When I was a kid — maybe seven or eight years old — I remember how often the adults would sit around and have discussions that involved the phrase "the good old days."
Through the limited perceptions and experience of my relatively young years it seemed like those good old days were always somehow simpler and more golden than the current way life was unfolding.
Granted, we were living in Denmark during the height of the Cold War, and Russia and East Germany and other communist block countries were not very far away. We also knew that if the sirens started going off we'd have about 10 minutes to live, most likely.
Clearly, that had not been the case for my older relatives whom I was listening to... even though some of them had lived through World War II.
50 years later I find myself sometimes thinking about the "good old days," even though I lived for several decades typically telling people that I didn't have any good old days and that the good old days of my life likely we're in the future.
These days, I'm not so sure.
Somehow I (think) I relate to the "again" part of the MAGA movement... even if I'm not in alignment with their means, I grok the longing for something that's not here now.
But that's not to say that I haven't noticed some of the changes that have happened in the world. Or, at least, I perceive to have happened in the world.
Truthfully, I don't remember any magical "good old days" or "Make America Great Again" days during which everything was sunshine and roses. There were always disasters happening, and something would go wrong in the world or something would go wrong in the economy or something would go wrong in our personal situations.
And whenever that happened, it definitely felt like we were falling off a cliff or sliding down a hillside in the middle of an avalanche that we had no power to stop and all we could hope for was that we would survive and come out on the other side.
Then, much as tends to happen in climatological situations, the storm would blow over and we would tidy things up and we would have periods of calm and rebuilding with periodic prosperity and happiness until the next disaster happened. These golden periods would sometimes last a few months and sometimes they would last many years.
When I talk about the background energy having changed the thing I've noticed is that this sensation of going down a steep hillside in the middle of an avalanche doesn't ever seem to end these days. It has become a permanent and pervasive fixture and sometimes we're actually going down the hillside with two or three avalanches happening all at the same time.
I honestly can't remember the last time I had a quiet period where things were going reasonably well with no ongoing disasters or knocking over the proverbial apple cart.
Well, that's not entirely true.
Shortly after I moved from Texas to Washington State I did have a two-year period where things were pretty good. That would have been in 2008 and 2009 for a brief period when things were good right before the housing and banking crisis caused a major meltdown and so many of my customers suddenly went from being affluent to penniless. Looked at a little differently, that means the last decent period was 17-18 years ago!
That's a pretty long dry spell!
It's not easy to keep a positive attitude through such a protracted patch of crap. But hey, still here plugging away at it... and still hoping that a quiet period might come.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!
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Created at 2026.02.14 00:09 PST
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