The light comes back on

2024 was a remarkable year. It was remarkable for a lot of reasons, many of them bad. But in regards to my own life, the ways in which it was remarkable for good reasons easily surpassed any previous year I'd lived.

During 2024, there were four different experiences I had that made me feel, truthfully, like I'd ascended to some higher plane of existence or been transported to a magical realm, where I was in touch with the universe and the essence of what it is to be alive in a way that the events of normal day-to-day life don't even approach. This might sound like a description of some crazy psychedelic drug experience (I can't speak to that personally), but it isn't. It's just that I got to do some really, really amazing things. And I've had other such experiences in my life, but never so many in a single year.

One was the honeymoon Erin and I took to Spain in early March, perhaps a topic for another as yet unwritten post. Another was witnessing a total solar eclipse in person. It goes without saying that a third was becoming a father - really not just the birth experience (although that was the most profound) but also many little moments since that I've shared with Erin and W.

The fourth was the most cathartic and emotionally powerful concert that I've attended in my life, which if you know me you know is really saying something. The concert took place on March 22, 2024, at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, and was played by one of my top two (with Okkervil River) favorite bands ever, Typhoon, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of their album White Lighter.

 

The concert not only marked the tenth anniversary of one of my favorite albums, it also, I realized during it, marked a closing of the door on the most tumultuous ten year period of my life.

The short run of White Lighter tenth anniversary shows that Typhoon did in March of 2024 was actually a bit belated, as the album was released in August 2013. So let's jump back in time to August 2013.

Typhoon had come up on my radar earlier that summer, when I saw them listed among upcoming shows at the Beachland Ballroom and Tavern in Cleveland and thought they sounded interesting. I hadn't yet listened to any of their music. I didn't know that the band's lyrics were largely inspired by lead singer Kyle Morton having nearly died from complications stemming from Lyme disease, and were thus about grappling with mortality and the fragility of the human body in both dark and hopeful ways.

White Lighter was released on Tuesday, August 20, 2013. Three days later, on Friday, August 23, my first wife Cara was admitted to the hospital after it was discovered that she had a blood clot in her calf, and it was subsequently discovered that her lungs were full of blood clots. Early the next week, she was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Needless to say, my whole world was turned upside down.

A couple weeks after the initial hospitalization, I listened to Typhoon for the first time. I had no idea what I was getting into. No idea how relatable the music would be. No idea that the music of Typhoon would become one of the most important things that would help carry me through the next few years of my life, first living with a spouse who had what was almost certainly terminal cancer, and then living as a young widowed person and struggling through physical and mental health problems of my own.

It's funny that the album with which I would form a stronger emotional connection than any other in my life was released within days of the event that would lead to it having that emotional resonance. If I'd listened to White Lighter on its release date, I'd have liked it a lot, but it would likely have just been one of many albums that I liked a lot. A week later, everything had changed.

And because White Lighter is the single most emotionally meaningful album to me, and I already knew very well that anniversary concerts of favorite albums could rank among the best things I'd ever experienced, when I saw that there would be tenth anniversary shows I knew there was no way I could miss out on attending.

I took a long weekend and flew to Portland the day before the concert. My whole visit was great. Non-concert highlights included several really fantastic meals, a visit to Powell's, the world's largest bookstore, and a round of disc golf at Pier Park, a very highly rated course that quickly became my favorite that I've played.

A very exciting birdie!

I also did a huge amount of walking. It's well known that "getting your steps in" is good for one's physical health. It's becoming more well known, but is still underrated, how beneficial long walks can be for mental health and emotional state. Between the honeymoon in Spain and the Portland trip, I'm pretty sure March 2024 is the month in which I've walked the most in my whole life, with several different days of over 20,000 steps each. Is it a coincidence that this happened during what was easily one of the best months of my life?

A lot of the walking I did was in the lush, sprawling expanse of Forest Park, one of the nation's largest urban forest areas. Being able to spend time in nature that's readily accessible from a city is a great thing, something I love about my home of Cleveland Heights, and Forest Park is probably the best such place that I've encountered in my travels.

 

Repping another favorite Portland band, Joseph. 

It's a pretty magical place, but the magic of walking through those lush woods didn't compare to the magic that took place in Revolution Hall on the night of March 22.

This was, in fact, the second time I'd seen Typhoon play a show in Revolution Hall. The second time, in fact, that I'd seen Typhoon play a tenth anniversary show in Revolution Hall - the prior, on November 5, 2017, was for the tenth anniversary of their record label.

Both shows came at very momentous times in my life. Just as my introduction to Typhoon, and first time seeing them live, had also come at a very momentous time in my life. All for very different reasons.

I got to the venue early to make sure I could get a good spot near the stage. There were two openers - the second, the Fourth Wall, I had seen open for Typhoon once before, in 2018, and it was great to see them again. Anyway, between waiting for the show to start and waiting in between acts, I had plenty of time to think about the band I was there to see and how their music had woven itself into those ten years of my life going back to White Lighter's release.

I even took the time to read my previous blog entries about Typhoon. I felt grateful to my past self for having written all those entries. It was a good reminder of why I write. It was a good reminder of what all I had been through to get to the remarkable place I had reached.

One of those entries was called Wait for the light to come back on. I wrote it after that previous Revolution Hall show in 2017. The title comes from the lyrics of "Artificial Light," the opening track of White Lighter and a song that had often moved me to tears when I saw it performed live.

On that November 2017 visit to Portland, I was still reeling and emotionally devastated from what had happened the month before - an out of nowhere (to me) breakup that was the most traumatic thing I had ever experienced.

Which, considering I had previously been widowed at the age of 31, is obviously saying something.

Taking a very long walk around Portland and then seeing an amazing Typhoon concert had provided a major respite from the pain I was experiencing. I think it was really the beginning of my healing process, although that process took a long time.

In 2024, once again, the combination of a long walk around Portland and an amazing Typhoon concert had a profound effect on me.

I realized something as I stood there in the crowded concert hall and thought about all my past experiences with Typhoon and the words I had written. All those concerts and the things that had been going on in my life when they happened. September 2013. March 2014. September 2014. November 2017. January 2018. June 2018. April 2022.

What I realized was that, ever since August 2013 - the release month of the album whose tenth anniversary this show was celebrating - I'd carried with me an inescapable feeling that the life I had was not the life I was supposed to have. There was just something wrong about it.

Turning 30 and then a couple months later learning that your wife has stage IV lung cancer will do that to you, I guess.

But I also realized that there had been one short-lived period of time within those ten years when that feeling had gone away. When it had felt like everything had fallen into place and my life made sense again.

It was an illusory feeling. Now that I have a child of my own, I can see even more clearly how absolutely insane it was that my (also widowed) girlfriend of April through October 2017 had pushed me into a stepfather role for her four-year-old daughter within a month of us meeting in person. But I didn't realize that at the time.

I can see clearly now something that I was aware of at the time but then, I think, didn't want to admit was true after it ended. Those months in the summer of 2017 actually had been the happiest time in my life. (Had been! But that's no longer true.) It didn't seem right when I had been happily married to someone with whom I shared nine years of my life to say that the happiest time in my life was instead a short-lived relationship with someone else, but honestly, it was true, and it was because being a parent (for all intents and purposes, albeit not in a formal or legal sense) was the most magical thing I had ever experienced. And thus, suddenly having that parental role and that relationship with that child stripped away from me was the worst trauma I'd had to endure.

I realized something else. When I thought back on my life, there was a clear line of demarcation, almost as if I had lived two different lives. There was the period of my life that felt immediate and familiar and real. And there was the time before that, a time that almost felt like a past life.

That line of demarcation was August 2013. The month in which White Lighter was released. The month in which everything in my life changed.

When I think back on the events of August 2013, there's an immediacy to them, as if they didn't happen all that long ago, even though it's now been over 12 years. And that's also true of all the important events that have happened between then and now.

But go back a little farther in time, and I find that events of even, say, July 2013 feel like they happened in a different lifetime. It's an uncanny feeling, although it's one that makes sense when you consider what happened.

