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| Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay |
This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny — the Stickies — to advise 'em now, haunt them after I'm deleted.
"Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples." -Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Dear Stickies and gentlereaders,
I am, officially speaking, a member of the (in?)famous Baby Boom generation, people born between 1946 and 1964. Have you ever wondered who decided on those dates? Or the dates that bracket the Ds.O.B. of other generations?
I consulted the worldwide web of all knowledge and the very first hit returned revealed that the rumors aren't true. There is not an obscure department — buried so deeply in the Census Bureau and staffed by bureaucrats that are the otherwise unemployable relatives of powerful Senators and Congresspersons who rarely bother to actually come to work — where this sort of thing is decided.
Pewtrusts.org: "...through a somewhat haphazard process a consensus slowly develops in the media and popular parlance."
Are you aware that people born in the "early 2010s" aren't Zoomers, they're Generation Alpha? Have we started over? Why wasn't I told?
{Are you wondering what this has to do with why geezers cry?}
That's easy. A fundamental tenet of my Overflowing Cistern hypothesis includes the age of the Geezer in question, more on that in a minute.
I recently saw an interview in which Jordan Peterson (Boomer) was asked why he cries regularly, and in public, which reminded me of former Speaker of the House John Boehner (Boomer, Red Tribe) who was regularly attacked by members and supporters of both tribes for being a lacrimaniac.
{What's a lacrimaniac?}
Well, technically, there's no such word as best I can tell.
{Ah, you're making up words again.}
But in my defense, lacrimation (the secretion of tears) is a word so it follows logically that...
Anyway, I thought the responsible thing to do, before proposing my hypothesis, was to have the research department investigate if there might be a scientific consensus; does old dudes crying have anything to do with the physiology or psychology of old dudes?
Answer, no. There are myriad opinions floating around, but no consensus. The guys couldn't even find an unimpeachable meta-study that'll be debunked at a later date.
Therefore, for your consideration, permit me to present the Overflowing Cistern hypothesis.
A cistern, if you're unaware, is according to Wikipedia, "...a waterproof receptacle for holding liquids, usually water."
The word waterproof is important in that in this context refers to the fact that although there's a way for water (or tears) to get in it's supposed to stay there.
{Permit me to cut to the chase to save us all some time, big boys don't cry, right? You're cistern thingy is an obvious metaphor. At some point, the cistern all the old dudes have funneled their tears into over the years starts overflowing, right? Next thing you know a given geezer is crying at both appropriate and inappropriate times, Bohener was famous for crying about all sorts of stuff and...}
Thanks for your help, Dana. Permit me to return a compliment you have paid me on occasion, you too have a keen eye for the obvious. However, there are devils lurking in the details.
First of all, the reason this missive began with a fascinating and informative digression about where generational names and dates come from is because I came across this information when I was researching the three sub-generations of Boomers, a phenomenon neither widely known nor discussed.
These subdivisions are important to my Overflowing Cistern hypothesis and I was searching for the approximate date Sub-2 ended and Sub-3 took over.
{Hoo-boy. Here we go again.}
Remain calm, it's really quite simple. Sub-1s are the early Boomers, and were as much influenced by the previous two generations (the Greatest Generation, 1901-27, and the Silent one, 1928-45) as they are by Sub-2 and Sub-3 Boomers.
{Fascinating.}
Right? I was trying to determine at what point during the rise of the Sub-2s (when Boomers started tossing out the tot with the Jacuzzi water) the big boys don't cry ethos morphed into the big boys should be more gentle, sensitive, and not hide their feelings ethos that the feminists convinced us would get us laid more often (which unfortunately turned out to be B.S.).
{Oh my dog! you can't...}
That's a subject for an entirely different column I'm highly qualified to write because I confess I bought it -- hook, line, and sinker. But unfortunately, the rest of this column, for reasons not interesting enough to bother you with, will be published next week. Think of it as a cliffhanger, but in compensation...
Update: as to the ongoing tempest in a teapot that is the Ohio legislature's stumble-bumbling-fumbling attempt to legalize weed, Ohio's five-foot-tall governor is upset.
While our state senate quickly passed a law overriding the citizen's initiative we morons recently voted for (yeah, they can do that) the house (and senate) left town to begin a month-long break for Christmas without taking any action.
Fun facts: Our legislators have to scrape by on only $70,000 a year, but "leadership" positions pay a little better. According to ZipRecruiter, the average Ohio working stiff makes $47,000 a year. As for what the mean wage is, which I would guess is closer to 40k based on my 38 years of living here in paradise, I couldn't find it on the worldwide web of all knowledge.
Also, according to Open the Books, Ohio has 164,821 state employees whose wages add up to $9,517,773,573.09 a year.
Anyways... It's occurred to the governor (Mike DeWine, multi-millionaire and full-time politician since 1976) that since the initiative remains in effect till our betters fix it for us it's now legal to smoke weed in Ohio but there's no place to legally buy it so people will be risking their lives by buying it on the "black market" (and not paying the 10% sin tax, which Mr. DeWine would prefer to be as much as 18%).
All over Ohio people who would never even dream of buying weed when it was illegal to smoke it for fear of paying the $100 fine if they got caught are roaming the streets in search of a connection.
{You're making that up!}
Not the $100 fine part, that's actually all that happens. But I must also confess that our governor is at least 5 foot 6, a solid 140 pounds, and pretty sharp for a geezer pushing 80 and who doesn't cry, not in public anyway.
Poppa loves you,
