I like a lot of things that seem to be going—or have long ago gone—out of fashion.
Watching movies in a theater. Shopping at record stores. Sending postcards while on vacation. Guitar solos. Character-driven movies, TV shows, and novels that are psychologically correct, as opposed to ideologically driven. Hell, novels period. Returning the grocery shopping cart to its proper place, rather than leaving it in the middle of the parking lot. Litter-free environments. Peace and quiet. Spending time in nature. Solitude.
Recently, I was having a phone conversation about video games with my old college buddy, Erik. We were talking about the staggering evolution of Madden—how the graphics and playability have improved (and complexified) so much since the 1990s, back when he and I would occasionally game in our dorm rooms.
My brother had given me a PS5 so I could play via the Internet with my nephews. Erik has children in their early twenties who are gamers. So—for old times’s sake—he and I decided to put on headphones, pretend to be NFL coaches, and play Madden online, like the kids these days do. Because his son and daughter are on Xbox and not PS5, it took us a comical beat to figure out how to connect our machines via the internet. We had to purchase subscriptions and update the systems. We even had to run updates on the actual games. Once we actually got going, neither of us knew how to utilize most of the many more-nuanced modern features, let alone all the extra buttons. We could generally work the controllers. But it kind of felt like we were senior citizens driving on the freeway after dark with paper road atlases spread across our steering wheels.
“I wish there was an old man feature you could turn on,” Erik said. “Return the game back to the basics. Simplify everything. I miss the days when you could just plug in the cartridge and play without having to learn a million new things.”
We laughed like old men do. Erik and I are only in our early fifties, but he’s gone gray and I’ve gone completely white and bald. We’re both relatively fit. Silver foxes, Alicia tells me. LOL.
But our conversations always have an old-man flavor to them. Things were better back in the day. The world has gone mad. There’s a general nostalgia accompanied by head shaking at how much things have changed—at least from our GenX perspective.
Like why is there so much pre-choreographed celebrating whenever an NFL player scores a touchdown these days? Whatever happened to the old Lombardi adage? “When you go into the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.” Why are all the players wearing jewelry during the games?
Again. Old Man Stuff.
Erik and I loved video games back in the early nineties, but they weren’t sophisticated enough to keep us busy forever. We’d tire of them in a reasonable amount of time and then move on, usually to more prosocial, face-to-face, non-screen-related activities. We used to sit around and talk—looking each other in the eyes. We’d do that for hours. And our parents never knew where we were. We’d go weeks without speaking to our moms and dads back in college. They couldn’t track us on our phones, because those were attached to the walls of our dorm rooms, where we seldom were. We didn’t use email. There was no texting.
After playing one or two games of Madden online, Erik and I go back to just speaking on the phone. We’ve apparently aged out of video games. That’s probably not a bad thing. We live far away from each other, so face-to-face is not on the table. But I feel face-to-face with Erik when we speak. And when I’ve actually seen him in person over the years, our talks are unchanged. It’s like something between us got cemented in 1992 and we’ve just been the same with each other ever since.
But whenever Erik and I do our old-man routine, I’m reminded of my late old-school-banker grandfather, who—back in the nineties—was always yelling about Automated Teller Machines ruining the world, because people no longer had to look their banker in the eye. According to my Pop Pop, ATMs destroyed communities. Customers were being reduced to numbers on a piece of paper. You can’t have a relationship with a machine. He would get red in the face speaking about these things. Mostly because his whole career was built on people trusting him, him hitting the streets and working the communities of Philadelphia, being the known face of the bank branches. His tools were eye contact, firm handshakes, jokes, and smiles. He knew your name and you knew his. He was Big H. Larger-than-life personality. The guy who lit up a room. ATMs made all that irrelevant. Or at least that’s what he believed.
I remember when my family first got a computer, Pop Pop refused to touch it. It was like he thought the keyboard would suck his soul right out of his body. My dad got this golf computer game that made my golf-loving grandfather curious enough to look at the screen while I was playing it. Pop Pop watched my demonstration with a frown on his face. When I showed him which buttons made the pixelated man swing the club, I saw the little boy in my grandfather’s eyes wanting to try. So I encouraged him to take a seat. We stood there frozen in front of the computer for a few seconds, before Pop Pop shook his head and walked away. Teenaged me was mystified at the time. What would the harm be? Here in midlife, I catch myself unconsciously playing out that exact scene again and again, only I’m no longer cast in the role of teenager.
Just the other day I was on the ChatGPT website, curiously poking around, but too suspicious to do a deep dive. The whole time I kept thinking, Will this be the death of human-made art? In ten years, will A.I. be able in seconds to write better novels than humans can in lifetimes? Am I already a dinosaur? Are all of us dinosaurs cheerfully aiding and abetting the oncoming apocalyptic asteroid?