So this concert celebrating the tenth anniversary of an album by one of my favorite bands was also much more than that.

The first time that I saw Typhoon live, it was amazing to witness the 11 members of the band all cram onto the tiny stage of the Beachland Tavern. I'd never seen anything like it.

I was too close to to fit the whole band in one picture, but you can see how crowded the stage was.

In the years since, various members of the band had had to move on to various other responsibilities in life. The size of the band had shrunken considerably. The most recent time I'd seen them, April 24, 2022 - the day after my second date with Erin, and a significant date for other reasons - a version of the band about half the size of the original had taken the stage at El Club in Detroit.

They'd played a great show, but it couldn't quite compare to what had once been.

On March 22, 2024, the full Typhoon lineup whose music had taken hold of my soul ten years previously once more took the stage at Revolution Hall. I had always thought, when I saw them, that the band seemed like a family. And this was like the best kind of family reunion. It felt like things were once more the way they were supposed to be. It felt euphoric.

And the music hadn't even started.

It's hard to put into words what I felt when the oh so familiar opening notes of "Artificial Light" filled the room, and what I continued to feel for the rest of Typhoon's set that night. But I'll try. As I remember it, a powerful physical sensation washed over my body and I somehow felt both intensely excited and remarkably calm, and at peace, and most of all just blissful.

 

I joined in with much of the rest of the crowd in heartily singing along to many of the words. That sort of communal experience with a concert crowd that is so passionate and so there for the music is a wonderful thing whenever it happens. Here it was extra wonderful, both because of what the music meant to me, and also because the feeling I had of the band being like a family somehow extended to the entire audience. It felt like, in that room for that one night, we were all one big family.

Many of the words that I sang most enthusiastically were words I had quoted in one of those old blog posts: Typhoon lyrics that make me think of Cara, posted a week after my first wife's death, a post that marked my transformation away from being someone who never shared his innermost feelings with, well, just about anyone. The emotions I experienced seeing those songs performed live at this tenth anniversary celebration, singing along, and thinking about everything those words meant to me and everything that had happened over those ten years, well... it was just a transcendent experience in the unique way that live music can transcend normal human experience, but even more transcendent than any other live music experience I've had before or since.

Although so many of those lyrics had meant so much to me going back to 2013 and through the ensuing years, there was one set that now took on a greatly heightened significance. From "Young Fathers":

Now I'm as old as you were when you had me
Should I be afraid? Should I start a family?

In 2015, I explained, "The above is not really so much related to Cara, but sticks out to me because I am in fact now as old (31 years) as my mother was when she had me."

It was a weird feeling at the time, thinking about how at the age my mother was when she became a parent, I instead became widowed.

Kyle Morton, speaking between songs at the anniversary concert, provided additional context to these lines. When he was at the age his parents were when he was born, he thought he was going to die. He wrote those words thinking that he would never get to be a parent himself.

He introduced album closer "Post Script," an absolutely heartbreaking song, by saying that he had written the song for Danielle, his wife; it envisions her life after his death. It had been ten years since that song was released into the world. Ten years since I had listened to it and the rest of the songs on White Lighter over and over while pondering my suddenly uncertain future.

I've talked to both Kyle and Danielle (frontwoman of now defunct band Wild Ones) multiple times at previous shows, by the way, and they're both just absolutely lovely people.

So here we were, ten years later. Kyle had not died. He was very much still alive, and as he explained in what was news to me, he and Danielle had been able to start a family. They had a baby girl!

During the show, it had already been very much on my mind that the crazy journey my life had taken over those ten years had all led up to me meeting Erin and now to Erin, back home in Cleveland, being pregnant with our child. At the revelation that Kyle and Danielle's journey had also led to them having a child - ten years after I had listened to those words, "Should I be afraid? Should I start a family?" and had wondered whether I, too, would ever have that experience - I felt this sense of... I guess I might call it cosmic connection. Sometimes it just feels like everything is as it's meant to be. This was one of those times.

All along, what I had really wanted in life was to meet someone with whom I would like to start a family, and then start a family with that person. Now it was happening. 

After the astonishingly beautiful performance of "Post Script," a song that sticks out in my memories of the first ever Typhoon concert I attended when those 11 musicians crammed themselves onto the tiny Beachland Tavern stage in September 2013, the band left the stage to thunderous applause. They returned to play an encore featuring several songs from their other albums and culminating in a rousing performance of "Reed Rd.," a fan favorite live song that never made it to an album (until it was included as a bonus track on the White Lighter 10th anniversary release) but that I fondly remember closing out the show at my second Typhoon concert. That show had been in March 2014, so almost exactly ten years in the past.

What a ten years it had been.

I walked out of the concert almost in a daze. It had been just so powerful, so beautiful, so overwhelming an experience. It was truly one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

Although since W's birth, the list of experiences similarly or even more amazing has rapidly expanded!

I had spent ten years carrying a vague feeling that my life, in some fundamental way, was not the life I was supposed to have. And now, now I no longer felt that way. I now felt that yes, things are right with my life, this is where my life is supposed to be. I was already starting to feel this (when you've spent so long carrying that feeling of things not being right, it's not easy to shake, even when things do start to really go right), but I think that night in Revolution Hall (importantly, I think, coming on the heels of an amazing honeymoon with Erin in Spain) is when that feeling really solidified itself in my mind.

Because life has been so busy and it's taken me so long to get around to finishing writing this post, I now have the benefit of being able to look back over the two years since that night and see that yes, that's really true. I feel so much gratitude.

Looking back, it seems even more remarkable now. I truly believe that that night in that concert hall induced a permanent and beneficial change in my brain. Not just in the way that the formation of any long term memory permanently alters some neural pathways, but a much more profound and fundamental change in the function of my mind.

Music, man. It really is something.

The day after the show, I did a lot more walking around Portland, including a stop at a record store where Typhoon's music was being played over the speakers. I was not surprised at the affirmative answer when I asked the guy at checkout whether he'd been at the previous night's show. That night, I caught a red-eye flight home with a brief layover in Chicago.

But then my flight from Chicago to Cleveland was cancelled.

While in the airport in Chicago, I joined a video call with Erin and our realtor as they viewed a house. We were still in the midst of a lengthy house search. It would be almost a month later when we finally found our home. We closed on it, incidentally, on the two year anniversary of our first date.

It turned out that the best way for me to get home from Chicago was to take a flight to the Akron-Canton airport, an hour's drive from home. Erin drove there to pick me up (the original plan would have had me taking a train from the Cleveland airport to our side of town). It's always a crazy journey for us!

I was extra happy to see Erin when I walked out the doors of the airport. On the way home, we stopped at a GBH (great blue heron) rookery that Erin had spotted from the highway on a previous drive we'd taken. A love of GBHs has been a significant feature of our relationship from early on. We parked, got out of our car, and looked at all those majestic birds tending to their nests.

I stood there with my wife and thought of the nesting that we would be doing in the near future.

Life is weird

 

February 19, 2026 was a day I will never forget.

In the morning, I took my cat Gavvy to the vet for oral surgery. At his last checkup, the vet had found he had some bad teeth that needed to be removed. This is something that, from my experience, always happens eventually with cats, although at age 9, Gavvy was younger than other cats of mine had been when they needed oral surgery. I wasn't thrilled about Gavvy having to go through the ordeal, or about the cost, but it was nothing I hadn't experienced before.

I took W with me to drop Gavvy off - the people in the vet office are always excited to see her. I then took her to daycare and went to work.

That afternoon the USA women's hockey team was facing off against Canada for the Olympic gold medal. Laila Edwards, one of the stars of the team and the first Black woman to play for Team USA in the Olympics, is from Cleveland Heights, the city I call home, and we've really latched onto her as a local hero. It was really fun to see the outpouring of support during the Olympics. The New Heights Grill, a bar/restaurant in my neighborhood, had become a site for watch parties, and I decided to leave work early to catch the game there.

