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Dad’s Top Discs: Favorite Albums of 2025

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

December 17, 2025

2025 was a weird year for music. There was so much anxiety as Trump drug America into the gutter, I kept waiting for the soundtrack to kick in to amplify our revolution. Luckily we had regular gems dropped by Jesse Welles, the Arkansas bard. Watching him perform “Join ICE” on Colbert last month gave me hope that protest music still matters. I leaned heavily on the North Carolina punk band, The Muslims and their great 2021 album, Fuck These Fuckin Fascists, to get me through. That and my local jazz station, KMHD. But there were a dozen or so new releases that really brought me immense listening pleasure this year.

My 11-year-old daughter, who one year ago was a hardcore Swiftie, buzzing from seeing one of Taylor’s final Eras concerts, has moved on. “Dad, you love Taylor Swift more than I do.” I get what’s happening. She’s differentiating herself. I’ve loved the K-Pop that is now at the top of her charts, especially Stray Kids, but if I like it TOO much, I’ll ruin it for her. We did have a great moment in October listening to Swift’s new The Life of a Showgirl stream through the house (from separate rooms). Cozy was meh, and I was blown away by the song craft and the dialed back production that seemed very 70s FM to my ears. This is the Taylor Swift album I’ve been waiting for. By the fifth track, “Eldest Daughter,” I knew this album would be spinning non-stop.

It was a great year to be a Beatle fan, starting off with the best Ringo Starr solo album in ages, Look Up, where our drummer goes back to his first love of country music with great joy. The thirtieth anniversary of the Beatles Anthology series gave us Anthology 4. The collection included 13 unreleased tracks, plus the three remastered “Threatles” songs. The compilation was so lovingly assembled by Giles Martin, it felt like stepping into the studio with the boys. There is still magic to be discovered (and the Rubber Soul cuts were revelatory).

My absolute favorite discovery of 2025 is the Denver band, Dead Pioneers, fronted by Paiute spoken word artist, Gregg Deal. Their 2023 debut album and 2025’s PO$T AMERICAN slam punk rock power and indigenous indignation in a way that is both humorous and revolutionary. The PO$T AMERICAN tracks, “My Spirit Animal Ate Your Spirit Animal” and “STFU” nearly blew out my speakers this year. After the first listen, I immediately ordered a Dead Pioneers t-shirt and began saying prayers that they’d come to Portland. There has been a great void in my music collection by indigenous artists. If anyone should be raging against the machine in ICE America, it’s the first people. PO$T AMERICAN is everything I loved about The Clash 45 years ago. The more I listen the more I learn and the louder the drums get.

So here is my dozen discs for ’25.

  1. Dead Pioneers – PO$T AMERICAN
  2. Jesse Welles – Under The Powerlines II
  3. The Beatles – Anthology 4
  4. Taylor Swift – The Life of a Showgirl 
  5. Tyler Childers – Snipe Hunter 
  6. Wet Leg – Moisturizer 
  7. Rosalía – Lux
  8. Geese – Getting Killed 
  9. Jon Batiste – The New Americana Collection 
  10. Bad Bunny – Debí Tirar Más Fotos 
  11. Sabrina Carpenter – Man’s Best Friend
  12. Ringo Starr – Look Up

Elegy for a Land Line

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

November 1, 2025

I was trying to respond to a message on Signal but I got a message that there was not enough space on my iPhone to open the app. So I had to find some old videos of the kid to delete and decide if I wanted to remove a few other apps I wasn’t actively using. Then I got a Facebook Messenger DM to respond to. As I was typing a response, another Messenger popped up. As I was deciding if I should finish the first message before answering the second one, my phone rang. It was a guy named “Michael” who wanted to talk to me about Medicaid A and B benefits. I wanted to be the lady in the commercial who just wanted to soak in the bathtub.