Speaking of the apocalypse—because it’s the holiday season, after all—I recently got an e-reader so that I could read a manuscript another writer had digitally sent me. She had tried to mail me a hard copy, but it got held up somewhere between Australia and the USA. I had long wanted to get a handheld device to read professional documents, so that I didn’t have to read on my phone or computer. I’d been printing out a lot of stuff, which seemed wasteful. So I bought the e-reader and started reading the Australian novelist’s latest, which is fantastic, by the way. It’s called The Knowing. Out 4 Feb 2025. By the supremely talented Madeleine Ryan. You can read my enthusiastic blurb here. (I was also a big fan of her debut novel, A Room Called Earth. And I’ve actually already read her third forthcoming novel too, which is equally excellent, will be published a few years from now, and is called love, honour & obey.)
The first thing Alicia and I learned about my use of the e-reader is that it’s easier for her to sleep when I read with it in bed. When I read an actual novel in bed, I wear a headlamp. I used to be able to read with the red-light feature, but my eyes are now too old for that. So I have to read with the light on the highest setting. (More Old Man Stuff.) The highest light setting keeps Alicia awake. The e-reader self illuminates and—for some reason—I’m able to read it on a very low-light setting, which does not keep Alicia awake. So I’ve been reading on an e-reader at night.
I like that you can make the text huge. After reading my own words all day long, my eyes are often tired at night. With the words supersized, you have to tap to turn the page just about every two paragraphs or so, which gives you a fun sense of accomplishment. This is stupid, I realize, as the e-reader doesn’t change the word count of a novel, but I can’t deny the enjoyment I get from tapping every so many seconds, watching ‘the pages’ fly by. The machine often malfunctions. I’ll be reading and then suddenly I’m on the homepage again, for no reason at all. I hate the way it feels in my hands. I had to pay money to keep advertising off it, which is maybe proof that the apocalypse has already happened, while we were all distracted by these clever machines. But I can instantly look up words I do not know with the touch of a finger. And Alicia isn’t annoyed, which is the primary goal of my bedroom life. So I keep using the e-reader, even though I much prefer hard-copy real novels. It’s like I’m being trained by the machine to prefer it, even though I find the idea of continually using it distasteful. I’m embarrassed to even be writing about it here.
As I got to the end of The Knowing on the e-reader, the hard-copy manuscript finally arrived in my P.O. Box. When I pulled the pages from the envelope, a glitter explosion occurred, making the inside of my beater Jeep twinkle a pinkish-purple, which made me laugh, maybe at the sheer shock. No one had ever sent me a manuscript covered in glitter. (Generally, it’s not considered professional to send manuscripts covered in anything other than words. I was already loving Madeleine’s new book, which is maybe why I found the sparkly quirk charming. Usually, I abhor a mess.) There was a handwritten card with my astrological sign on it—Scorpio. The note Madeleine wrote was heartfelt. She had personally bound her manuscript and had put much effort into the presentation. I was moved. Of course, it helped that I was already beyond impressed by her latest. But the point I’m trying to make is that so much of Madeleine’s personality was in the package she sent me. I got to know her through that piece of physical mail in a way that I hadn’t by reading her work on the more sterilized e-reader. As the manuscript came from her and not her publisher, it had cost Madeleine good money to send the hard copy and letter halfway around the world. Resources were required. But the human connection mattered.
Here’s another unfashionable statement:
I love snail mail.
A lot.
O.M.S.
I’ve had a few epic penpal relationships through the years. I’ve treasured them. Opening the mailbox still gives me a thrill to this day, even though I get less and less handwritten mail from friends and more and more corporate advertisements for things I don’t want or need. Despite the fact that email is free and postage costs money, I’m much more likely to write back a stranger who sends heartfelt mail to my P.O. Box, as opposed to email. If fact, the most human missives almost always come via the U.S. Postal System and hardly ever through the computer. When friends send me snail mail, it makes me happy in a way that texts and emails never do. Simply by reading honest handwritten letters, I’ve been snapped out of terrible depressions. For me, pen and paper and a stamp work better than drugs and alcohol.
At the end of her life, when she was in her nineties, my beloved Grandmom Dink and I would send each other cards with handwritten messages inside. I’d always include a five-dollar bill in mine, to cover the cost of a stamp and a return card from the dollar store or the gift shop in her building. I once sent her a birthday card that had a nun on the front of it. It said something like, “How old am I today?” Then on the inside, it read, “Nun your business!” My grandmother thought that was just about the funniest thing in the world. She’d reference it over and over again for years. “Nun your business!” became a running joke between us. Sometimes she’d just say the three words randomly and then laugh in this free way that released so much dopamine in my brain. It was nice to have a running joke with someone I loved.