The place was packed when I entered close to half an hour before the puck dropped. I'd intended to get lunch there, but with nowhere to sit decided to go home, where I ate lunch and also watched the first period of the game before returning to the watch party.

 

Watching a sports game in a crowded New Heights Grill definitely took me back to all the Cavs playoff games I watched there during their run to the title, almost ten years ago now. What a time that was.

Team USA had dispatched Canada 5-0 during the group stage, so I was expecting the Americans would skate to the gold. A familiar feeling of Cleveland sports disappointment filled the establishment as instead Canada grabbed a 1-0 lead and was holding on to it as the clock ticked down in the third period.

But then, with just over two minutes left, Laila Edwards shot the puck toward the goal, and team captain Hilary Knight deflected the shot into the net, tying the game!

The crowd exploded in cheers and I enthusiastically joined in. What an exhilarating moment.

Just as time ran out on regulation, sending the game to overtime, I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I saw that it was the vet and went outside to take the call.

The vet told me that Gavvy was out of surgery, but that she'd found something when removing his teeth, and it looked like he had cancer.

What??? I was completely stunned. The exhilaration that had filled me moments before evaporated in an instant. How could my beloved Gavvy, the cat with whom I've formed a more special bond than I've had with any other non-human being in my life, possibly have cancer at only 9 years old?

The vet explained that she had taken a sample, and both she and the other vet had looked at it under a microscope, and they were pretty sure he had squamous cell carcinoma. They needed to send a biopsy for testing, but it sounded unlikely that they were wrong.

I got off the phone just dumbfounded and horrified. I quickly looked up squamous cell carcinoma in cats and saw that when it occurred in the mouth, it was often found during oral surgery to remove bad teeth, because the cancer could cause the bad teeth. I also saw that the prognosis was very bad. Gavvy might have just a few months to live. He seemed like his normal self! We hadn't noticed anything unusual! How could this possibly be happening? I'd thought he was only about halfway through his life, not near the end.

I went back into the New Heights Grill. I decided I'd watch overtime before going to pick Gavvy up. The US scored to win the gold, and I joined in the cheers, but halfheartedly.

I then went to get Gavvy from the vet. I felt so sad when I saw him. He had no idea what was going on, of course. My heart was just breaking.

Later that afternoon I picked W up from daycare. When she saw me, she got a big smile on her face and ran to hug me. For a moment, I felt happy.

In the days that followed, I was just a wreck. It had been quite some time since I'd experienced such emotional turmoil. Every time I looked at Gavvy, I felt like crying. It just wasn't fair. He'd grown so much from the young cat who had been separated from his feline mother too early, and who latched onto me as his replacement mother and initially only trusted me and had behavioral issues around other humans and especially other cats.

 

Gavvy shortly after I brought him home, after he walked up to me while I was visiting Columbus, in October 2016.

He had come to accept and love Erin and was doing surprisingly well with W and I'd so been looking forward to seeing her grow up with him. It was just so surreal looking at him and thinking he'd be gone so soon.

Well, anyway, on February 24, five days after the surgery, I got another call from the vet. The biopsy results were in, and...

Gavvy didn't have cancer!!!

It turned out it was something called alveolar osteitis. He would need another surgery to take care of the rest of it after he fully recovered from the first surgery, but he'd be totally fine.

Tears filled my eyes, but this time they were tears of joy. A huge smile spread across my face.

The moment I learned that Gavvy does not, in fact, have cancer was honestly one of the happiest moments of my life. Not the happiest - certain events like getting married or becoming a father do rank higher - but it's up there.

And that's very interesting. Because if the vet hadn't mistaken alveolar osteitis for squamous cell carcinoma in the first place, I would have been spared five days of intense emotional turmoil and what, at the time, felt like a genuinely traumatic experience. But I also wouldn't have experienced one of the happiest moments of my life. That says something about the experience of being human, I think.

So, yeah. Life is weird. 

The cold and wind and rain don't know (The Erin and Jeff Oasis concert experience)

On August 24, as Erin, W, and I drove from Montreal to Toronto for the last stop on our Adirondacks + Canada vacation, we were at a service plaza when I overheard some people talking about a truck fire having shut down the highway somewhere on the way to Toronto. We looked up driving directions and were dismayed to see that our drive, which was already set to be about tied for our longest ever in a day with W, would take considerably longer.

Despite this, we still made time for a stop at the amazing Big Apple roadside attraction that we'd become aware of in December 2023 driving from Toronto to Ottawa with an embryonic W on board. I don't regret the stop; it was everything I hoped for and more, but it likely did contribute to us driving into the Toronto area in the dark with a screaming W in her car seat behind us. She did eventually fall asleep in the car but woke up when we reached our Airbnb, leading me to take a short late night bike ride to a weird grocery store to buy some milk.

The whole thing was certainly worthy of Erin and Jeff Experience™ billing, and a fitting lead in to the Oasis concert the next day that we were in Toronto to see. Oasis's first North American show since 2008. An event that would be unforgettable for many reasons, some good, some bad, but I wouldn't change a thing because it all came together to make the whole experience even more unforgettable.

I realized in the days leading up to the concert that Oasis had been the first band I was really into of my own accord as opposed to because of my parents playing a band's music. I was in 7th grade. "Wonderwall," "Don't Look Back in Anger," and "Champagne Supernova" from the band's smash hit second album (What's the Story) Morning Glory? were all over the radio. I bought the album on CD and loved it and at some point also bought the band's debut Definitely Maybe. Then their third album Be Here Now, released in August 1997, became the first album whose release I ever anticipated. I remember following news about it on the primitive websites of the era. I had absolutely no clue at the time how central my love of music would become to my life, but I was excited about that album, and in some ways that was a preview of my future.

Be Here Now was widely regarded as disappointing. I didn't like it as much as its predecessors, but I still liked it a lot. Something interesting happened, though, which is that I kind of stopped being as much of an Oasis fan for reasons that simply highlight how impressionable children and teenagers are. As I recall, the modern rock station in Columbus (99.7 The Blitz) didn't play Oasis, and therefore I got the impression that they weren't as "cool" as other bands I liked such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana, or Smashing Pumpkins. I still listened to Oasis some - I had a weekly paper delivery route in high school and I strongly associate those Oasis albums (along with several other albums I have) with listening to them while doing that route - but I didn't really consider them a top tier favorite band anymore. And then for some reason, as an adult I basically just stopped actively listening to Oasis, although I'd still enjoy their hit songs if I happened to hear them somewhere.

When the much hyped 2025 reunion tour, bringing the notoriously feuding Gallagher brothers back together, was announced, though, I realized I'd really like to go. Toronto was the closest date and it would work to hit the night one show there on the way back from our vacation. It was something I was looking forward to, but not thinking about that much, but then in the weeks leading up to the show I got out my old Oasis CDs (which, unlike most of the hundreds of CDs I own, I had not ever previously ripped to my computer) and started listening to them and listening to them again and then I found I was getting really excited.

There was a great energy about the city of Toronto on August 24, the day of the show. As we went about our day, we'd occasionally see someone in Oasis apparel, and we'd smile at the recognition they were likely going to the same show as us that night. It would be the biggest concert I'd ever attended, and although I usually opt for much smaller shows, it felt really cool to be a part of something so big. And it really was a big deal, bigger even than most stadium shows. Really the most comparable thing I could cite to the feeling of being in Toronto that day would be being in Cleveland when one of our pro sports teams is in a championship series.

At one point we were walking through the city and saw a long line of people and wondered what they were lined up for. As we got closer we noticed a decent number were wearing Oasis gear. Then we saw that they were in line for an official popup Oasis merch store. I had no interest in waiting in the line, but just the sight of it raised my excitement further.

The concert was at Rogers Stadium. If you know anything about Toronto sports venues, you might think that's the Blue Jays' downtown ballpark. If so, you would join Erin and me in being incorrect.