Electronic media has countless dark sides. Countless. One is the massive wave of stimuli that we are duty bound to respond to, from emails to TikTok comments. I spend a large chunk of each day deleting junk emails so I don’t have a panic attack every time I open my inbox. And a good percentage of those are emails I should read, but it’s just too much to process. And now that I have reached the status of “Influencer” on Instagram, I get hundreds of messages everyday, almost all incredibly supportive, or sharing a video I NEED TO WATCH. I try to respond to as many as I can, but I will occasionally get the indignant follower, offended that I was too whatever to respond. Where is my time?

And don’t get me started on the constant spam calls I get. Sometimes I’ll get a spammer calling while I’m on the phone with another spammer, all trying to separate me for my money. I’m getting better at not picking up but I do enjoy messing with them and seeing how long I can keep them on the line.” “Hello, my name is Michael and I’m calling about the new Medicaid benefits. How are you?” “Oh, I’m OK, Michael, but I’m suffering from a blocked colon. Do you think you’ll be able to help me? With my blocked colon?” Click.

All this has got me in the dreaded “Good ol’ days” funk that I typically warn against. Here we go. When was a kid, there was one phone in the house that was connected to the house by a chord. There was no call-waiting. If someone called while you were on a call, they got a busy signal and had to try later. That was it. No email. No texts. No DMs. If you didn’t have their phone number, you had to write a letter. On one side, we were more isolated from immediate conversations, but on the other side, we were more isolated from immediate conversations.

As a 20th century boy I can remember what it was like to be away from that landline and be unreachable. We knew when the street lights came on it was time to go home. We could be present in the moment. My daughter, born in 2014, will never know what it’s like to be unreachable. To be truly unconnected and on your own. I’m a sociologist, not a psychologist, so I can’t say if that’s a bad thing or not, but I do know there is great value of calmness and being present in the moment and that’s hard to do with all the pings and beeps and calls from “Michael.” I could unplug for a day but then I’d be stressed about all the DMs and emails that were piling up. Maybe a nice power outage would calm my nerves.

I remember staring at the telephone and wishing it would ring. Be careful what you wish for.

Growing up with a K-Pop Kid

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

October 2, 2025

Fifty years ago, I was 11 years old and somewhere between my Elton John phase and my Kiss phase. All the girls in my class were in their Bay City Rollers phase. Now I have an 11-year-old and she’s firmly in her K-Pop phase. Yeah, there’s a new Taylor Swift album out tomorrow but that pales in comparison to having every single incarnation of the new album by Stray Kids (available at Target). I know, because I’ve had to drive her there to get each version. “I’m spending my own money, Dad!” I laugh because I was right there, spending my chore money on Kiss posters.

Three thoughts.

Thought One: I love the evolution of music. If you would have asked me in 1975 what the pop music of 2025 might sound like, I never would have guessed the post-modern electro-clash of South Korean K-Pop groups. It’s like music from another planet. Just blast “Ceremony” by Stray Kids and tell me what you are listening to. But it’s infectious. Is it “noise” (Get out my yard, kids!) or a brilliant innovation of the pop music genre? The rock and roll ethic is youth music is supposed to set the younger generation apart from the older generation. My Dad’s parents hated Elvis and my dad hated Run DMC. I’m supposed to hate this music but I’m fascinated by it. Sorry, Cozy. I’m in.

Thought Two: I used to lecture about “teenybopper” culture in my Sociology of Youth Subculture class. About how research shows that the “culture of the bedroom” allows pre-teen girls to experiment with heterosexual norms of dating. I’m from the seventies, so their were a lot of girls buying Tiger Beat for the pin-ups of Leif Garret and Shaun Cassidy. Cozy’s Stray Kids box sets come with similar swag that ends up on her bedroom wall. Her and her friend screamed yesterday as they pulled out the pictures of the members of the boy band, including Hyunjin, who she declared was her “husband.” Classic teenybopper. How many women my age were sure they would marry Donny Osmond?