She was often sad in the retirement home and would write me about her loneliness. I think she felt she had lived too long. Long enough to lose a husband and a son. But she’d never wallow in it or put her burdens on my shoulders. She’d tell me about her past and how much she missed my deceased grandfather and uncle, whom she often claimed to be able to see in the clouds above. And she’d never fail to express appreciation for my handwritten cards, which she said always came at just the right time, whenever she was feeling down. I’d write her about my own loneliness and career worries. And she’d write that she was praying for me and that God had my back and there was a plan. “You’ve got talent,” she’d say. “Get our family another big movie. Show them who we are.” I still have a big box full of my grandmother’s cards and letters. And I think of her every day when I check the mail. Sometimes I fantasize about there being a card from her in there. Sent from heaven. If anyone could pull off that small miracle, it would be my Grandmom Dink. RIP.
I’m also a big fan of Christmas. Everything about it. The tree. The presents. The birth-of-Jesus manger story. Wise men and stars of wonder. Twinkling lights on houses. All the dumb songs. The idea that God sent and sacrificed his son to save our ridiculous asses. The idea that we are all worth saving. That there is something eternally good and beautiful in everyone. That for my entire life, so many people took a time out at the end of the year to give each other presents and visit each other’s homes and eat meals together and sing together and make sure everyone knew that we were all going to muddle through somehow.
I also really like getting Christmas cards in the mail.
One of the things I’ve been taking to heart lately is this idea: Be the thing you want.
If you want love, be love. If you want friendship, give friendship. If you want someone to save you, save someone else. If you want community, be a community leader. If you want your family to show up for you, show up for your family. If you want a better spouse, be a better spouse. And if you want mail, well then, send some damn mail!
Alicia used to send out New Year’s Day cards. That was a nice tradition we had for many years. Recently, I’ve begun sending Christmas cards.
I like hand-addressed, hand-written cards, so that’s what I send. Our list has grown over the years. It now takes a lot of finger-cramping time to handwrite everything out, which, I guess, is why so many people either don’t send cards at all, use a computer service, or send those long printed info letters that read like press releases. All of the above are fine. And maybe the people who don’t send cards, don’t want cards. Maybe the people who use printing services want to receive those types of cards. Same for the press releases. And that’s okay. I accept all of it.
But I’m old school. I want to see the handwriting. I want to feel the imprint of the pen on the paper. I want to know that someone sat down and took a few minutes to write something to Alicia and me. Maybe this is stupid. People are very busy. I know that some will simply toss my handwritten words in the trash without thinking too much about them. Not everyone will display all the Christmas cards on the kitchen counter like Alicia and I do, perhaps in an effort to create a tangible symbol that we are not alone on the darkest days of the year. I know that paper use means cutting down trees. I love trees. I realize that it takes great resources to move millions of envelopes all over the planet. I love the planet. And, yet, I still love getting and sending Christmas cards.
I always buy cards from an independent artist, usually on Etsy. I try to pick out images that seem to represent the current version of Alicia and me. This year I went with birds. Birds and Christmas lights. Birds wearing Santa hats. And one batch of a lone star behind a naked tree branch hanging over a snowy field. I start writing out the addresses in October. When I write the one or two lines inside the card, I think about the people who will be receiving it. I try to meditate on them, send them light and love and goodwill. In many ways, each card I write is like a prayer.
Does God care about my Christmas card ritual? Do the people who receive them benefit?
I hope so.
But I think it’s me who cares and benefits most of all, because the process takes me out of my regularly scheduled life—all the noise and junk and fear and anxiety and self-involvement—and forces me to focus on a friend or family member or loved one or a colleague.
If only for a few minutes, I become the thing I want most—love.
I love the people I’m writing to. I love the act of writing itself. I love the idea of handwritten words connecting me with another group of human beings. I love Christmas—the belief that a higher power once again flickers a little more brightly, making us remember the eternal glory and know that we can indeed be the thing we most want.
I remember that each and every one of us can be love.
And that we all can shine in small ways that matter.
So I will continue to send handwritten Christmas cards. I will continue my humble attempts to be the thing I most want from others. And I will be grateful for the yearly reminder that I might very well have failed so many times in the past twelve months, but am still here to try again.
Salvation from within is alive as long as I am.
I realize the irony of my sending you this typed post via email. The hypocrisy! I wish I could have handwritten it. But—despite the fact that I haven’t been to church in decades—I will say Merry Christmas to you anyway. It’s what my people taught me to say at this time of year. It’s the centerpiece of a mythology that’s forever hardwired into my psyche. And it can bring out the best in me. If you say something else once a year to let people know you care about them, feel free to say that back to me. There are many true ways to say you love someone. I accept them all.
Write someone a handwritten note, why don’t you?
Give it a try.
At the very least, you might surprise them.
Maybe you’ll even surprise yourself.
PS - Did you read the December 4th post? Here’s To The Katies Of The World (A Spectacular Triumph)