Hearkening back to another moment of confusion about concert venue locations when Erin and I were planning the trip to California that ended up including our Yosemite elopement, when I first told Erin about the Oasis concert in Toronto we both thought it was at the Jays' stadium, but when I actually went to look at tickets, I discovered that "Rogers Stadium" is a completely different venue from the Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays play. Rogers Stadium is a 50,000 capacity outdoor concert venue that opened earlier this year on the site of a former airfield about 10 miles north of downtown. Which is pretty weird.

Even weirder is that the stadium was built to be temporary - after five years it will be demolished to make way for planned development. Apparently the Toronto area needed a really big outdoor concert venue and this was decided to be the best solution to the problem (for now, I guess?). At one of the first concerts held there, Chris Martin of Coldplay called it a "weird stadium in the middle of nowhere."

As we'd find out, this was a very accurate description.

Doing some research on Rogers Stadium as vacation approached, I learned that after the venue's inaugural concert, some fans had had to wait up to two hours to exit the stadium, but that the issues causing this had mostly been worked out in time for the Coldplay show. Still, the location was not convenient, to say the least. It looked like taking a train and walking from the station was our best bet. Google Maps showed about a 15 minute walk from the station to the stadium. Not bad, right?

In typical Erin and Jeff fashion, we decided to ride bikes from our Airbnb to the train. While handing W off to the babysitter, the topic of rain came up (it had sprinkled on us in a park earlier in the day). I looked at the weather on my phone and saw a 0% chance of rain through the 11 pm hour.

We biked to the subway station, locked our bikes up, headed down to the platform, and boarded a train with lots of Oasis fans already on board (another train, jam-packed with people headed to the concert, had departed the station a couple minutes earlier just as we got to the platform). Again, it gave a fun feeling of being part of something really big. Apparently there were two train stations at which we could exit that were supposed to have similar walks to the stadium. We weren't really sure whether one was better, but at the first of the two, a bunch of people exited our train, so we followed them.

When we emerged onto street level, we could see the weird stadium looming in the distance, and it truly did look very weird and very in the middle of nowhere. We started walking, following other concertgoers, and soon realized we were getting farther away from the stadium. Then we came to a street that was where the Google Maps directions would have had us turn, and saw a sign saying we couldn't go that way, and to continue to another street, so we continued to walk and the stadium continued to recede into the distance behind us until we finally turned toward it.

It turned out that the walk from the train station to the stadium gates took more than half an hour. On the way, some cycle rickshaws passed, offering a faster alternative to the lengthy walk, for what I'd imagine was a substantial fee. Each was blasting Oasis songs from speakers.

I think everyone making that long walk felt a shared sense of bewilderment, like, what even is this place? What are we doing here?

We finally reached the stadium in time to hear, but not see, the last couple songs by opener Cage the Elephant while we waited to use the bathroom and then finished walking to the grandstand entrance.

As we waited for the main event, it was fun to just look around at all the other people and soak in the excitement. People of all ages (we were probably at about the average age of the crowd). I especially enjoyed seeing how excited the younger audience members were, people who weren't even alive when Oasis's most popular music was released. A couple of Gen Z girls in front of us asked Erin to take their picture with their handheld digital camera, which is apparently a trend with that cohort, which I love. There was also a teenage boy with his parents who was wearing a t-shirt of perhaps my favorite Oasis song, "Supersonic," the title stylized like the familiar Oasis logo, and a bucket hat - I glanced his way when that song came up in the setlist and loved seeing his reaction.

When this tour was announced, a lot of people wondered if it would really work. Would the Gallagher brothers manage not to be at each other's throats? Could they even make it through a whole tour? Would the band be able to bring it on stage like they did when they were younger?

Wonderfully, the answer to all these questions was a resounding yes. The songs sounded as great, or even better, in concert in 2025 as they had when I was spinning those CDs in my bedroom or my portable disc player in the '90s. The Gallaghers seemed genuinely happy to be on stage together. And man, the band just has this seemingly effortless swagger that few modern rock bands can pull off, and they still have it after all those years off, and it's really fun to experience in person.

 

If you want a more in depth review of an Oasis reunion tour show, I really liked this one: How the Oasis Reunion Has Become 2025’s Most Wholesome Story. I guess this post is more about the wild experience we had in seeing the show than it is a detailed review of the show.

But back to the show, everything was going great, basically matching my expectations (every night on the tour had the same setlist so we knew what we were in for), when about halfway through Oasis's set I noticed some ominous clouds rolling in to cover the previously clear skies. That was funny, I thought, given the 0% chance of rain I'd seen forecast, but of course, clouds don't always mean rain.

It was during the song "Stand By Me," which, it must be noted, contains the lyrics, "The cold and wind and rain don't know/They only seem to come and go away," that I started to feel some drops of water descending from the sky. I laughed, and looked around to take in other's reactions. It was a fairly light rain. It wasn't really bothering me, and especially given the timing, it kind of added to the fun and made the whole thing feel like even more of an Event.

I figured the rain would pass over, or come and go away, as it were, in short order.

I was very wrong!

In fact, the rain continued, and grew in intensity, becoming, at times, an actual downpour. It wasn't a warm night, either, so it felt rather unpleasant! Looking around, very few in the crowd had come prepared. I saw a few people who'd donned ponchos and I envied them a little. I was at least fortunate to be wearing a ball cap so my face was shielded; Erin didn't have even that.

The show went on. Liam Gallagher donned a hooded jacket, the hood pulled over the top part of his face as he sang, and between songs interjected some amusing comments such as comparing the weather to Manchester's, and also firing back at critics who said they were only doing this for the money because why would they keep playing through such miserable conditions if it was only about the money. He really seemed to be reveling in the situation!

 

The way the light show interacted with the rain was also cool to see.

So, a thing about this weird stadium is that, unlike a normal outdoor stadium, there's really nowhere to go to escape from the weather. (I don't know what would happen if truly severe weather hit during a show - it seems a little frightening to contemplate.) I don't know that I would have tried to seek shelter; I don't know if many of the people around us would have, but we didn't really have a choice. We were stuck there, getting drenched on a cool night in the middle of nowhere near Toronto, watching an Oasis concert. I had thought we were having a crazy experience during our long trek to the stadium. I'd had no idea what a crazy experience we'd been in for.

During "Live Forever," another of my favorite Oasis songs, I think I had a slightly manic grin on my face as I belted out the lyrics, "Did you ever feel the pain/in the morning rain/as it soaks you to the bone?" The whole thing was just so wild. The concert concluded perfectly, with the thrill of singing along to "Wonderwall," one of the most iconic songs of my lifetime, with tens of thousands of other people, followed by a performance of "Champagne Supernova" that concluded with a fireworks display, something that would have seemed over the top at most any other concert I've attended but felt just right at this one. An image of a setting sun filled the giant video screen behind the stage as the show ended and we began to file out of the stadium with the rest of the drenched but thrilled audience.

The whole thing was just such an epic experience. The crazy things about it - the weird venue with its absurdly long walk to the entrance, the heavy rain on a night with none in the forecast - as irritating or unpleasant as they might have been in the moment, they ultimately just made the experience more memorable and in a way I'm glad for all of it.

It's funny. In high school I got this weird impression that Oasis wasn't as "cool" of a band as a lot of the other music I listened to, and I think this had a long-lasting effect of making me basically stop actively listening to Oasis, but it turns out that I still really like them and in fact like them more than a lot of the other music I was listening to in high school. I started listening to my Oasis albums again in preparation for the show but have ended up listening to them a lot more since seeing the band live. Definitely Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory? are genuinely great albums.

I remember well what my favorite songs on those albums were when I was younger. It's interesting to me that all my favorites from back then remain favorites now, but there are some additional songs that didn't stand out to me back then and have now been added to my favorites list. An indication of how my taste in music has evolved and expanded. Those albums must have been influential in the course my taste in music initially took. So, so much music has entered my ears and my brain in the decades that have passed since then. Some aspects of how my brain responds to music remain similar. Some have changed.