Thought Three: Music is such a great way to bond with your kid. Some families have sports, or religion, or animal husbandry. Our house has always been filled with an unhealthy obsession with music. Taking Cozy to see Taylor Swift last year was something we will both talk about for the rest of our days. Being present for her present K-Pop obsession is a great gift and she knows I appreciate it because I was in a similar spot. (There is more than one picture of me in Kiss make-up.) Andi and I took Cozy to see the film Demon Hunter at the theater and she sang every world. On the fourth of July, Cozy and her girl squad were crammed into my Subaru and they put “Gnarly” by KATSEYE on repeat and full volume and sang at the top of their lungs while they threw Snap n Pops at pedestrians. It was bliss.

Thanks to Facebook routinely reminding me, I am often lamenting over pics of Cozy the Toddler. Or Cozy the Second Grader. I posted a lot of pictures of her and that was a great part of her and my life. Cozy the Middle Schooler has all kinds of new joys to offer. Yeah, I want her to get off her phone and clean up her room (That’s another conflicting conflict to explore), but there is so much for me and this kid to learn about each other. Me at 11 was on my bike, her a 11 is on TikTok. We’re different people in different times. Me at 11 was obsessed with Watergate and my first trip to Washington, DC. Cozy is more than aware that Trump is threatening her country and her city, in particular, but she distances herself because her father is so invested in it, often asking why I spend so much time on the protest front line.

So the music connects us. The night she was born, I held her in my arms and sang, “Yellow Submarine.” I can imagine myself on my deathbed with her singing me some K-Pop tune from the 2020s. I asked her yesterday, “What do you think the music of 2075 will sound like, because you’ll be there?” She said, “Like robots.” I said, “That’s what I said 50 years ago.” We’re both right.

Foreshadowing the Clampdown on Academic Freedom

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

From Substack September 5, 2025

September 5, 2025

My senior year at Emory, I added a second major. I had taken more than the required sociology classes, so I decided to double major in political science. I wanted to better understand the history of fascism, but also the geopolitical events of the day. So I signed up for Professor Juan del Aguila’s Latin American Politics class and Professor Thomas Remington’s Soviet Foreign Policy class (where President Carter was a regular guest lecturer). I also enrolled in a semester-long course called The Philosophy of Marxism, taught by a wonderful Catholic priest named Professor Thomas Flynn. I tried to integrate all this with my sociology background into my senior honors thesis, a Marxist analysis of the Irish conflict.

Emory in the 1980s was a vibrant place. Between classes, frequent protests over apartheid, CIA recruitment, and whatever Ronald Reagan was doing that week, and keeping up with the abundance of live music, there was a small fracture on campus. As a kid from a Georgia Klan town, Emory opened me up to a multiplicity of progressive approaches to politics, culture, and sexuality. But there was dissent in the liberal utopia. A conservative group called Students for America, founded by Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, began showing up in classrooms. Their goal was to out “liberal” college professors. They weren’t very effective. As it turns out, the truth is liberal.

But forty years ago, I already knew what this was. Having studied the rise of Hitler, I knew that college campuses were the first targets of the Third Reich. In April 1933, the Nazis passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. It effectively forced universities to fire faculty who were leftist, Jewish, and/or anti-fascist. Among those let go was Albert Einstein. After that, students in the Hitler Youth and the National Socialist German Students’ League would report professors who made “un-German” statements or who were critical of the Reich. The students forced the firing of more faculty, often threatening them with violence. A climate of fear overtook German universities as Nazis purged them of any hint of “leftist indoctrination.” Many professors fled Germany, and others ended up in concentration camps.

At Emory in 1985, we joked that the Students for America were the Reagan Youth, following history’s fascist playbook. Little did we know what was to come.

