to believe that I know how to teach, that I’ve finally figured it all out, I remind myself how close even an expert educator is to daily disaster.

And if an expert is circling so close to the drain, what chance does a journeyman like me have? It’s a reminder to stay humble, Pony Boy.

To wit, here are ten situations that can send any lesson, lemming-like, over a cliff:

The Sketchy Meal

At any given time, one or more of your young charges is in gastrointestinal distress. Maybe it was last night’s value meal from BK or today’s lunch of pepperoni pizza. But lurking in the recesses of the soon-to-be offender’s colon are the remnants of a sketchy meal that has, in the long journey from mouth to esophagus, stomach to small intestine, and small intestine to large, gained the smell of the most pungent Limburger cheese.

This cheese is waiting for the right moment to express itself as flatulence so odiferous and eardrum-shatteringly loud that it would disrupt even Socrates or Maria Montessori, sending them and the rest of the class scurrying for a neutral corner where said stench will not permeate. The day’s lesson? Forgotten in the fog.

Sketchy Meal 2: The Sequel

Everything from the Sketchy Meal, except that the student wants it to happen. Because in the brain of a sixteen-year-old boy, nothing is as funny as a wet rip at the height of a Shakespearean sonnet or the solving of a two-factor equation.

Sketchy Meal 3: Back for More

Again, everything from the Sketchy Meal, except this time, it’s the educator. I vividly recall a teacher in junior high with the unfortunate first name of Melody who played a jaunty little tune for our class as she hustled, red-faced, from the blackboard to the bathroom on a fine spring day.

Lest you think that all the classroom conundrums are related to the rectum, let us not forget:

The Crinkler

A young person making audacious noise with something that the intrepid educator can’t quite see from the front of the class. When the teacher approaches the student, demanding the object in question be produced post haste, the student complies by slapping a condom in a shiny wrapper into the teacher’s open palm. Cue gales of laughter that will capsize any lesson.

The Interrupter

The student who raises a hand at the apex of the lesson, just as the teacher is driving home a crucial point. The educator, living in perpetual hope of actually reaching a child, stops the lesson to answer a curriculum query so important that the student is waving their hand back and forth as if it held a lighter (or a cell phone) during a ballad at an Air Supply concert*. But the comment is never about the content. Instead, it is a complaint about the kid two rows over (who ate a BK value meal the night before), a question about the deadline to buy prom tickets, or an urgent need to leave the room to submit an assignment for another class.

The Jack Rabbit

The student who has completed the assignment before the teacher has even finished explaining it. Despite the teacher’s assertion that the work, if done well, should take most of the class, this speedster has already crossed the finish line and is demanding immediate assessment, even though the teacher is gamely addressing the rest of the class at that moment.

The Fire Drill

No matter how carefully the teacher has planned for this eventuality, it will always occur when students are taking one of the biggest tests of the year, but only after they’ve perused most of the questions and can look up the answers before the test continues the next day.

The Projectile

A classic, and for good reason. Any item—an overripe banana from the depths of a book bag, a crumpled detention notice, a used tissue—has the potential to become a mini-missile lobbed at another student or the teacher. Depending on the force of the splat, bid farewell to at least a portion of the day’s learning.

The Knocker

The intrepid office aide delivering a pass who bangs on the door as if it were the drawbridge of a castle, shades of the Porter scene in Macbeth, reverberating across the room at a key moment in the lesson; or rattling the door in question even after the teacher has clearly said, “Coming!” Five will get you ten that the knocker, once revealed, will engage another student in a conversation, or that the summoned student will loudly proclaim innocence as he saunters from the class.

The Poorly Timed Announcement

This comes courtesy of a well-meaning administrator who has forgotten to make a public-address announcement at the start of class and instead decides to open the mic twenty minutes into the period. The announcement always falls into one of two categories:

• Completely unnecessary: “Teachers, please excuse the interruption. I forgot to mention earlier today that the chess club’s next big tournament will be held in December 2030. Sign up now.”