In the '90s, I don't remember being aware of the term "shoegaze"; as an adult, I became a fan of the genre, but never realized until revisiting their albums that Oasis had basically done a shoegaze song and a really good one at that, "Columbia," on their debut album, and that song is now one of my favorites by the band.

It's kind of staggering to think about how much I know about music now in comparison to how little I knew when I first got into Oasis. But I knew when I heard their music that I liked it a lot. And hey, I still do!

Thankfully, as we exited the stadium, we found that departing crowds were permitted to go the way that Google Maps had incorrectly suggested that we'd be entering, so it didn't take a ridiculously long time to get back to the train. Also thankfully, it was no longer raining when we rode our bikes through the cool night from the train back to our Airbnb, where a sleeping W awaited us.

Oh, but then she woke up when I was going to bed and took a long time to fall back asleep. The Erin and Jeff experience, indeed.

First family vacation!

The week before Memorial Day, Erin, W, and I went on our first real family vacation!

Well, we'd previously spent a week in Lake Placid in October, but with my parents joining us - and thus able to babysit W - so this was indeed a more "real" family vacation experience. Just Erin and me with our child. A whole new experience for all three of us. And it was a great experience.

We spent most of the week in Virginia, in Shenandoah National Park and then heading down the Blue Ridge Parkway before staying in a yurt near the charming town of Floyd. The trip started, though, with a stop in Pittsburgh for an important concert. Rather than recounting every part of the trip in detail, I wanted to write about two specific things that rank as two of the highlights of my year: seeing Pearl Jam live for the first time in 15 years, and going hiking as a family.

Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam were my favorite band in high school and college, and although I've since mostly moved on to listening to other music, they remain an important part of my life, as well as one of the best live bands I've seen. Somehow, though, I had gone 15 years without seeing them live, after concerts in 2003, 2006, and 2010 that were all among the best I've ever attended.

2010 was the last time they played in Cleveland, and their tours in the years since became much more limited, but after the show Erin and I attended on May 18 at PPG Paints Arena in downtown Pittsburgh, I feel very foolish for not having traveled to see them in the intervening years.

How, one might wonder, did we pull off going to an out-of-town Pearl Jam concert on a trip with a baby? Well, that's a story in itself!

I'd expressed an interest in going to the show for some time, but had felt uncertain due to the very expensive (resale) ticket price. I guess eventually I just had to remind myself, if I have a good chance to see one of my favorite bands live, I'm not going to regret going, no matter how much it costs. And that ended up being even more true than I'd anticipated.

It turned out that a good high school friend of Erin lives in the Pittsburgh area, and his wife works at a daycare, and a coworker of the wife was able to babysit. Convoluted? Perhaps, but leaving W with someone who (1) takes care of small children as her job and (2) was personally vouched for by the wife of Erin's friend seemed safe.

It also turned out that the house where W would be spending the evening was a ways away from downtown Pittsburgh, basically in the middle of nowhere. We got a hotel in between the two locations, and after going out for an early dinner with W (during which she drummed on metal plates as Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" played over the restaurant's sound system!), we drove to drop her off.

A very interesting thing I observed during the drive: as we came around a turn on a winding country road, I saw a turkey vulture in the road chowing down on a dead groundhog. Another groundhog, this one still alive, was at the side of the road, apparently watching. The vulture flew away and the live groundhog scampered off as we drove past.

After dropping W off, we drove back the same way. The vulture was back - and so was the groundhog. I suspect it must have been mourning its companion.

Animal behavior never ceases to fascinate.

On to the show.

We parked in a garage close to a half mile from the arena and got to our seats in time to see most of the opening set played by Australian band Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers. Those young ladies (the band has been around for 10 years but the members were 15-year-old high school students when they started it) could rock, and I really enjoyed their set. What an honor to be chosen by Pearl Jam to open for them, and I think it's very cool of Eddie Vedder and co. to have given them the opportunity.

I was obsessed with Pearl Jam from the ages of, oh, about 16 through 22. Although I continued to like them a lot, and never ceased to be aware that I'd been obsessed with them during a formative time in my life, I think in a way I forgot just how much I'd loved them.

The opening notes of Ten deep cut "Garden" filling the arena as Pearl Jam started their set quickly brought all that back.

Although not recognizable to most of the general public like "Alive," "Even Flow," "Jeremy," or "Black" are, "Garden" was a song I always really loved when I was a teenager listening to Pearl Jam's iconic debut album. It was a song I hadn't previously seen performed live, and one that doesn't get played all that often.

A really great thing about Pearl Jam concerts, and a thing that sets their shows apart from those of any other band I know, is that they vary their setlists so much from show to show, meaning that you never know what you might hear and that each individual concert really feels like a unique and significant event.

To wit, they had played another show in Pittsburgh two days prior (in retrospect, I really wish I could have attended both), and among the 26 songs played on night one and 27 songs on night two, there was only a five song overlap. This is typical for Pearl Jam. Other bands I've seen over the years (and there are a lot!) generally range from playing the same set every night of a tour to playing a lot of the same songs while varying a handful of songs from night to night. No other band I'm into does it like Pearl Jam.

And although I've complained about the paucity of shows the band has played in recent years, I have to give them credit: playing such different setlists from night to night on a tour has to take so much more work than playing mostly the same set of songs every night with a few changes, and it's really remarkable for Pearl Jam to keep doing this so far into their career and with such a huge catalog from which to draw.

 

Erin, more of a casual fan, had some interesting comments on the reactions of the audience to the performance. She mentioned watching how people would respond upon hearing the intro to a favorite song they hadn't expected to hear. As a diehard fan, this experience truly is an amazing thing about these shows. She also said that looking out across the packed arena and seeing how into the music everyone was, it almost felt like watching a cult. I think there's some truth in that. A concert like this can be very much akin to a religious experience. But unlike most cults, this is a good thing. 

There were a number of songs I was especially thrilled to hear, including long time favorites of mine like "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" (a song I was kind of obsessed with about 25 years ago), "Immortality," and the ever familiar "Alive" (Mike McCready's live guitar solo is truly a thing to behold).

 

One that took me by surprise for how excited it made me was "Insignificance" from underrated 2000 album Binaural, which might be the Pearl Jam album that for me is most tied to a particular time in my life. 

And one song that I was not at all expecting to hear and that really brought on the emotions was "Hunger Strike" by Temple of the Dog. Had I realized ahead of time that the show fell on the anniversary of Soundgarden/Temple frontman Chris Cornell's death, I guess it wouldn't have been surprising.

In November 2016, I went to Philadelphia to see the first show of the first, and only, Temple of the Dog tour, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the grunge supergroup's one album. It was an astonishing performance. "Hunger Strike," the band's biggest hit, features Eddie Vedder sharing lead vocals with Cornell, but Vedder wasn't present for that 2016 show. The rest of the members of Pearl Jam, who were also the rest of the members (along with Cornell) of Temple, were all on the stage that night. Cornell's death the following May hit me harder than any other celebrity death has - I'd loved his music for most of my life.

Eight and a half years after that Temple show at which Chris Cornell, backed by Mike McCready, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, and Matt Cameron, sang those familiar "Hunger Strike" vocals but Eddie Vedder was absent, I got to see Eddie Vedder, backed by Mike McCready, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, and Matt Cameron, sing "Hunger Strike." It felt like a full circle moment and like a completion of something that had been unfinished. And given events of my life over the course of those years, that felt fitting.

This was the last show of Pearl Jam's tour, and thus they really delivered by playing an extra long set, clocking in at 2 hours and 40 minutes and ending at 11:40 pm. Perhaps not ideal when you have a lengthy drive into the country to pick up a nine-month-old from the babysitter's ahead of you, but man, was it worth it for me. It was such an epic experience and absolutely one of the best concerts I've ever seen.

It was later announced that long-time Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron (who'd been with the band since 1998 after they'd gone through four different drummers in their first eight years of existence) was leaving the band. Thus, this show had marked the final concert of the "Pearl Jam with Matt Cameron" era, making it an even more momentous occasion and making me even more glad I'd attended.

