Esoteric Meandering Shouting Into the Void

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I think most of us spend way too much time haunting the graveyard of our own decisions. Standing there staring at all the little headstones marked “what if.” What if I took that job? What if I stayed? What if I left sooner? What if I said yes? What if I said no? What if I made one different turn twenty years ago and suddenly I’m living in some beachfront house with lower blood pressure and better knees?

But that’s not life. That’s fan fiction.

I know I’m guilty of it too. I replay conversations like there’s some director’s cut version of my life hidden somewhere in the archives. Maybe if I had chosen differently, I’d be happier. Maybe I’d be richer. Maybe I’d still have certain people in my life. Maybe I’d have avoided certain scars. Human beings love to imagine that somewhere out there is an alternate timeline where every choice magically worked out perfectly.

We’ve been obsessed with the multiverse long before Marvel turned it into a two-hour CGI migraine. The idea isn’t new. Hell, It’s a Wonderful Life was basically a “what if” story decades ago. What if George Bailey had never been born? What if one missing piece changes everything? It’s the same concept dressed up in black-and-white sentimentality instead of superheroes punching holes through dimensions.

And honestly, I get the appeal.

Because reality is heavy. Choices are permanent. Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, you don’t get to politely ask life to put it back in. So our brains create these little escape hatches. Parallel universes where we were smarter, braver, luckier, thinner, less stubborn, more patient, or just happened to be standing in the right place at the right time.

But eventually I had to realize something uncomfortable.

“What if” doesn’t count.

It just doesn’t.

If “ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas.” My grandparents used to say that, and I hated it when I was younger because it sounded dismissive. But now I understand it. You cannot build a life on hypothetical bricks. You can visit the land of what-if once in a while, but you can’t move there permanently. Too many people do. They unpack their bags and start decorating imaginary lives they never actually lived.

Meanwhile, real life keeps happening without them.

I think sometimes we romanticize alternate outcomes because we only imagine the good parts. We picture the road not taken like it comes with perfect lighting and a movie soundtrack. We never imagine that maybe taking that other job would’ve made us miserable. Maybe marrying that person would’ve ended in disaster. Maybe moving across the country would’ve left us lonely and isolated. Maybe the thing we regret avoiding was actually the thing that saved us.

We don’t know.

That’s the whole point.

Every choice closes certain doors and opens others. That’s being alive. Nobody gets every version of life. We only get one. One messy, confusing, occasionally beautiful timeline where we do the best we can with incomplete information and exhausted brains and emotions we barely understand half the time.

And honestly? Sometimes surviving your choices is more important than perfectly optimizing them.

I’ve started realizing that maturity is understanding there’s no cosmic scoreboard comparing your life against all the alternate versions that never happened. There’s just this one. This imperfect, weird, complicated existence where we stumble forward making decisions we hope make sense at the time.

Some choices will absolutely haunt me forever. I’m human. I know that. There are conversations I wish I’d handled differently. Opportunities I should’ve taken. People I should’ve appreciated more while they were still here. I don’t think anyone reaches adulthood without carrying at least a few ghosts around.

But I also know this: constantly staring backward keeps you from seeing what’s still in front of you.

At some point, you stop asking, “What if?” and start saying, “Well… this is where I ended up. Now what?”

And honestly, that question matters a hell of a lot more.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There are very few things in life that can ruin your entire day faster than a check engine light. You can wake up in a decent mood, grab your coffee, maybe even convince yourself that life is manageable for five consecutive minutes, and then suddenly there it is. That little glowing orange demon on the dashboard. Instantly your stomach drops. Your brain goes from zero to catastrophe in under three seconds.

Because nobody ever sees a check engine light and thinks, “Oh good, this is probably inexpensive.”

No. The human brain immediately goes to worst-case scenario. Transmission. Engine failure. Financial collapse. Walking to work. Selling organs on the black market to afford repairs. The light itself doesn’t even tell you what’s wrong, which somehow makes it worse. It just glows there ominously like your car knows something terrible and refuses to elaborate.

And I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels like living in America right now feels exactly like driving around with a permanent national check engine light.