• Completely disruptive: “Teachers, please excuse the interruption. Everybody with a last name that starts with letters needs to move their cars from the south parking lot immediately.”

All of the above are reminders that no teacher is immune to the fickle forces of pedagogical disruption. What really matters is how the beleaguered educator responds. Not taking yourself too seriously is a good start.

Colleagues, can you think of any other disruptors? Share them, please!

*And, yes, I know I’m dating myself with the Air Supply reference.

Image: The Ass at School,1557, Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The National Gallery of Art.

I have to believe that many people, like me, are searching for the magic bullet, the secret sauce, the needle in the haystack.

Whatever it’s called, it represents the answer to life’s challenges, a way to understand the world and people, and how to best respond in challenging situations.

I totally get that, for many, this answer lies in the Bible, the Koran, or another spiritual belief system. These tomes and the faiths around them offer many guideposts to living correctly. As a non-spiritual person, I still find many valuable teachings in religion, provided I can separate them from the necessity of believing in an omniscient, higher power.

So I am cognizant that what I, and others like me, may be searching for is something that replaces the role religion once played in our lives.

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That said, I have found a certain comfort in various self-help programs and philosophies through the years. Probably the stickiest of these, in terms of its influence on my overall outlook, is Choice Theory by William Glasser. There was a time in the late 1980s and 1990s when exposure to Glasser’s theories was de rigueur for education majors. I don’t know if that’s still the case. Probably not.

The idea that controlling others is a myth, that the best we can do (as teachers in a classroom and people in society) is to control our own behavior and provide information so that others can make informed decisions, resonates deeply with me. It’s still how I respond to students when they tell me that I can’t make them do anything (accompanied by a less-than-endearing sneer): You’re right. I can’t. All I can do is lay out options. You have to decide to do—or not do— it on your own.

I also appreciate Glasser’s contention that most of the problems vexing us are not rooted in our past, traumatizing though those events may be. Instead, today’s struggles are almost always rooted in today’s problems. Resolve those problems, and the current struggles go away, or are much improved.

Still, I’ve found in recent months that Glasser’s theory isn’t helping me in the moment; it’s more of a long-term mindset. As a mantra that can guide my decisions today, right now, when faced with having to say yes or no or responding to an angry phone call, neighbor, relative, whatever, Control Theory isn’t cutting it.

So I’ve revisited the other program that has made an impact on me: The R Factor.

Years ago, my school district’s administration rolled out R Factor training in a big way, and we still subscribe to its tenets, especially the rallying cry of Event + Response = Outcome (E+R=O) and the advice to Press Pause when facing tough moments. Speakers from Focus 3, the company founded by the late Tim Kight, have visited our district several times, delivering information about the above slogans and others, such as No BCD and Get Your Mind Right.

Many of these Focus 3 maxims are explored in Above the Line by Urban Meyer with Wayne Coffey, the 2015 book explaining how Meyer created a winning culture at OSU (before groping a woman at a public restaurant, which is definitely not Above the Line behavior).

That book is fine, but it also contains a great deal of sports culture that isn’t compelling to a non-sports reader (like me).

So I was curious to see what Heather Verity, the current CEO of Focus 3, could add to the discussion in her new book, The R Factor: How to Maximize the One Thing You Can Control, which certainly sounds authoritative.

I was worried about the book’s slight page count (120 pages), and I was right to be. When you subtract the pages at the beginning allotted to Tim Kight’s rough draft for a similar book he never finished, and the pages at the end that are a pitch for other Focus 3 programs and materials, what remains is a book that attempts to be both a how-to manual and a memoir and fails at both.

The strength is still the R Factor program itself, which does serve as an effective in-the-moment reminder to take a deep breath and compose yourself before responding in a stressful situation. Similarly, the observation that one person’s response to a stressful event is another person’s stressful event shows how a cascading domino effect is created through a snarky response or impetuous action.