My dad told me once that one of his only regrets in life was not seeing Springsteen live when he was younger, and those are words I'll always remember. This concert was a reminder, when you get a chance to see a band that's really important to you live, you shouldn't pass it up.

And now moving from one really amazing experience to another...

Hiking as a family

Going on hikes together has been a big part of my and Erin's relationship from the start. On our second date, we went on a 4.7 mile hike in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. We got engaged on a 12 mile hike in the Adirondacks. The day after we got married, we went on a 10 mile hike in Yosemite.

Naturally, we were greatly anticipating going hiking with W, and hoping that she'd be amenable to doing it as a baby.

Early in life, she was very resistant to our attempts to get her in a wearable baby carrier, causing some worries that family hiking was something we'd have to wait quite a while to do. We gave up on the carrier for months because she became so angry whenever we put her in it.

Good friends had kindly provided an Osprey hiking backpack with baby carrier for us to use with W in our hiking endeavors. Our first practice run was on a cold winter day when we went to the Shaker Lakes Nature Center for a short hike on snowy trails. W seemed okay but not thrilled at first, then started crying, then fell asleep. Not an inspiring outcome, but it was very cold.

We took W in the hiking backpack one other time before our vacation, on a longer but still fairly short hike with some friends at a metro park. She still seemed to be trying to make sense of it all, but by the end seemed to be getting into it more.

Our first real hike as a family? It was a big jump up from those practice runs.

The day after the Pearl Jam concert, on our drive from Pittsburgh to Shenandoah, we stopped in the George Washington National Forest to hike Big Schloss, a peak on the border of West Virginia and Virginia. It's about a 4.5 mile round trip with a total elevation gain of about 1100 feet. The bulk of that comes in the first 0.8 miles - 600 feet of climbing before the trail levels out and follows a ridge to the peak.

 

It's a really cool hike, one Erin had done before and I'm glad she suggested it; the scenery as you traverse the ridge and then reach the summit was really gorgeous and also different from any other hike I've done.

A 600 foot climb over the course of 0.8 miles is pretty steep hiking, but I've done worse, and I've done much lengthier stretches that were at least that steep on other hikes. I had definitely not, however, done anything like it while carrying a baby on my back. Coming at the very start of our very first real hike with W, it was quite an introduction to hiking with a baby!

In fact, although the length and elevation profile of this hike were fairly modest by my normal standards, this was, no exaggeration, the most strenuous and physically taxing hike I've ever done. I've done all sorts of extremely strenuous distance running and cycling over the course of my life, but hiking? Hiking had never felt like this. My legs felt so heavy and I found myself basically gasping for air at points.

And you know what? It was great!

I've always found great satisfaction in challenging myself physically, testing my limits. It's something that I haven't done as much in recent years, not for lack of desire, but because my joints could no longer handle that intensity of running or even cycling. But now I found that simply walking up a mountain while carrying W on my back provided a great challenge. An unexpected benefit of parenthood.

The more important thing, of course, was whether W liked it. And she did - she seemed to love it! She babbled excitedly, looking around at the scenery and taking it all in. She also caught a couple naps over the course of the hike (one on the way up, one on the way down), looking so precious as she rested the side of her head on her little hand in the carrier.

At the top, we crossed a cool wooden bridge and reached some rocks with just breathtaking views of the surrounding mountains where we got to hang out for a little while, just the three of us, our little family.

 

On subsequent mountain hikes we've let W out of the carrier at summits, but on this particular one that seemed questionable so we kept her in the carrier. We enjoyed a nice snack, including some cheese, a W favorite.

The descent was, of course, not nearly as physically taxing, but I did find I had to be extra careful descending steep sections of trail while being so top heavy. I've since picked up a hiking pole and have been very glad to have it.

At the end of the hike I took the backpack off, set it on the ground, and looked down at W, and she looked back up at me with just the most delightful smile on her sweet little face. She looked so happy - and I felt so happy. Hiking in the mountains with my wife and daughter and discovering that my daughter enjoyed it so much was probably one of the most magical things I've ever experienced.

We did several more hikes that week, and having found how much she liked it, W became visibly excited when I'd put her in the hiking backpack and lift it up off the ground. It was just so great.

A recent Adirondacks vacation brought a lot more family hiking, and W has continued to love it. I'm looking forward to the years ahead, as she grows first into a toddler who'll provide an even greater challenge for me to carry, and then into a child who can tackle the trails herself with increasing skill and speed, just as I did in my youth. And I'll always remember Big Schloss, our first family hike on our first family vacation. 

The Age of Confusion (or: the more things change...)

Last year my parents downsized from the house in which I grew up to a condo, and in the process of moving gave away a lot of things including most of their music and book collections. Naturally, I ended up with a lot of records and CDs. I also picked a few books that looked interesting. I've recently been reading one of them, 28 Science Fiction Stories of H.G. Wells, and it's quite interesting indeed. I found the first story, a novel called Men Like Gods, so interesting - and timely - that I felt compelled to write something about it!

Men Like Gods, which Wells described as a "scientific fantasy," was published in 1923 and is set in 1921. The premise is that the protagonist, an Englishman named Mr. Barnstaple, is transported to an alternate dimension along with about a dozen other Earthlings. They find themselves on a strangely Earth-like world inhabited by humans but in a very different society than that they know, a futuristic society in which humanity has apparently used science to solve all its problems. A Utopia, as Mr. Barnstaple quickly comes to think of it.

There is a lot of commentary on the state of mankind and society in the 1920s - and I was struck by how relevant it all seemed to the 2020s. So I wanted to share some of the passages I found most striking along with my reactions to them.

The story begins thusly:

"They all cost money, with a cheerful disregard of the fact that everything had gone up except Mr. Barnstaple's earning power," I read, and chuckled, because apparently inflation was also a big concern a hundred years ago.

That was just the beginning.

Mr. Barnstaple is the sub-editor of a newspaper called the Liberal, "that well-known organ of the more depressing aspects of advanced thought." We learn that he is "obsessed by apprehensions of some sort of financial and economic smash that would make the great war seem a mere incidental catastrophe." The "great war," which we now, of course, know as World War I, was a recent event when this story was written. And of course, the Great Depression was not too far in the future, so Mr. Barnstaple and H.G. Wells seem prescient here.

We often like to think that we live in unusually tumultuous and terrifying times, and although there are certainly a lot of really bad and frightening things happening today, I don't know whether that's really true.

"Even in ordinary times Mr. Peeve [Mr. Barnstaple's boss] would have been hard enough to live with; but the times were not ordinary [emphasis mine], they were full of disagreeable occurrences that made his melancholy anticipations all too plausible. The great coal lock-out had been going on for a month, and seemed to foreshadow the commercial ruin of England; every morning brought intelligence of fresh outrages from Ireland... a prolonged drought threatened the harvests of the world; the League of Nations... was a melancholy and self-satisfied futility; everywhere there was conflict, everywhere unreason; seven eights of the world seemed to be sinking down towards chronic disorder and social dissolution."

"Mr. Barnstaple was, indeed, ceasing to secrete hope... His hope had always been in liberalism and generous liberal effort, but he was beginning to think that liberalism would never do anything more for ever than sit hunched up with its hands in its pockets grumbling and peeving at the activities of baser but more energetic men. Whose scrambling activities would inevitably wreck the world." That passage could have been written today, right? Have baser but more energetic men always been wrecking the world? Probably for as long as civilization has existed, and yet somehow the world has continued to go on, not entirely wrecked.

As stated in the opening sentence of the story, Mr. Barnstaple needs a holiday, and we learn that "the most hopeful thing about" his situation is that "he owned a small automobile of his very own." Of this automobile, we learn that "Mr. Barnstaple used it to come up to the office from Sydenham because it did thirty-three miles to the gallon and was ever so much cheaper than a season ticket." 33 miles per gallon. A hundred years ago. The best-selling cars in America today are Ford F-series pickup trucks; the popular F-150 gets about 23 miles per gallon. Good lord, what are we even doing? But I digress.

