Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The story of “420” isn’t some ancient code handed down by shadowy botanists—it’s a far more ordinary tale that accidentally grew into legend.

It starts in the early 1970s in San Rafael High School, where a group of students nicknamed themselves the Waldos. Their mission wasn’t philosophical or political—they were trying to find a rumored abandoned cannabis crop somewhere in the hills of Marin County. They agreed to meet after school at 4:20 p.m., using “420” as a shorthand for both the time and their little treasure hunt. Spoiler: they never found the crop, but the code stuck.

From there, things get more interesting. The Waldos had connections to the orbit of the Grateful Dead, whose fans—the famously nomadic Deadheads—were excellent at spreading ideas, trends, and, apparently, time-based slang. “420” began circulating beyond a single high school, morphing from “meet at this time” into “let’s smoke.”

By the 1990s, the term got a major boost when High Times published and popularized it, effectively canonizing “420” as cannabis shorthand. Once media picked it up, the number escaped its humble origins and became cultural currency.

Then came April 20—4/20—which evolved into an unofficial holiday for cannabis enthusiasts. Gatherings, protests, and celebrations began popping up in places like Golden Gate Park and beyond, blending counterculture, advocacy, and a fair amount of smoke.

As for why this number stuck when so many other codes didn’t—it’s partly timing, partly luck, and partly because it sounds just cryptic enough to feel like you’re in on something. Over time, “420” shed its inside-joke origins and became a global symbol for cannabis culture, even as laws and attitudes toward marijuana shifted dramatically.

So what began as a bunch of teenagers looking for a mythical stash turned into one of the most recognizable pieces of modern slang. Not exactly sacred history—but in its own hazy way, a cultural myth with surprisingly well-documented roots.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There’s a certain kind of confidence that doesn’t bother with consistency. It just kicks the door in, plants a flag in the living room, and declares victory over a house it insists it doesn’t even want to be in. That, more or less, is the current philosophical backbone of the “America First” crowd: a worldview that somehow manages to shout “we don’t need anyone” while also demanding that everyone pay very close attention.

It’s a fascinating contradiction—like someone loudly quitting a party while climbing onto the table to make sure the entire room notices their exit.

On one hand, we’re told America must be the biggest, toughest, most dominant force on Earth. Not just strong—visibly strong. The kind of strong that needs to be announced, repeated, capitalized, and possibly trademarked. Strength measured not in stability or alliances, but in how effectively we can glare at other countries until they feel uncomfortable. Diplomacy is for the weak; cooperation is code for losing; and if you’re not “winning,” what are you even doing here?

On the other hand, we’re also told: we don’t need anyone. Alliances? Burdens. Global leadership? Overrated. International cooperation? Suspicious at best, traitorous at worst. Why bother with messy relationships when you can just… not? Why maintain decades-long partnerships when you can dramatically shrug and walk away, preferably while muttering something about how everyone else was holding you back anyway?

So which is it?

Are we the world’s enforcer, or are we the guy who moved out to a cabin in the woods because neighbors are annoying?

The answer, apparently, is: yes.

Because the real through-line isn’t strategy—it’s attitude. It’s not about building a coherent foreign policy; it’s about maintaining a posture. A vibe. A kind of geopolitical chest-thumping paired with a deep suspicion of anyone who might suggest cooperation requires compromise. It’s dominance without responsibility, isolation without humility.

We don’t need allies… but they better respect us.
We’re pulling back from the world… but the world better not forget who’s in charge.
We’re done with global commitments… but still expect global deference.

It’s less a doctrine and more a mood swing with a flag attached.

And the beauty of it—politically speaking—is that it works. If you disengage, it’s not retreat; it’s strength. If you alienate allies, it’s not instability; it’s independence. If relationships fray, well, that just proves they weren’t worth having in the first place. Every outcome reinforces the premise, because the premise was never meant to be tested—just declared.

In this framework, the world isn’t a network of partnerships; it’s a series of transactions. Everything is a deal, every country a potential adversary or subordinate, and every interaction a chance to “win.” Long-term stability is nice, sure, but have you considered the immediate satisfaction of a well-timed threat?