Every single day there’s another noise coming from under the hood of this country, another vibration you swear wasn’t there yesterday, another flashing warning signal telling us something is deeply, fundamentally wrong. And sitting in the driver’s seat of all of it is Donald Trump, somehow managing to make the entire planet feel like a 1998 Ford Taurus one missed oil change away from exploding on the interstate.

Maybe I pay too much attention to the news. Maybe doomscrolling has permanently rewired my nervous system. But I swear the collective anxiety level of this country feels like millions of people hearing an unfamiliar clunk in their engine at the exact same time.

Because with Trump, everything feels unstable all the time. Every speech feels like smoke coming out from under the hood. Every social media post feels like another warning light turning on. Every international conflict feels like the mechanic calling to say, “Well… I’ve got bad news.”

We’ve got escalating tensions with Iran. Constant political chaos. International allies looking at us the way passengers look at a pilot who just said, “Huh, that’s weird,” over the intercom. And through all of it, we’re supposed to continue pretending this is normal.

It’s exhausting.

I honestly think a huge percentage of Americans are walking around with low-grade political PTSD at this point. Not just from one event, but from the nonstop chaos fatigue of never knowing what fresh insanity is waiting when we wake up. It’s the emotional equivalent of hearing a strange rattling noise in your car for years while somebody keeps insisting the vehicle is running “better than ever.”

No, it isn’t.

The engine is screaming.

And maybe that’s the part that wears me down the most. The people acting like the blinking red warning light is somehow patriotic. Like acknowledging the obvious danger is the real problem instead of the danger itself. Meanwhile the rest of us are white-knuckling it through traffic wondering whether democracy is about to overheat on the side of the road.

The stress becomes constant background noise. You wake up already bracing yourself for headlines you haven’t even read yet. Your nervous system never fully powers down because the national dashboard is permanently lit up like a Christmas tree.

Oil pressure low.
System malfunction.
Engine overheating.
Democracy traction control disabled.

And the worst part is knowing that unlike a car, you can’t just pull over somewhere safe and turn the whole thing off for a while. You still have to go to work. Pay bills. Buy groceries. Pretend everything is fine while the metaphorical engine coughs smoke into the atmosphere.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way, because you can almost see it in people now. That exhausted look. That constant tension. That feeling that everyone is just waiting for the next terrible thing to happen because lately there’s always a next terrible thing.

At this point, America doesn’t feel like a superpower.

It feels like a car making a noise your mechanic described as “concerning,” but you can’t afford to fix it, so everybody just keeps driving and praying the wheels don’t come off on the freeway.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There are moments when I sit down and do the math on my family history and my brain just kind of short-circuits for a minute. This year would have been my grandmother’s 100th birthday. One hundred years. A whole century. She was born in 1926, which sounds less like a birth year and more like the answer to a trivia question about silent movies and bread lines.

And I know I can’t be the only person who has looked backward at the chronology of their grandparents’ lives through the lens of modern social norms and thought, “Wait… hold on… that math feels illegal now.”

My grandfather was born in 1913. My grandmother in 1926. Their first child, my uncle, was born in 1943. My father came along in 1945. Then my aunt in 1956. If you line all those dates up against today’s standards, people start reaching for calculators, therapy, and maybe a mandatory reporting hotline.

By modern standards, only one of those births would have even remotely passed without somebody side-eyeing the situation. Today we hear phrases like “age gap discourse,” “power imbalance,” and “call the police.” Back then, people were just out there surviving the Great Depression, fighting world wars, and apparently getting married at ages that would make current social media implode in real time.

It’s wild how much social norms can change in a hundred years.

And the thing is, I’m not even saying that change is bad. A lot of it is probably good. Society evolved. We learned things. We became more protective of young people. We started questioning dynamics that previous generations accepted without blinking an eye. That’s progress.

But it’s still difficult to reconcile emotionally because these aren’t abstract historical figures in a textbook. These are my grandparents. These are people I knew. People who loved me. People who existed in a completely different social framework than the one we live in now.

When I think about my grandmother turning 100 this year, I don’t first think about controversy or morality or sociology. I think about the smell of old perfume and coffee. I think about those impossibly tough old women who survived everything. Wars. Rationing. Economic collapse. Raising kids without modern medicine, modern conveniences, or Google telling them whether a fever meant “drink water” or “prepare your will.”