Mr. Barnstaple thinks due to all the turmoil in 1921 that "if anything it was a sillier year than 1913, the great tango year, which, in the light of subsequent events, Mr. Barnstaple had hitherto regarded as the silliest year in the world's history." From my perspective our current era seems a contender for silliest in history, but I'm undoubtedly very biased. Also, I have no idea why 1913 might have been "regarded as the silliest year in the world's history," and have no idea what even happened in that apparently very silly year. I wonder what people will think of our current era a hundred years from now?

After being transported to Utopia, Mr. Barnstaple and the other Earthlings learn about this strange world from some of its residents, the Utopians. They learn that Utopia seems to be essentially a parallel universe Earth but farther along in history. At some point in Utopia's past it was much like the Earth of 1921. That era is now known to the modern-day Utopians as "the last Age of Confusion."

The Utopians are interested in learning what it's like to live in such an age, and so one of the Earthlings, Mr. Burleigh, gives "a brief account of the world of men," including "states and empires," "wars and the Great War," "economic organization and disorganization," "the difficulties of finding honest statesmen and officials," "the unhelpfulness of newspapers," and "all the dark and troubled spectacle of human life."

I mean, sounds like a good summary of the world today, right? Replace "newspapers" with news sources in general - newspapers, TV, news websites, social media - all of which have failed to prevent and have indeed helped enable the lurching toward fascism that is currently happening in the United States. We bemoan this as a problem of our age, but perhaps it's always been a problem.

The Earthlings are then told of how things work in Utopia, and are astonished to learn that there is no central government; "Decisions in regard to any particular matter were made by the people who knew most about the matter."

One thing I find fascinating about this story is that when it was written, two terrible global events were both in recent memory: World War I, and the flu pandemic of 1918-1920. The Great War is mentioned multiple times in the story. The flu pandemic? Never mentioned explicitly, but a number of points in the story seem to have come out of the pandemic being on the author's mind. Here we get the first, when the Earthlings ask, "But suppose it is a decision that has to be generally observed? A rule affecting the public health, for example? Who would enforce it?"

The answer: "It would not need to be enforced. Why should it?"

At the beginning of COVID, many people were surprised to learn that there had been a deadly global pandemic a hundred years earlier, because they'd never heard of it. It killed more people than World War I, but whereas World War I is a major part of history classes and contributes to the setting of all sorts of notable literature, the same just isn't the case for the flu pandemic. But then once we'd lived through a pandemic for a while, people realized it made sense that after experiencing it, most people would just want to go back to normal life as if the pandemic hadn't happened. People wouldn't want to read or write a novel set during the pandemic.

And so the choice by Wells not to mention the pandemic when he lists all the recent problems of the world, but the clear influence of the pandemic on his story (an influence I wouldn't have recognized had I not lived through a pandemic myself), fascinates me.

Jumping forward in the story, the more prominent evidence of the flu pandemic's influence comes when, on the second day after the Earthlings arrive, the "great epidemic in Utopia" begins. Utopians had long ago eliminated all disease from their world and as a result their immune systems are not prepared for the infections the Earthlings are carrying. "Though not one of them was ailing at all, it became clear that someone among them had brought latent measles into the Utopian universe, and that three or four of them had liberated a long suppressed influenza."

(When I read the story earlier this year, I didn't realize how timely the measles reference would be. Oof.)

These diseases rapidly spread through the population, and our band of Earthlings is then approached by people in gas masks who tell them, "Quarantine. You have to go into quarantine. You Earthlings have started an epidemic and it is necessary to put you into quarantine."

Amusingly, some of the Earthlings think that their natural immunity makes them superior to the Utopians and will allow them to conquer the planet as its inhabitants all fall ill, but the Utopians' science quickly turns things around. Then, in one last pandemic reminder, the funniest moment of the story to me came when the Utopians mention that research is being undertaken to develop a method to send the Earthlings back to their own dimension. Father Amerton, the voice of organized religion among the motley crew from Earth, asks what the nature of the treatment will be - "Is it to be anything in the nature of vaccination?"

He then goes on, "I may say at once that I am a confirmed anti-vaccinationist. Absolutely. Vaccination is an outrage on nature. If I had any doubts before I came into this world of - of vitiation, I have no doubt now. Not a doubt! If God had meant us to have these serums and ferments in our bodies he would have provided more natural and dignified means of getting them there than a squirt."

Yep, these words were written in the early 1920s. Other than a few amusing anachronistic terms (like "anti-vaccinationist" and "squirt"), nearly the exact same words could have been spoken by countless people a hundred years later - and as a result of this, hundreds of thousands of people died preventable deaths.

So much for humanity becoming more enlightened as history progresses.

Mr. Barnstaple realizes that the more he hears about the last Age of Confusion in Utopia's past, "the more it seemed to resemble the present time on Earth." He forms an outline in his mind of the history of Utopia from that confused era onward. In this outline, a period of tremendous advancement in scientific inquiry occurred.

"The Utopians, who had hitherto crawled about their planet like sluggish ants or travelled parasitically on larger and swifter animals, found themselves able to fly rapidly or speak instantaneously to any other point on the planet." Note that powered flight and instantaneous communication to locations around the globe were both recent developments when Wells wrote this story!

"They found themselves, too, in possession of mechanical power on a scale beyond all previous experience, and not simply of mechanical power; physiological and then psychological science followed in the wake of physics and chemistry, and extraordinary possibilities of control over his own body and over his social life dawned upon the Utopian."

These developments did not lead to an instant transformation from Age of Confusion to Utopia, though. At first they were only appreciated by a small minority of people, while most people "spent the great gifts of science as rapidly as it got them in a mere insensate multiplication of the common life."

The next passage sounds very much like a description of the world of today: "The economic system... became more and more a cruel and impudent exploitation of the multitudinous congestion of the common man by the predatory and acquisitive few. That all too common common man was hustled through misery and subjection from his cradle to the grave; he was cajoled and lied to, he was bought, sold and dominated by an impudent minority, bolder and no doubt more energetic, but in all other respects no more intelligent than himself. It was difficult... for a Utopian nowadays to convey the monstrous stupidity, wastefulness and vulgarity to which these rich and powerful men of the Last Age of Confusion attained."

Gee, does that remind you of anyone?

"What plenty and pleasure was still possible in the world was filched all the more greedily by the adventurers of finances and speculative business."

Are we talking about Utopia in the Age of Confusion, Earth in the 1920s... or Earth in the 2020s?

Eventually, the people of Utopia's past came to realize that "the state could not do its work properly nor education produce its proper results, side by side with a class of irresponsible rich people. For, by their very nature, they assailed, they corrupted, they undermined every state undertaking; their flaunting existences distorted and disguised all the values of life." Again, does that remind you of anyone? And eventually, after centuries of struggle, the control of "greedy, passionate, prejudiced and self-seeking men" over society was wrested away, and a society in which science and education were held in paramount by all was established.

In this utopian society, Mr. Barnstaple learns, there are "Five Principles of Liberty, without which civilization is impossible." The most striking of these is the fourth: "that Lying is the Blackest Crime."

As the young Utopian explaining this to Mr. Barnstaple states, "Where there are lies there cannot be freedom."

This, again, calls to mind events of our present era, and, apparently, of the era one hundred years' past. Mr. Barnstaple contends that "half the difference between Utopia and our world... lay in this, that our atmosphere was dense and poisonous with lies and shams... The fundamental assumptions of earthly associations were still largely lies, false assumptions of necessary and unavoidable difference in flags and nationality... impostures of organized learning, religious and moral dogma and shams."

Mr. Barnstaple gets especially worked up about "the suppression and falsifications of earthly newspapers," which is "a question very near his heart."

"The London newspapers had ceased to be impartial vehicles of news; they omitted, they mutilated, they misstated. They were no better than propaganda rags."