Verity is on solid ground when providing program highlights, accompanied by real-life examples. But there just aren’t enough of the latter to help readers see how each statement applies in different work and home situations. When I compared the book’s contents to a handout from Focus 3 and some of my notes from years before, I found few differences. I wonder how readers who are new to the techniques would absorb (or fail to absorb) them from the book alone.

As it stands, Meyer’s Above the Line, with its sole chapter dedicated to R Factor techniques, is still the best (written) introduction to that program.

Ultimately, my search for the magic bullet—or at least a more detailed explanation of the bullet—goes on.

What self-help/pop psychology books and programs do you subscribe to?

Image: Moonlight, 1772, Claude-Joseph Vernet

A while back, a high school senior asked me to write a letter of recommendation.

I was happy to. Highlighting the accomplishments of goal-oriented young adults is always a pleasure. I offered my standard response: “Send me a brag sheet and give me a week or two.”

The student froze, mumbled a half-hearted assent, and headed off.

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Weeks passed, and the brag sheet didn’t materialize, so I requested it again. This isn’t unusual: Some students are reluctant to crow about class rank, extracurriculars, and honors, believing it’s in bad taste. (I’ve never had this particular hangup—or the honors.)

But when the student failed to send the information a second time, I asked why. The answer: I don’t do anything. I just work.

I wrote a glowing letter.

The student needn’t have worried about judgment from me. I started my first job in seventh grade, working at a farm near my family’s house, and stayed there until I turned sixteen and was old enough for a “real” job—i.e., one where the government took out taxes.

My list of extracurriculars in high school was short. And by short, I mean nonexistent. I just worked, mostly at the local Ponderosa restaurant. While my classmates were gaining experiences on the field, the court, and the stage, I was gaining them in front of a dishwasher, a grill, or customers.

All the lessons of time management, goal setting, resilience, and adaptability that many people learn through school-sponsored activities were available to me on the job. I learned to juggle homework and long hours, support others on their bad days (and allow them to support me on mine), and work together to achieve a goal—like surviving the dinner rush.

It doesn’t matter how you gain these experiences. For some, it’s by throwing a football. For others, by learning a dance move. Or participating in band, debate, scouting, pageants, or volunteering at a local nursing home. What matters are the memories and knowledge.

I never felt less-than or unprepared. Nor was I ever jealous of my classmates' accomplishments. They had their thing, I had mine. We got where we needed to be.

While the education system works to normalize other pathways to career success that do not require four years of college, it should also recognize the diverse ways that students can grow outside the classroom.

A young soccer player runs off the field sweaty, satisfied, and ready to put what she has learned to work in other venues. A young restaurant worker clocks out feeling the same.

Educators and employers need to see both accomplishments as equally acceptable ways to grow and mature. Neither is just anything.

Image: Soap Bubbles by Jean Siméon Chardin, probably 1733/1734. The National Gallery of Art.

Wait for
   alarm to ring
   contacts to see
   water to boil
   dog to pee

   light to turn green
   parking space
   mistakes discovered
   saving face

   taxes to file
   dress shoes polished
   porch swing painted
   pizza demolished

   promotions promised
   raises missed
   spotty health
   spouse is pissed

   kids to visit
   burgers grilled
   fall to winter
   roads snow-filled

   friends to move
   loved ones gone
   receding hairline
   thinning lawn

   lines at Christmas
   empty chairs
   a life diminished 
   no one cares

   shortness of breath
   drop to knees
   spinning room
   God not yet please

   eulogy spoken
   mourners sigh
   coffin lowered
   dirt piled high

   Silence surrounding
   just as before
   grass grows higher
Wait no more

Image: Waiting by Edgar Degas (c.1880/82)

I blame Costco, honestly.

The popular warehouse club sells V8 Energy drinks in 24-can packages. And the flavors in the pack are broken down into eight each of Pomegranate Blueberry, Black Cherry, and Peach Mango.

I love Pomegranate Blueberry, tolerate Black Cherry, and loathe Peach Mango. Having one-third of the selection in the verboten category would generally be a dealbreaker, but fortunately, my wife loves Peach Mango. (I knew I married her for a reason.)