That generation operated under an entirely different understanding of adulthood and responsibility. By the time many of them were teenagers, they were already working jobs, running households, or helping raise siblings. Childhood itself looked different. Life expectancy looked different. Expectations looked different.

And honestly, trying to overlay 2026 morality onto 1926 realities is like trying to install modern airbags into a horse-drawn carriage. Technically, you can discuss it, but the entire framework underneath it was built for a completely different world.

That’s the strange thing about family history. The farther back you look, the more you realize human beings didn’t suddenly become complicated. We just changed the rules around them. Every generation thinks their norms are permanent right up until the next generation comes along and decides half of it was insane.

Which makes me wonder what people 100 years from now will look back on us for.

Because if history teaches anything, it’s that someday our great-grandkids are probably going to stare at our timelines, our relationships, our politics, our beauty standards, our technology addictions, and say, “Wait… you people thought THAT was normal?”

And honestly, they probably won’t be wrong.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed that suddenly the narrative around Donald Trump has shifted from “the healthiest human organism ever assembled in a lab” to “well, of course he falls asleep randomly during the day, do you know how stressful the presidency is?”

Ah yes. Daytime somnolence. Which sounds far more sophisticated than “grandpa keeps nodding off during important moments.” It’s the medical equivalent of calling a bald spot “follicular minimalism.”

For years we’ve been told that Donald Trump is basically the peak of masculine vitality. According to his own orbit, he’s six-foot-three, two hundred and something pounds of pure alpha energy, powered entirely by Diet Coke, Filet-O-Fish, rage posting, and whatever chemical compound McDonald’s fries become after forty consecutive years.

This is a man who reportedly sleeps four hours a night, never exercises because apparently the human body is a battery with finite charges, and somehow still possesses the stamina of a Marvel superhero. At least according to right-wing media, which discusses his health with the same objective medical rigor medieval peasants used when claiming their king could cure diseases by touching people.

But now suddenly we’re hearing whispers about fatigue. Drowsiness. Falling asleep during the day.

And immediately the excuses begin.

“It’s stress.”

“It’s because he works so hard.”

“Anyone would be tired under that pressure.”

Which is fascinating because when former President Joe Biden looked tired, needed a pause, misspoke, or blinked too slowly, the same people acted like he was one nap away from being preserved in amber at the Smithsonian.

Apparently exhaustion is patriotic now. Falling asleep is actually leadership. If Donald nods off during a meeting, it’s not aging. It’s sacrifice. It’s dedication. It’s the burden of carrying America on his shoulders while simultaneously carrying seventy-eight years of cholesterol in his arteries.

And look, to be fair, the presidency probably is brutally stressful. I wouldn’t want the job. Every decision gets analyzed by millions of people, every mistake becomes international news, and every sentence lives forever online. That kind of pressure would age anybody.

But the issue isn’t whether stress can make someone tired. Of course it can.

The issue is that for nearly a decade we’ve been sold the image of Trump as some sort of genetically superior titan while every other aging politician was mocked as frail, senile, weak, sleepy, confused, or unfit. The rules only seem to apply until they apply to him.

Because suddenly daytime somnolence isn’t cognitive decline. It’s “proof he’s working harder than anyone else.”

Amazing how that works.

And honestly, maybe this is the most relatable thing about him. Not the gold toilets. Not the endless rallies. Not the spray tan that somehow exists in a shade between “traffic cone” and “sunset warning advisory.” But simply being an older man who gets tired during the day.

Welcome to humanity. Population: everybody.

The problem is that his supporters spent years insisting he wasn’t human at all. They marketed him like a late-night infomercial version of masculinity. Strongest. Healthiest. Sharpest. Most energetic president ever. A man who could apparently bench-press democracy while surviving entirely on fast food and vengeance.

So when reality peeks through the curtain and we discover he may, in fact, be an elderly man experiencing elderly-man things, it creates this bizarre political gymnastics routine where the same symptoms are either catastrophic decline or heroic endurance depending entirely on whose red tie is hanging over the podium.