Don't we all today, people from all parts of the political spectrum, bemoan the state of the news media and how various parts of it (which parts depending on one's point of view) are no better than propaganda? And don't we, like Mr. Barnstaple, yearn for a past era in which this was not so much the case?

I do think that the collapse of any sort of commonly agreed upon objective reality is a striking problem of modern life. It's said that a tool of authoritarianism is constantly bombarding the public with lies, not so much to get people to believe the lies as to get people to stop believing that there is any sort of truth. As I look with anguish on what's happening in my country, I very much believe this, and from my perspective it seems like a relatively novel problem in the span of modern American life. But it's clearly not a novel problem in human history. And it's probably been a problem, to a greater or lesser extent, for as long as civilization has existed.

Of course, it could probably go without saying that the idea that humans could ever agree on an objective reality to the extent that it would be possible to outlaw lying - and to do so in service of the truth and not to an oppressive regime - is far-fetched.

Reading this story, I found myself wondering two things about H.G. Wells's thoughts on this imagined world of his. The first is, did Wells view Utopia, this world where all the problems of modern society had been solved and everyone could live a life of comfort and plenty, as good?

His protagonist, Mr. Barnstaple, becomes quite the Utopia stan (as the kids say), but all the other Earthlings are, to various degrees and for various reasons, quite critical. One interesting critique: "Life on earth was... full of pains and anxieties, full indeed of miseries and distresses and anguish, but also, and indeed by reason of these very things, it had moments of intensity, hopes, joyful surprises, escapes, attainments, such as the ordered life of Utopia could not possibly afford."

There's also the matter of Utopia having been achieved in part through heavy use of eugenics, something that today is generally regarded as a Bad Thing, but that may have been viewed more favorably by many in the past.

The second thing I wonder is whether Wells viewed it as plausible that at some point in the future humanity could progress to a society like that portrayed in the story. Or if not exactly like that, then at least a society where those familiar problems - constant conflict, ubiquitous unreason, unhelpful and dishonest newspapers, rich and powerful men laying waste to society - had largely been banished to the past.

When I was a kid, I got the impression of the story of humanity as one of continuous progress. In the future, things, in general, would be better than they were in the past. I certainly no longer feel that way. I'm not sure whether that change is simply due to me being older, or if it's also a reflection of a general change in how humans view the future. A lot of classic science fiction portrays futures in which technology has made life easier for all humans rather than just for the privileged. I don't think that's the case anymore.

When I read this story, the fact that so many of the problems a hundred years ago sound exactly the same as the problems today makes me skeptical that the problems will ever be solved. Mr. Barnstaple leaves Utopia feeling confident that one day, "Earth would tread the path Utopia had trod." What about H.G. Wells? Was he, from the vantage point of 1923, able to look to the past the way that I can from 2025 and see how all the problems he described echoed things that had already happened? Or did the "Age of Confusion" seem like a temporary state through which humanity was passing?

To be fair, he did describe the struggle to go from Age of Confusion to Utopia as having taken thousands of years. Even still, it's hard for me to imagine that transition ever occurring, because there are certain fundamental aspects of human nature.

Wouldn't it be nice, I've thought recently, if we could just live in a world where everyone had two basic character traits:

1. They cared about other people. Other people in a general sense, not just a certain subset of other people. There are, I think, a lot of people who do, but there are also a lot of people who don't.

2. They had decent critical thinking skills. That is, if presented with evidence for an argument, they could evaluate the evidence and come to a reasoned conclusion about the strength of the argument. And if presented with an argument that's obvious BS if examined carefully, they would be suspicious of it. They wouldn't just believe things for no sound reason and cling to those beliefs even in the face of an overwhelming amount of contradictory evidence. This, I think, is something that no one is perfect at, but some people are good at it, while some people are okay at it, and some people quite frankly aren't very good at it, at all.

It seems that the difference between Wells's Utopia and the real world, and the reason that the real world could never become like Utopia, could be summarized as that many, many people in the real world have neither or just one of those two character traits, and there's no reason to think that will ever change.

And it's interesting to me that that's true. It seems that that's how we evolved. Why is it that some people do have those traits, and others don't? (Perhaps the remarkable thing is that a lot of people do have those traits instead of no one having them?)

What would the world be like if everyone cared about humanity and could be swayed by evidence toward believing true things and disbelieving false things?

Granted, there are issues where, even working under that imagined framework, there aren't clear right and wrong answers. Take the aforementioned COVID pandemic. There were tradeoffs between trying to slow the spread of a deadly disease and trying to live as a social species for which being social is a basic need (especially for the developing minds of children, who conveniently were themselves at low risk from the disease!) and there was no way to avoid doing some measure of harm in some direction. The actual response to the pandemic was a disaster in a multitude of ways, but I don't think there's an ideal world where there's a clearly correct response with no downsides.

But there are also issues where there are very clear right answers, and the problem is that a lot of people just don't want to accept those answers as right, or reflexively oppose them because they don't like the people who are proposing the ideas.

To use a pet issue of mine as an example, it's inarguably true that improving bike and pedestrian infrastructure and public transit would benefit the health of individual people, of society, and of the planet. In a cost-benefit analysis, the benefits outweigh the costs by a mind-boggling amount. Operating under a Utopian framework, we would just do this and the only questions would be about the details, not about whether or not to do it. Sadly, the real world doesn't work that way.

But then, every form of progress does have unintended consequences (rip scribes). Perhaps in the imagined world full of compassionate and rational people, accelerated progress compared to the real world would have inadvertently brought about our premature demise.

Or perhaps we would be living in a utopia.

Either way, I find it simultaneously depressing and comforting to realize that so many of the problems that seem new or at least newly terrible to us today are the same problems that have been faced over and over again by other people in the past. Depressing, because it's sad to think about how no matter how hard people try to fix the world, in some ways it's probably unfixable. But comforting, because when you're in a bad situation there's comfort in knowing that you aren't alone, that not only are other people feeling the some things but other people have felt the same things in the past. Lots of people lived through times like the times we're living through now and were still able to find meaning and joy in their lives. Lots of people lived through far worse times and were still able to find meaning and joy.

It was really funny to me to read this story from a century ago and have the protagonist remark that "the times were not ordinary" for reasons that are in many ways the same as reasons that we, today, say that the times are not ordinary.

There's a joke I've seen a lot, where someone says that we're living in unprecedented times, and concludes, "I want to live in precedented times." But I think the truth is that, while some things about the times in which we live are unprecedented, other things have plenty of historical precedent. And I think this has been true for people everywhere for at least the last few centuries and perhaps for as long as civilization has existed. (Go far enough back in history, and I suspect the idea of "unprecedented times" wasn't so common, because the rate at which life changed was too slow to be noticeable in the lifetime of a typical human.)

The truly unprecedented elements of our lives relate mostly to the continuous and accelerating state of technological innovation. The things that merely seem unprecedented but actually do have precedent, I think, are often more fundamental things about human life that arise from fundamental aspects of human nature. Deep down, humans don't change nearly as rapidly as our technology does, and thus, the same themes play out over and over again, whether the main source of news (and propaganda) about the unfolding events is newspapers or television or social media. Yes, what's happening in the United States right now is unprecedented in this country in my lifetime, but it's far from unprecedented in human history.

Mr. Barnstaple leaves Utopia feeling invigorated by the hope that the efforts of people like him on Earth would not be in vain, and that one day in the future Earth would become a utopia as well. Reading his story a century later, that seems exceedingly unlikely, but I don't see that as a reason to despair or to give up the fight. Fighting to prevent a dystopia is perhaps even more important than fighting to achieve a utopia. As long as we're able to have those "moments of intensity, hopes, joyful surprises, escapes, attainments" that are provided to us by the privilege of living on this amazing, awful, yet wonderful world, the fighting isn't and wasn't in vain.

In a post I wrote a few months ago, I shared this quotation:
 

 

That was before I read Men Like Gods. After reading it, these words seem even more timely.

Life. It sure is something, isn't it?