However, there’s a hitch. In a marriage, there always is.

This particular hitch is that my wife categorizes herself as a “sipper.” For every sixteen fluid ounces I consume, she drinks maybe two. And that’s on a good day.

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Around the house, I’m known as the Finisher because I can’t stand waste and will finish whatever’s left of any open drink. It doesn’t matter what or how old, I’ll drink it. Two-day-old Diet Dr. Pepper? No problem. Four-day-old glass of water with a floating dog hair? Down the hatch. So an unopened drink is usually no problem at all, and is often an unexpected treat.

But Peach Mango is a problem because it tastes like a hellish melange of baby vomit and bird feces.

And it’s a problem exacerbated by lunch.

Almost daily, I trundle off to work with a lunch bag that includes Pomegranate Blueberry or Black Cherry, and my wife with one containing Peach Mango. But recently, she brought home six unopened cans, claiming she simply can’t drink that much daily.

This is an issue that wouldn’t exist if Costco sold 24 cans of Pomegranate Blueberry, or even split the pack evenly between Pomegranate and Black Cherry. But nooooo.

And, yes, I know this is a first-world problem of the highest order. Sue me.

The only two solutions to my dilemma are:

1. Stop buying V8 Energy drinks.

2. Start drinking Peach Mango.

The first solution is intolerable. The second is … almost as intolerable.

Before I continue, a word about how I discovered V8. A few years ago, the company delivered cases of its new energy drinks to the building where I teach, hoping to hook stressed-out but moderately health-conscious educators. All of the cans were Pomegranate Blueberry.

For a while, I took one or two each week, wanting to give others an opportunity. But nobody else was interested, so I started taking one from the lunch room each day, and then two, and sometimes circling back between classes for a third.

Eventually, when I stopped guzzling long enough to read the label, I realized why I was wired like an A.I. data center and sleeping only two hours a night. Each can contains the equivalent of the caffeine in a cup of coffee.

By then, I was hooked. Good marketing, V8!

All of which is to say that I can’t easily stop buying V8. The alternative is drinking the occasional Peach Mango, accompanied by the grimacing and groaning necessary to make others recognize the depths of my disgust.

This has become enough of a thing that two of my colleagues have developed a shorthand for the kind of day it is based on the flavor of V8 I’m drinking.

Pomegranate Blueberry: Choice day. Things are humming along. Students are learning, instruction is sizzling, and grades are up to date.

Black Cherry: Average day. It has its peaks and valleys. Students are doing their thing, which may not always be the thing I need them to be doing, but isn’t too egregious; instruction is plodding along; the pile of papers to grade is not negligible but not insurmountable.

Peach Mango: Below average. The day is bleak, colorless. Students are noticeably off-task, instruction is lackluster, and the piles of grading are approaching Himalayan heights.

This has now taken on a life beyond the drink. A day is dubbed“Black Cherry” even when I don’t have a drink in my hand. “Peach Mango” can be declared before the sun is up.

The week I had to drink Peach Mango every day to finish off a box will leave a stain forever. Peach Week, as it’s now known, was the pits.

To end on a positive note, today was pretty good. I’d call it Black Cherry verging on Pomegranate Blueberry. Maybe Black Blueberry. Or Cherry Pomegranate.

Neither of which is sold by Costco.

If you’re a teacher, it’s happened to you. The lesson you slaved over, the one with clearly detailed learning targets and expectations, multiple moving pieces designed to build upon one another, flops.

And flops big-time.

Maybe students are bored, confused, or disengaged. Maybe classroom shenanigans derail the learning. Or maybe a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and the carefully constructed foundation of your lesson crumbles.

It’s happened before and it will happen again. It’s the nature of teaching.

In the moment, of course, it’s a huge deal. Forty-three minutes wasted. Listless students. Off-task behaviors. Little-to-no learning. A possible domino effect for the next day.

So, whaddaya do?

First, take a deep breath. Count to five. Let it out. Repeat as necessary. This too shall pass.