Which is exhausting enough to make anybody need a nap.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There is apparently no greater picture of rugged masculine vitality than a 78-year-old man scheduling his third “annual” physical before Memorial Day. At this point, Donald Kankel’s Putty Hands Trump has had more checkups this year than most people have oil changes. Meanwhile, we are still being told with a straight face that he is the healthiest, strongest, most energetic human specimen to ever waddle into the Oval Office. Not just healthy for his age either. No, according to his orbit of devoted televangelists and spray-tanned disciples, he is basically an Olympic decathlete trapped inside the body of a guy who considers walking down a slight incline a hostile military operation.

And honestly, good for him. It takes commitment to maintain that level of mythology.

Most people hear “third annual physical in a single calendar year” and think maybe something might be medically noteworthy there. But not MAGA world. No, apparently this is what peak human performance looks like now. Frequent diagnostics. Constant monitoring. Enough lab work to qualify for airline rewards points. Somewhere there is a retirement community in Florida looking at his appointment schedule and saying, “Sir, you may be overdoing it.”

This is the same man whose supporters insist he possesses superhuman stamina while simultaneously watching him fall asleep during meetings, court proceedings, interviews, golf cart rides, and probably halfway through his own thoughts. There are toddlers with more sustainable energy reserves. Every public appearance now feels like your uncle insisting he is “still in great shape” moments before making a noise getting out of a recliner that sounds like a wooden ship breaking apart during a hurricane.

But we are all expected to ignore observable reality because reality has become deeply inconvenient. We are supposed to believe that a man fueled almost exclusively by rage, Diet Coke, fast food, and grievance is somehow the physical pinnacle of the human species. Apparently cardiovascular health can now be measured in Truth Social posts per minute.

And the doctors. Oh, the doctors. Every physical somehow reads like it was written by a North Korean state newspaper. “President Trump is the healthiest individual ever examined in the history of medicine. His arteries are carved from granite. His cholesterol fears him. Scientists remain baffled by his raw virility.” At this point I fully expect the next report to claim he has the resting heart rate of a silverback gorilla and bones forged from Cold War-era American steel.

Meanwhile, normal people over the age of seventy are being told to watch their sodium intake and maybe take a short walk after dinner. Trump appears to view exercise the same way medieval peasants viewed the plague: avoid at all costs and pray it passes by.

And yet the image persists because modern politics is no longer about evidence. It is about branding. Trump has marketed himself as strong for so long that millions of people simply refuse to process contradictory information even when it is wobbling directly in front of them on live television. If he had to ride a mobility scooter onto a debate stage tomorrow, half the country would insist it was actually an advanced tactical command vehicle designed by the military.

The truly amazing part is that this entire performance exists alongside the nonstop attacks on other politicians’ age and health. Everyone else gets scrutinized for blinking too slowly or coughing once during allergy season. But Trump could apparently undergo six “annual” physicals, take a nap in the middle of a national security briefing, and emerge from the experience hailed as the reincarnation of Teddy Roosevelt crossed with Captain America.

At this point, I am less interested in the actual medical reports and more interested in the logistics. Does he get a punch card? Is there a free sandwich after the fifth visit? Does the receptionist just keep his paperwork permanently on file now? Because three annual physicals before June feels less like preventative healthcare and more like your car mechanic gently trying to tell you the transmission is held together by hope and WD-40.

Still, we are told not to question the legend. This is peak vitality. This is masculine dominance. This is what ultimate endurance looks like in America now: a man who needs more medical supervision than a retirement village bingo tournament while being marketed as the physical equal of an NFL linebacker.

Sure. Absolutely. And I’m the healthiest man alive because I occasionally eat a salad near a treadmill.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There is a strange desperation in the air right now, and you can feel it every time another state suddenly discovers a brand-new “concern” about voting. Funny how these concerns never seem to emerge in wealthy white suburbs where Chad and Brayden are triple-checking their golf tee times. No, the panic always appears in places where Black voters, Hispanic voters, younger voters, immigrant communities, and poor voters might accidentally gain enough political influence to make somebody uncomfortable.