So we end up in this strange, self-constructed paradox: a nation trying to dominate a system it increasingly refuses to participate in. A superpower that wants all the authority of global leadership with none of the obligations. A country that insists it’s above everyone else while quietly stepping away from the very structures that made that position possible.

It’s not quite bullying, and it’s not quite isolationism. It’s something more peculiar—like declaring yourself the ruler of a room you’ve already stormed out of.

But don’t worry. As the door slams, you’ll definitely hear about how much better things are on the other side.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There was a time when “Make America Great Again” sounded like a slogan stitched onto a red hat. Now it feels more like a set of instructions—specifically, the kind you’d find on a cheese grater. Firmly grasp the country, drag it steadily downward, and call whatever falls off “progress.”

Because “great,” as it turns out, has a homophone. And we are living in it.

We’ve begun to grate.

Not in the inspiring, moon-landing, interstate-highway, “we built this” kind of way. No, this is the slow, grinding erosion of standards—the kind that doesn’t make a sound at first, until you realize the edges are gone. Expertise? Grated. Institutions? Grated. The quiet expectation that the people in charge should know what they’re doing? Finely shredded.

Take something as uncontroversial as the weather. The sky used to be one of the few things we could all agree on—blue meant blue, hurricanes meant “maybe listen to the scientists.” Now even that has been fed through the blade. Funding gets trimmed, agencies get hollowed out, and suddenly the same country that once led the world in atmospheric science is checking the forecast like a student copying homework.

We lean on European weather models—not because collaboration is new or bad, but because self-sufficiency has quietly slipped out the back door. It’s not a partnership when you’ve dismantled your own tools and are now hoping someone else brought theirs.

And this is where the slogan starts to sound less like nostalgia and more like performance art.

Because while we’re busy sanding down expertise at home, we’re simultaneously projecting strength abroad—loudly, theatrically, insistently. We posture. We escalate. We wrap ourselves in the language of dominance while borrowing the intellectual infrastructure we used to export. It’s a curious form of patriotism that declares independence while relying on others to double-check the forecast before we pack an umbrella.

War, or the constant flirtation with it, becomes the ultimate distraction. It’s the cymbal crash that drowns out the quieter, more consequential story: that you cannot steadily degrade the systems that make a country function and expect the illusion of strength to hold indefinitely. Eventually, the gap between what we say we are and what we’ve allowed ourselves to become gets too wide to ignore.

That’s the real hypocrisy—not just in policy, but in identity.

We still tell ourselves we’re the best. The most capable. The leaders. But leadership isn’t a declaration; it’s a maintenance job. It requires investment, humility, and the uncomfortable acknowledgment that expertise matters. That facts matter. That maybe the people studying the atmosphere, the economy, or the fragile geometry of global stability aren’t the enemy.

Instead, we’ve chosen the grater.

And the thing about grating is that it’s irreversible. You don’t get to reassemble what you’ve shredded and call it whole again. You can only keep going, convincing yourself that smaller pieces somehow add up to something greater.

So here we are—making America “great,” one thin shaving at a time.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There was a time—not that long ago, though it now feels like a different geological era—when every misplaced syllable from Joe Biden was treated like a five-alarm fire in the national psyche. A verbal stumble? Breaking news. A pause mid-sentence? Panel discussion. A slightly meandering anecdote? Cue the solemn declarations: this is it, the decline, the unraveling, the end of coherence as we know it.

We were told, with the urgency usually reserved for asteroid warnings, that the Republic itself was hanging by the delicate thread of a conjugated verb. Words like “senile” and “dementia” weren’t whispered with concern—they were hurled like confetti at a particularly mean-spirited parade. Entire segments of the media ecosystem seemed to function as linguistic forensic labs, analyzing every Biden utterance like it was the Zapruder film, except instead of bullets, we were tracking dropped consonants.

And now—well. Now we live in a time of interpretive flexibility.

