My last post was in March 2022, which makes me feel like I don’t necessarily need this blog anymore. Still, I have hopes and dreams, even at 50.

In March ’22, I had a 2019 Honda CRV, fully kitted out with all the things to make it a perfect Lstrmobile. It is dead, now. It was murdered in October 2024 by a jerk driving a Dodge Charger on the Schuylkill Expressway who thought his text was important enough to nearly kill my wife and son. They’re fine, although Aly still hates to drive.

2024 hasn’t been a great year, overall. I’ll leave out the personal details, except to say that I broke my foot in such a way that it required surgery. It happened just as I was getting on a major health kick, too, which is depressing. But there is a litany of things starting with a house fire last autumn and continuing through until today.

Things aren’t all bad. I’m still freelancing, remarkably, although I’ve been entertaining the idea of going back to work full-time. I still lack a proper office (he types seated in a depressing Panera).

The Tonka dog still lives, which is great at age 11, and we have a cat, which is remarkably tolerable. The kids are doing well. One moreso than the other, but I’ll leave out the heartbreak.

This was a year of treading water, but I expect great things from 2025. Hopes and Dreams.

Today on the Lstrblg...

The Dark Panera of Our Souls

My midlife crisis has involved questioning the intolerability of the status quo regarding our way of life. This is generally in the form of bitching about cars, (sub)urban design, and the endless consumerism around which we base our lives.

Right now, I’m writing to you from a sorry excuse for a third space: Panera. I know you are familiar with the concept — not of Panera, but third spaces. It was all the rage when coffeehouses came back. There was this brief era of independent coffeehouses. You can easily say “but then Starbucks happened,” but that isn’t necessarily the truth. Starbucks works in urban environments fine, as do many small coffeeshops, but it really excels in the car space. Independent business come and go, but chains have the staying power to reshape our habits.

This Panera is in a half-dead shopping center across the street from the library, in fact, but the library doesn’t open until after noon. I just dropped my car off at the car stereo place, to upgrade the cd-player to something we can actually use. The music is too loud and the coffee is too mediocre. There aren’t enough outlets either, but as the morning goes on it has started accumulating other folks with laptops. A third space, as I understand it, is neither work nor home but a place you can go to hang out and either meet with people…or work or read in peace. This place is hard to do anything of those things.

This summer, my son was given an internship with a local, large truck-selling firm at the other end of the county. He didn’t have a license yet, so I spent the time driving (or riding, which was an unfamiliar experience) with him out to the greater Teleford-Souderton-Perkasie metropolitan area, where I would find a welcoming library to spend my day working.

It was perfect, in its way. The boy got a great experience, I got to spend time with him (he really is a great guy), and I got some time to focus on work. Speaking of which, I have some tasks I need to do. But first, I need to find an outlet…