Suddenly it is, “We need stricter voter ID laws.”
“We need fewer polling places.”
“We need shorter early voting windows.”
“We need to purge voter rolls.”
“We need to make mail-in voting harder.”

And of course they always wrap it in the sacred language of “election integrity,” as though democracy itself will collapse because a grandmother in Atlanta waited six hours in line instead of seven.

It is honestly fascinating watching politicians perform rhetorical gymnastics worthy of an Olympic floor routine to explain why voting should be harder in heavily minority districts but magically easier everywhere else. Apparently democracy is only beautiful when the “correct” people participate.

What makes this whole thing feel especially absurd is that everyone with access to a census report already knows the demographic trajectory of the United States. The country is changing. It has always changed. Every generation of terrified gatekeepers acts like diversity is some kind of new software update forced onto their phones overnight when, in reality, America has been blending cultures, languages, ethnicities, and identities since the beginning. That is literally the entire story.

Yet here we are, watching parts of the political establishment behave like the Confederacy never technically lost, it just got outsourced into think tanks, gerrymandering consultants, and cable news panels screaming about “traditional America” while quietly meaning “America where white voices remain dominant.”

Because underneath all the polished talking points, underneath the fake concern about fraud, underneath the dramatic speeches about preserving values, there is a deeper fear humming beneath the surface:
What happens when whiteness no longer guarantees cultural ownership of the room?

That is the part nobody wants to say out loud.

By the middle of this century, the United States is projected to become what sociologists call a “majority-minority” country, meaning no single racial group will hold a numerical majority. And for some people, that demographic reality lands like an extinction-level event instead of just… math.

Which is wild when you think about it because the actual outcome is not some apocalyptic collapse. Society does not suddenly burst into flames because more Hispanic families live in Texas or because more Black voices shape policy or because interracial kids exist in larger numbers. The world keeps spinning. People still complain about gas prices. Nobody knows how to merge properly. Everyone still loses their minds at Costco on weekends. Civilization survives.

But fear has always been politically profitable.

And fear of losing dominance is especially powerful because some people cannot distinguish equality from oppression. If they are no longer automatically centered, they interpret that as persecution. If other communities gain influence, they feel robbed, as though representation itself is a finite resource that minorities are “taking.”

It becomes this bizarre zero-sum paranoia:
“If they gain a voice, I must be losing mine.”

No.
You are just no longer the only voice in the room.

And honestly, the irony is almost painful. The same people shouting about freedom and liberty are often the first ones trying to reduce ballot access the moment the electorate starts looking less like a 1950s country club brochure. Apparently freedom is sacred right up until people with more melanin start using it effectively.

Meanwhile the rest of us are sitting here wondering why grown adults are still obsessing over skin color like it is some mystical divider of humanity instead of just biology doing arts and crafts with pigmentation.

Peel our skin off and every single one of us is the same strange collection of anxiety, ego, fear, hope, bad decisions, and questionable internet searches. We all want dignity. We all want safety. We all want our families to survive. We all pretend we are emotionally stable while internally spiraling because somebody replied “k” in a text message.

Human beings are ridiculous across every race equally.

Which is why this current wave of voter suppression feels less like strength and more like a death rattle. Not the confident roar of a movement certain of its future, but the panicked gasp of people realizing history is moving in a direction they cannot permanently stop.

Because demographics change. Cultures evolve. Power shifts. That has happened in every civilization that has ever existed. The only question is whether a country adapts maturely or thrashes violently on the way there.

And right now, parts of America look like a man angrily trying to hold back the ocean with a folding chair and a Facebook meme about “real Americans.”

Dwain Northey

Does anybody else need noise all the time just to keep themselves company against their own thoughts?

I don’t even mean music necessarily. I mean background noise. Familiar noise. The kind of noise that doesn’t ask anything of you. A TV show you’ve seen a thousand times. Cartoons rerunning in the background at two in the morning. The same episodes of The Simpsons or Family Guy or Futurama playing on a loop not because you’re actively watching them, but because silence somehow feels louder.