Enter Donald Trump, a man who can take a straightforward concept like immigration policy and turn it into something that sounds like it was assembled from refrigerator magnets during a mild electrical storm. We are told, for instance, that people are arriving on “pork visas”—which, one assumes, is either a new agricultural exchange program or perhaps a deli loyalty rewards system gone horribly wrong. Credit cards are apparently being handed out like party favors, and asylum seekers are not fleeing danger so much as escaping what he imagines to be a sort of global network of “insane institutions,” which sounds less like policy analysis and more like the plot of a low-budget thriller.

And then there was the small matter of the Jesus photo. A perfectly normal sentence to type in 2026, by the way. Presented with an image of himself styled as the Son of God—a piece of digital art so subtle it practically winked—he was reportedly told by staff that it had been doctored. To which the response was not, “Ah, I see, thank you,” but rather, “Oh well, I was a doctor.” Which is impressive, really. Not the content of the statement, but the sheer confidence with which it sidesteps reality, logic, and basic sentence structure all at once.

But perhaps my favorite subplot in this ongoing theater of selective concern is the triumphant return of the cognitive exam—specifically, the way Donald Trump brandishes it like an Olympic gold medal. The “perfect score,” we’re told. The flawless performance. The intellectual decathlon, apparently, now featuring identifying animals and remembering a short list of words.

Here’s the part that tends to get left out of the victory lap: cognitive exams aren’t handed out like raffle tickets at a county fair. They’re not a fun bonus round for people who are just too sharp and need an extra challenge. In any clinical setting—something you’d know if you’ve spent time in healthcare—they’re administered when there’s a concern. A baseline needs to be established because something has raised a flag. Stroke. Dementia. Alzheimer’s. Observable decline. That’s the context. That’s the club.

It’s not a participation trophy. It’s not even a merit badge. It’s closer to a diagnostic checkpoint—a quiet, clinical “let’s make sure everything’s okay here,” which, by definition, means someone, somewhere, thought everything might not be okay.

So the spectacle of boasting about acing one is… unusual. It’s like proudly announcing you passed a sobriety test while insisting you were never suspected of drinking. Congratulations, I suppose, on successfully identifying a giraffe and recalling “person, woman, man, camera, TV.” Truly stirring stuff. But the existence of the test itself is the part that usually matters, not the standing ovation afterward.

And yet, somehow, this doesn’t trigger the same chorus of alarm. No breathless chyrons. No wall-to-wall speculation. No anguished op-eds about fitness for office based on the ability to complete a screening tool designed to detect impairment.

Which brings us back to that lingering question: when did cognitive concern become so… situational?

Because if we’re going to treat mental sharpness as a prerequisite for leadership—and that’s a reasonable standard—then it probably shouldn’t depend on who’s talking, or how much we already agree with them. Otherwise, we’re not actually evaluating capacity. We’re just grading on a curve that shifts with our preferences.

And that’s not a medical assessment. That’s branding.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I didn’t expect to be writing something like this, and if I’m being honest, I’ve gone back and forth about how to even say it without sounding either colder than I feel or softer than the reality deserves.

First, I should be clear about one thing—I wasn’t the one who rescued Buck. I didn’t go out looking for him, didn’t make that initial choice with open eyes and a plan. He was brought into my life, and I was the one who ended up with him, the one who tried to make it work once he was already here.

Bringing Buck back to the shelter wasn’t an easy decision, even if on paper it might look like a simple one. He’s not a bad dog. That part matters to me, and I want it said out loud. He’s just… a lot. Loud in a way that fills every corner of a space, restless in a way that doesn’t settle, and wired for a life that doesn’t really fit inside the walls I have to live within.

And the truth is, I’m not the person he needs. I don’t have the patience, the space, or honestly the inclination to turn him into the dog he could probably become with the right person. That’s not me being cruel—it’s me being realistic. There’s a version of this story where I keep him and try to force it, but that version probably ends worse for both of us.

Still, none of that makes it feel good.

Because even if I didn’t bond with him the way people always hope you will, I’m not made of stone. I know what it means for a dog to go back into that system, into confinement, into waiting. That part sits heavy. It’s one thing to admit something isn’t working; it’s another to know the consequence of that truth for something that doesn’t get a say.

If circumstances were different—more space, fewer constraints, a life that could absorb his energy instead of being overwhelmed by it—maybe this ends another way. But it’s not. And when the choice comes down to keeping a roof over my head or stretching things to a breaking point for his sake, that’s not really a choice at all, no matter how much I might wish it were.