The far right has long waged a war on higher education funding. Fascists need a docile, uneducated populace, not cohorts of college grads who have read Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon. Professors were in the crosshairs of Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare in the 1950s. More recently, laws and executive orders have been passed to restrict university funding and curriculum around LGBTQ and race issues. In 2021, when I was teaching my Race and Ethnicity class at the University of Oregon, I announced on the first day, “This class is based on Critical Race Theory. Tell me if you have a problem with that.” Fortunately, Oregon still protects academic freedom, but I was told I would be watched by conservative students. It was clear that universities were nervous about pressure from the right. (That same year, Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, was denied tenure at UNC–Chapel Hill because of pressure from conservative donors.)

Things began to shift after the election of Trump last November. Right-wing social media influencers began to encourage conservative students to out liberal professors and try to get them fired, as the Hitler Youth had done 90 years earlier. Far-right group Turning Point USA published their online “Professor Watchlist” (which includes some of my favorite academics, like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Robin Kelley). It should be noted that the front-page of their website features a “professor” who appears to be Jewish. Right-wing pundits and online influencers attacked history professor Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, and tried to have him removed from his position at Boston University. Hopefully academic unions are tracking complaints from conservative students. I’m guessing they have spiked.

When I was a tenured full professor at Portland State University, I felt ten feet tall and bulletproof. But this is a new era, and I am in a new position. As I focus on my consulting work, I’ve had the great privilege to adjunct at our local community college, and I’ve had a front-row seat for the shift. I have great respect for all my students, no matter their political leanings. Sociology classes are kind of group therapy. We’re all working it out in real time. But some of the young white men—the demographic that broke for Trump—have been given permission by our anti-education president to disrupt that sacred space. They are more likely to push back against discussions of patriarchy and white supremacy. It pops up in class, in course evaluations, and in online reviews, often as snide comments. Since I was in their exact shoes all those years ago (as a conservative white teenager), I desperately want to reach them. But I’m also deathly afraid of them. I’ve studied the history and know what they can do.

Fortunately, I’ve got a union and an administration that defends faculty freedom. But it feels like a dark cloud is coming to campuses across the country. And we have been here before. Buckle up.

Raising a Daughter in Epstein’s America: Cozy Turns 11

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

August 17, 2025

Eleven years ago today, I was driving west on the Sunset Highway like a bat out of hell. Andi was in labor and we had to find some place to have this baby. We had planned a natural birth in a bathtub birthing center, but our daughter Cozy had started to poke her head out and said, “Nope!” and was retreating back into the security of the womb. The nearest hospital had no room at the maternity inn, so my barely mobile wife, her mother, and the midwife hopped in the Prius and headed west. St. Vincent hospital was on the very edge of town and I was assured that it was still in Portland. This child would be born in Stumptown.

Fortunately, Cozette was born at 9:25 pm in Portland, Oregon, not Beaverton, during the second term of Barrack Obama. That night seemed like the most perfect exhausting evening on earth. Our daughter was here and the world was hers. Little did we know what was ahead.

I had hoped for a girl because I want to help put strong women into this world, who aren’t saddled with the marginalizing messages girls have typically gotten from their dads growing up. This was a feminist household. But easier said than done. We are always working against our patriarchal programing. And then came Donald Trump to make everything so much worse.

Cozy turned two during Trump’s first campaign for the White House. She was too young to hear the reports of the man who would be king bragging about grabbing women, “by the pussy,” and all the credible reports of sexual assaults by the alleged billionaire. (He still hasn’t released his taxes.) She never heard how he talked to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (Although, she did put the ballot in the box for me and shouted, “Hillary!”)

Cozy was in first grade on January 6th and already knew Donald Trump was a very bad man. But it was his second term that made things the most challenging. The constant news coverage of Trump and his pedophile ring has just filled the air with the most disturbing sex talk. I can’t even listen to NPR with her in the car. But she already knows it all.

At 10, I got my puberty memo, so I knew Cozy was already in the zone. I bought a supply of menstrual pads for when it officially gets here, but the fact that the style among her and her friends is the visible bra strap means we’re fully in it. I knew it was coming, just not this soon. And now the normal relatively innocent adolescent sex chat has been colonized by the flood of chat about Epstein’s rape of underage girls and the protection of those fellow child rapists by the President of the United States.