I can’t sleep in silence. I’ve tried. People talk about peace and quiet like it’s this luxurious thing, like silence is supposed to be calming and restorative. To me it feels deafening. The second the room gets completely quiet, my brain apparently decides this is the perfect opportunity to replay every regret, every anxiety, every unfinished thought, every weird hypothetical argument from 14 years ago that no one else remembers but somehow my brain preserved in museum-quality detail.

And I honestly don’t know if this is common or if we’ve all just quietly agreed not to admit it.

Because I look around and it seems like everybody has some method of drowning out their own internal noise. Some people drink. Some people smoke weed. Some people scroll TikTok until their eyes stop focusing. Some people bury themselves in work. Some people need podcasts constantly playing. Some people can’t drive without music. Some people can’t shower without YouTube in the background like they’re afraid to be left alone with themselves for seven uninterrupted minutes.

Maybe all of us are just trying to lower the volume in our heads long enough to breathe.

For me, it’s background television. Cartoons especially. There’s something comforting about hearing familiar voices and predictable jokes. No emotional investment required. No surprises. Just noise. Warm, familiar noise. Like having company without the exhaustion of actual social interaction.

And lately, this blog has kind of become another version of that.

An outsourced conversation with myself.

I write these things because if they stay trapped in my own head too long, they start echoing. So I throw them out into the void hoping maybe someone else reads them and says, “Yeah. Me too.” Not because I need solutions. I’m not even sure there is a solution. I think sometimes people just want confirmation that they’re not uniquely strange for existing the way they do.

Because I don’t think I’m uncommon.

I think there are a lot of us sitting alone in our homes with televisions running in empty rooms. Sleeping with sitcoms playing softly in the background because silence feels emotionally unsafe for reasons we can’t fully explain. Keeping ourselves surrounded by noise because if everything gets too quiet, our thoughts suddenly stop being thoughts and start sounding like a crowded room we can’t escape.

Maybe that’s modern life. Maybe that’s anxiety. Maybe that’s loneliness even when you technically aren’t lonely. Or maybe human beings were simply never designed to sit in complete silence with unlimited access to their own consciousness.

All I know is this:

If I wake up at 3 a.m. and the TV shut itself off, I immediately notice it. The silence feels wrong. Heavy. Like the room changed shape while I wasn’t looking.

So I turn the cartoons back on.

Not to watch them.

Just to know I’m not sitting alone in the dark with my own head.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Memorial Day has always felt strange to me. Not wrong exactly, just emotionally out of tune with itself. It is supposed to be one of the most solemn days on the American calendar, a national pause to remember the people who left home wearing a uniform and never came back. Some gave years of themselves. Some gave pieces of themselves. Some gave all of themselves. Yet every year the country seems to greet that remembrance with coolers full of beer, mattress sales, boat traffic, backyard smoke, and arguments over whose turn it is to bring hamburger buns.

I understand why people gather. I understand why families want to be together on a long weekend. I understand that freedom and leisure are part of the inheritance those sacrifices protected. But there is still something deeply incongruent about watching a commercial scream “Memorial Day Blowout Sale” while somewhere a folded flag sits in a widow’s living room like a permanent weather system that never moves on.

Maybe that discomfort says more about me than it does about everyone else.

I have always leaned introverted, and social anxiety has a way of sharpening the quieter emotions. While crowds are posting barbecue photos and lake trips, I find myself pulled inward instead. Memorial Day does not feel celebratory to me. It feels reflective. Heavy. It feels like a day for silence more than noise. A day for memory more than recreation.

I think about young soldiers who probably assumed they would make it home by Christmas. I think about parents who answered doors they never wanted to answer. I think about the impossible mathematics of sacrifice: entire futures erased in a moment so people thousands of miles away could continue living ordinary lives. The least I can do is sit with that reality honestly for a while.

And honestly, maybe people like me — the ones who skip the crowded parties, the ones who spend the day quietly, the ones who feel more reverence than excitement — may actually be observing the spirit of the holiday closer to its intended meaning. Not because we are morally superior, and not because everyone else is disrespectful, but because remembrance itself is not loud. Grief is not loud. Gratitude at its deepest level is usually quiet.

There is no correct way to mourn collectively as a nation. Some people honor the fallen by gathering with family because those freedoms made family gatherings possible. Others visit cemeteries. Others fly flags. Others tell stories about relatives who served. And some of us simply retreat inward for a day and carry the weight privately.