So this is the part that feels like an apology, even if I don’t know who exactly I’m apologizing to. Maybe to him. Maybe to myself for not being better suited. Maybe to the idea that things should have worked out differently.

What I do hope—genuinely—is that someone else walks into that shelter and sees what I couldn’t fully step into. Someone with more room, more patience, more willingness to meet him where he is and shape him into something better. Because I do think that’s possible for him.

Letting him go doesn’t mean I don’t care. It just means caring doesn’t always translate into keeping.

And sometimes, doing what you have to do doesn’t feel right—but it’s still what has to be done.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

It must be comforting—deeply, almost spiritually comforting—to live in a world where failure is just success wearing a red hat and shouting louder.

Because if you listen to Donald Trump and his ever-devoted chorus, the last year-plus has been nothing short of a golden age. A renaissance. A masterclass in leadership so advanced that the rest of us, clearly, just lack the intellectual horsepower to recognize it.

Take Iran, for example. Or rather, the situation formerly known as “not actively spiraling.” What some might call a reckless escalation, a destabilizing series of moves, or a strategic blunder that handed leverage away like party favors—well, that’s only if you’re stuck using outdated definitions of “competence.” In the new framework, chaos is strength, unpredictability is genius, and outcomes are irrelevant so long as the branding remains confident.

“I alone can fix it,” was the promise. And in a way, that promise has been fulfilled—if by “fix” we mean taking a complex, fragile system and shaking it like a vending machine until something else breaks loose.

But Iran is just the headliner. The undercard is stacked. Economic “wins” that somehow feel like losses if you check your bank account. International relationships that resemble group chats where everyone has muted you. Domestic policies that arrive with fanfare and leave quietly through the back door once reality asks a few inconvenient questions.

And yet, the messaging remains immaculate. This is the real achievement—not governance, not diplomacy, not measurable outcomes—but narrative control so relentless it borders on performance art. It’s not that things are going poorly; it’s that you’re being told they’re going extraordinarily well while watching them go poorly, and expected to resolve that contradiction by doubting your own perception.

It’s almost admirable, in a way. Reality itself has been rebranded as fake news. Failure is just success that hasn’t been appreciated properly. And every misstep isn’t a misstep at all—it’s a bold, misunderstood move in a chess game so complex that it looks exactly like checkers played badly.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left squinting at the scoreboard, wondering if we’ve missed something. Maybe the losses are wins. Maybe instability is strategy. Maybe setting things on fire is just a prelude to calling yourself a firefighter.

Or maybe—just maybe—the simpler explanation is the correct one.

But that would require acknowledging that the emperor isn’t just underdressed—he’s been loudly insisting he invented clothes while everyone else is handed a blindfold and told to applaud.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There’s a special kind of quiet resentment that settles in on Tax Day. Not the loud, table-flipping kind—no, this is more refined. This is the slow exhale as I hit “submit,” watching money leave my account like it’s heading off to a better, more exclusive life without me.

Because here’s the thing—I pay my taxes. Not heroically. Not joyfully. Just… dutifully. Like a guy who still returns his shopping cart even though the wind is howling and civilization feels optional. I do it because that’s the deal, right? Roads, schools, emergency services, the vague promise that we’re all pitching in to keep the lights on.

And then there’s the other side of the equation—the people for whom “the deal” is more of a suggestion. The ultra-wealthy, who seem to treat the tax code less like a set of rules and more like an escape room they’ve already memorized. While I’m over here attaching a W-2 like it’s a sacred document, they’re moving money through a maze of shell companies, offshore accounts, and deductions so creative they should qualify as modern art.

It’s almost impressive. If it weren’t so… insulting.

Because let’s be honest: they use more of the commons than I ever will. Their businesses rely on infrastructure, legal systems, educated workforces, publicly funded research—you know, all the boring stuff taxes pay for. They didn’t exactly bootstrap their way out of a vacuum. Yet somehow, when it’s time to settle up, they’ve got accountants and attorneys performing financial gymnastics that would make an Olympic judge blush, and suddenly their tax bill looks like a rounding error.