Next, reflect on what happened as soon after the class as possible. Jot down impressions. This should be fast, fast, fast. Maybe you lost the class’s attention when handing out papers. Maybe students were coming from a high-energy experience in another class and struggled to settle in. Maybe you were waylaid at the door by a colleague and couldn’t start class in the usual way, disrupting your usual rhythm.

Capture the positives too. Few lessons are a total wash-out. Reflect on the students who were engaged or at least compliant. What made their experience different?

If you have to teach the same lesson later in the day, what corrections can you make, however small, to yield better results? Often, a tweak makes all the difference. Rephrase the directions, or have students do it. Ask a different question or questions, of higher or lower rigor, to help students settle into the learning.

If you don’t teach the same lesson later in the day, lucky you! Focus on compartmentalizing, so the bad mojo of the crash-and-burn doesn’t affect the rest of your preps.

When you get home, go for a walk, clean out the refrigerator, mow the grass. Anything to give your mind a much-needed break and create emotional distance.

Then, when you’re ready, look at those notes. Has distance given you a new perspective? Were things really as bad as they seemed in the moment? Often, a little space (and grace) helps you see where the lesson went wrong and how to fix it next time.

Which brings me to: When is “the next time”?

Obviously, you have to go back the next day (or the following Monday, if your special hell is a bad lesson on Friday afternoon, followed by a weekend of recriminations). That’s not what I mean.

“The next time” you teach a particular skill might be the next class day if students must master the material in the flopped lesson before moving on. But if the lesson was a one-off (which might be the problem, since students have a sixth sense for filler), consider just moving on to the next topic.

If you taught the lesson multiple times in the same day and it went wrong only once, then something about that particular interaction was wonky. Right before or right after lunch? Some unexpected hiccup in the day’s schedule? Maybe the aforementioned butterfly in Africa?

If you taught the lesson multiple times and all of them went wrong, then it was just a bad lesson. Determine what needs to be retaught, leave yourself a big note for next year, and move on.

It’s instructive (and maddening) to recognize how much prep went into the lesson. Occasionally, classes that require a great deal of work ahead of time flop faster because the number of moving parts is so great that any one hiccup disrupts it all. Conversely, some of those complicated lessons are the richest in terms of learning.

It’s also worth noting that deep classroom conversations and successful outcomes can come from lessons that are little more than bullet points on a slide, the educational equivalent of a Hail Mary pass thrown on Sunday night for a Monday morning class. Maybe the extra space to navigate and improvise allows ideas to percolate more fully.

Maddening, indeed.

Sometimes, I’ll address a substandard lesson with the class on the next day. Sometimes I won’t.

Certainly, when off-target behaviors contribute to the lesson’s failure, a teacher must connect with the students involved. I’ve found a quick comment as the student enters (“hey, we won’t have a repeat of yesterday, right?”), delivered with a knowing nod and a friendly tone, is enough. Repeat offenders need stiffer consequences, of course.

If I mention the substandard lesson to the class, it’s a chance to model resilience in the face of adversity—which sounds rather arch when applied to one of the many hundreds of thousands of lessons taught in schools each day, I know.

So, if I go there, I keep the references quick: “Wow, yesterday did not go as I intended,” followed by how I have adapted. On occasion, I’ll ask students what they think. If you do this, don’t be surprised if they have no idea there was a problem. Also, don’t let any dialogue today embroil you in a repeat of yesterday’s mistakes.

If a very teacher-centric lesson goes bad, I try to follow with a kid-centered lesson, and vice versa. The brain craves diversity, after all.

Finally, and most importantly, forgive yourself. Doctors don’t correctly diagnose every condition. Attorneys don’t win every trial. Teachers don’t nail every lesson.

If you’ve developed a good classroom climate and rapport, the occasional flop is not a tragedy, but rather a reminder that teaching is both a science and an art.

Image: Jan Steen (1625/1626–1679), The Village School (c 1670), oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. Wikimedia Commons.