But I do think America has become uncomfortable with solemnity. We rush to turn everything into entertainment, into commerce, into a reason to celebrate instead of a reason to reflect. Memorial Day is not supposed to feel triumphant. It is not Independence Day. It is not a victory parade. It is a reminder of cost.

The real meaning of the day lives in absence.

An empty chair at a table.
A name carved into stone.
A photograph that stopped aging decades ago.
A mother who still catches herself listening for footsteps that will never come home again.

That is Memorial Day to me.

So while the highways fill and the grills heat up and the stores wave giant red-white-and-blue discount banners into the air, I find myself pulling away from the noise. Not out of bitterness, but out of respect. Because some holidays should leave room for silence. Some holidays should make us uncomfortable. Some holidays should ask us not to celebrate ourselves for a moment, but to remember people who no longer have the privilege of ordinary Mondays.

Maybe the introverts are not doing Memorial Day “better.” Maybe we are simply more willing to sit in the quiet long enough to hear what the day is actually asking of us.

Dwain Northey(Gen X)

There used to be an old saying that “beauty is only skin deep,” and the older I get, the more I realize that may be one of the few clichés that survived because it’s absolutely true. Someone can be breathtaking at first glance — movie-star handsome, impossibly glamorous, sculpted like they were assembled by a committee of Renaissance artists — and then they open their mouth and within thirty seconds all you can see is arrogance, cruelty, ignorance, vanity, or the conversational depth of a damp napkin. Suddenly the perfect face isn’t perfect anymore. It’s amazing how quickly ugliness can rise to the surface once personality enters the room.

The reverse is true too. There are people who would never make the cover of a magazine, never trend on social media, never have strangers stopping them on the street, yet they become beautiful because of who they are. Humor does that. Kindness does that. Intelligence does that. Authenticity does that. A warm smile attached to a decent human being will always outlast a flawless jawline attached to someone intolerable.

Unfortunately, modern society seems to have decided that skin deep isn’t deep enough anymore. Now beauty apparently has to be injectable, inflatable, stretched, frozen, tightened, lifted, peeled, tucked, filled, and filtered until half the population looks like they’re trying to escape their own faces. Somewhere along the line, aging stopped being considered normal and started being treated like a catastrophic design flaw that needed immediate correction.

And look, people can do whatever they want with their appearance. If Botox or fillers make someone feel confident, good for them. Nobody should be shamed for wanting to look their best. But there’s something darkly absurd about the collective refusal to simply look like human beings who have existed on Earth for more than twenty-five years. We’ve reached a point where some faces are pulled so tight they look less youthful and more like a baseball stretched over a catcher’s mitt. Lips have become so overfilled they enter a room several seconds before the rest of the person.

What’s ironic is that many of these procedures don’t actually make people look younger. They make them look surgically preserved. There’s a difference. Real youth has movement, imperfection, expression, life. A face frozen into permanent surprise doesn’t necessarily scream vitality. It just quietly suggests someone lost a war against time and demanded a refund.

Meanwhile, the people who age naturally often end up looking far more attractive because there’s character in their faces. Wrinkles tell stories. Laugh lines are evidence that someone actually spent time enjoying life instead of trying to erase proof they lived it. Gray hair, weathered skin, and imperfect features can carry a kind of dignity that no cosmetic syringe can manufacture. There’s confidence in somebody who says, “Yeah, I’m aging. That’s what happens when you don’t die young.”

Of course, beauty has always been subjective. Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. Some people love polished perfection. Some people love natural aging. Some people think cosmetic enhancements are art. Others think everyone is beginning to resemble slightly startled wax figures. Humanity has never agreed on what beauty is and probably never will.

But the deeper truth underneath all of it remains unchanged. Eventually, every surface fades. Gravity wins. Time wins. The mirror always gets the last word. And when all of that starts slipping away, what’s left is who you actually are.

That’s why beauty is only skin deep. Because skin is temporary. Character isn’t. A beautiful face might capture attention for a moment, but a beautiful soul determines whether anyone wants to stay once the conversation starts.