Meanwhile, I’m double-checking whether I can claim a deduction for a home office that is, in reality, a corner of my kitchen table where I occasionally put a laptop next to a coffee stain.

And here I am. Filing. Paying. Participating.

Because opting out isn’t really an option for the rest of us. There’s no clever loophole where I can just declare, “Actually, my income took a brief vacation to the Cayman Islands and won’t be back in time for this fiscal year.” No, my income shows up, gets taxed, and leaves—very predictably, very transparently. Almost like the system works exactly as intended… for me.

So Tax Day becomes less about civic duty and more about perspective. A reminder that we’re all in the same system, just not playing the same game. Some of us are following the instructions printed on the form, and others are quietly rewriting the rulebook in a boardroom somewhere.

And yet, I still hit submit.

Because despite all of it—the loopholes, the inequities, the absurdity—I still believe in the idea behind it. That pooling resources matters. That society is a shared project, even if some investors have found a way to skip their contributions while still collecting dividends.

But I won’t pretend it doesn’t sting a little.

Okay, more than a little.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I live in a place where the sun doesn’t just shine—it files a restraining order against clouds. Out here in the Southwest, water isn’t a resource so much as a rumor we keep repeating to ourselves like it’s going to magically refill the glass.

Every morning, I turn on the tap with the same quiet optimism of someone checking their 401(k) during a market crash. “Maybe today,” I think. Maybe today the water will feel abundant instead of…borrowed. Loaned. Like the Earth is keeping a tab and we’re aggressively pretending we lost the receipt.

We talk a lot about melting ice caps, and don’t get me wrong—watching the Arctic turn into a lukewarm cocktail is concerning. But last I checked, I can’t pour a glass of salt water, squint at it, and call it hydration. “Ah yes, notes of brine, a hint of existential dread.” That’s not a solution. That’s a cry for help with a garnish.

Meanwhile, here in the desert, we’re building the future. Data centers bloom out of the dust like steel cacti, humming with the promise of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the ability to generate 10,000 variations of a cat wearing a cowboy hat. Progress, baby. Just don’t ask what keeps those servers cool. Spoiler alert: it’s not optimism. It’s water. Lots of it.

And I get it—we love our technology. We love asking machines to answer questions we used to ignore on our own. But there’s something beautifully absurd about prioritizing the hydration of servers over the hydration of, say, people. At this rate, the AI is going to achieve sentience just in time to ask us why we didn’t bother to keep ourselves alive.

The real magic trick is how we’ve managed to avoid talking about the obvious solution like it’s impolite dinner conversation. Desalination. Turning the endless oceans into drinkable water. We can literally teach a computer to mimic human thought, but taking salt out of water? Whoa there, let’s not get crazy.

Except—we already know how to do it. We’ve known for a while. It’s not some sci-fi fantasy. It’s just expensive, energy-intensive, and apparently less exciting than building another server farm so we can argue online faster.

So instead, we do what humans do best: we wait. We wait until the problem gets big enough that it can no longer be politely ignored, like a smoke alarm chirping at 2 a.m. Eventually, we’ll either change the battery—or the house will burn down, and we’ll all stand outside saying, “You know, I always thought that noise was important.”

I find myself wondering, quietly, uncomfortably, if we’re inching toward something we don’t want to name. Not all at once, not dramatically, but slowly—like a landscape forgetting how to be alive. Places like parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, California…places that already flirt with the edge of “just enough.” What happens when “just enough” becomes “not quite”?

Do we become the cautionary tale we used to point at from a safe distance? The one we’d shake our heads about, saying, “How did it get that bad?” while conveniently ignoring the part where we had a front-row seat to our own version of the same story.

And the most unsettling part? It’s not that we don’t have options. It’s that we have them and still hesitate. We debate, we delay, we budget, we prioritize everything except the one thing that quietly underpins all the others: water.

Because without it, there’s no agriculture, no cities, no data centers, no clever essays about how ironic it all is. There’s just…dry silence.

So here I am, standing at the sink, letting the water run a second longer than I probably should, wondering if someday this will feel like a luxury I didn’t appreciate enough. Wondering if we’ll look back and realize that the real “elephant in the room” wasn’t hiding at all.

It was just waiting patiently for us to notice that it was dying of thirst.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There’s a special kind of clarity that comes from watching someone accuse another person of losing touch with reality while simultaneously uploading Renaissance fan fiction of themselves as the Son of God.

I mean, I try to stay open-minded. Maybe I’m the one who’s confused. Maybe this is what humility looks like now. Maybe when Donald John Trump criticizes the pope, it’s not hypocrisy—it’s just… peer review. You know, one spiritual authority checking another. Totally normal. Happens all the time. I’m sure Pope Francis wakes up every morning wondering, “But what would Donald-as-Jesus think about this?”

Because that’s where we are. Not metaphorically. Not “he thinks highly of himself.” No, we’ve blown past metaphor and landed squarely in full-color, soft-focus imagery of Trump performing miracles like he just wandered off the set of a low-budget Easter special. Healing the sick, blessing the masses—probably just one executive order away from turning Mar-a-Lago water into wine.

And somehow, in the middle of all this, the pope is the one being called out.

Now, I’m not a theologian, but I feel like there used to be some ground rules. Modesty, maybe? A vague hesitation before self-appointing as the central figure of Christianity? But perhaps that’s outdated. Maybe the new gospel starts with, “In the beginning was the brand, and the brand was tremendous.”

What fascinates me isn’t even the imagery—it’s the absolute confidence. The kind of confidence where you can post yourself as Jesus on Monday and question someone else’s moral authority on Tuesday without even a hint of internal friction. That’s not cognitive dissonance. That’s cognitive surround sound.

And look, maybe it’s not hypocrisy. Maybe it’s performance art. Maybe we’re all just too unsophisticated to appreciate the nuance of a man who can simultaneously play critic, savior, and social media influencer in the same news cycle. That’s range. That’s versatility. That’s… exhausting.

Because from where I’m sitting, it feels less like a debate about faith and more like a casting call where one guy decided, “You know what? I’ll just play all the roles. God, prophet, critic—why limit myself?”

And the rest of us are left squinting at our screens, wondering if we’re witnessing satire, delusion, or just the logical endpoint of a world where self-awareness quietly packed its bags and left years ago.

But hey, maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe tomorrow he’ll post himself parting the Red Sea, and we can all finally agree—it’s not hypocrisy.

It’s just content.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

It’s a tough moment for the world’s most sensitive strongmen. With Viktor Orbán no longer playing his favorite role as the guy who could sit at the European Union table while kicking it from underneath, one has to wonder: who’s going to pass the notes now?

I imagine Donald Trump staring at a map of Europe like it’s a restaurant menu written in a language he doesn’t trust, asking where Hungary went—not geographically, but spiritually. And Vladimir Putin, somewhere in a long hallway with terrible lighting, is probably sighing the kind of sigh that echoes, the kind reserved for when one more “complicated ally” suddenly remembers it lives next door to NATO.

Because that’s the real tragedy here. Not that Hungary has a conservative leader—no, that part’s fine. It’s that inconvenient detail where this new leader seems to believe in alliances, treaties, and, you know… not actively poking the bear while insisting it’s just a misunderstood house pet. A conservative who thinks NATO isn’t a book club? Bold. Almost reckless.

There was a certain comfort, I imagine, in knowing that Viktor Orbán could be counted on to raise an eyebrow at Brussels, stall a vote, or at least create the kind of awkward silence that makes international cooperation feel like a bad family dinner. Now? Now there’s a risk of… cohesion. Of alignment. Of countries agreeing on things without needing a dramatic pause and a side-eye.

What are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin supposed to do in a world where even the “difficult ones” start coloring inside the lines? Who fills the void of the strategic contrarian, the geopolitical speed bump, the guy who says, “Yes, but what if we didn’t?”

It’s unsettling. It’s unnatural. It’s almost like alliances are meant to function.

Don’t worry, though. If there’s one thing history has taught us, it’s that someone, somewhere, will step up to make things unnecessarily complicated again. Nature abhors a vacuum—and geopolitics abhors smooth cooperation even more.