I keep flashing back to the days when the GOP was the “party of values” and rich Republican ladies would clutch their pearls over the lyrics in rap music. Now the GOP has become the Guardians of Predators and I’m doing everything I can think of to protect my child from them. We’ve hit the point where children are safer with priests than they are with Republicans. It’s a race to the bottom with Trump, and the old man is in a full on sprint.

Maybe the whole “innocence of youth” thing is a myth. There are kids shooting up schools, after all. But I had a naive hope that I could save my daughter from the reality of our sick culture that elevates rapists and refuses to punish wealthy white sex predators for a few more years. She knows she’s a target. There’s no way in hell I would leave my daughter alone in a room with the President or any of his uber creepy MAGA cult. (Many of Trump’s white nationalist following believes the age of consent should be 14 so men can marry children, so there’s that.)

If there’s any silver lining to this disgusting state of affairs, is that Trump’s rape culture has forced us to talk to our daughter about sexual safety early and often. And Cozy is clear on her boundaries. She’s already shut a classmate down who sent an inappropriate text. It’s horrible at age 10 she had to but she knows how to protect herself. But the other side is the non-stop sexual content she must see as she endlessly scrolls through her TikTok. I want to believe it’s all Taylor Swift but I know it’s mostly Sabrina Carpenter. Our baby is surfing in a sea of sexual messages, and not all are affirming.

Tonight, Cozy will celebrate her birthday with a big overnight party. They will want to keep me and any other adult at arms length. May they all be safe, happy, healthy and live with ease. Welcome to adolescence, Cozette. I am still here to protect you, but I’m going to let you start to lead.

Winding Down Elementary School: Gender Check-In

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

May 15, 2025

As fifth grade starts to wind down and the complex reality of middle school looms, I’m reminded of how this blog began. November 2014, I was a stay at home dad, spending my days with Baby Cozy, wondering how I was going to raise a girl in a culture that still devalued half the population. The idea of a blog charting the challenges of “feminist fatherhood” seemed like a good way to share the struggle. Over ten years later, while the the world burns, protecting her gendered journey is still the priority.

The experience of elementary schools has seen the predicted emergence of pre-teen gender rolls. As discussed in Carol Gilligan’s pioneering 1982 study, In a Different Voice, the primary grades, 1 – 3, saw boys and girls as a fairly homogenous blob of “kids.” Half of Cozy’s friends were made of snips, snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. But by 4th, each team peeled off. In fourth grade, Cozy found her tribe of Swifties and boys became the object of much gossip and wonder. “Does he like me?”

Gilligan wrote about how 13 was the age of the great gender divide in which girls start to realize their value is based on how boys view them and their self-esteem plummets. But 2025 is not 1982, for better or for worse. For worse, kids are hitting puberty earlier now. In the 1970s, the average of the first menstruation was 13 and it’s down to 12 now. The beauty industry is targeting younger and younger girls. Cozy has been experimenting with make up but tells me it’s just for fun. On the better side, Gen Alpha kids have been raised by parents who mostly accept the basic tenants of feminism that girls and women are human beings. Boys seem less creepy and girls seem less concerned with their opinion.

We’ll see if that holds up in sixth grade.

This week I got a little tour of the middle school Cozy will attending in the fall. Parents had fun sharing their fond memories of middle school. I don’t know if it’s a “Deep South” thing, but we didn’t have middle schools where I grew up. Elementary went to seventh grade and eighth grade was high school, where you were a “sub-freshman,” the dreaded “Subbie.” Being in seventh meant you were the very big fish in the pond, but the year was also spent full of horror stories about what awaited the little subbies, destined to be terrorized by giant (and practically adult) high school kids. “They’ll force you to do heroin in the bathroom!”

I’ve gathered that middle school is the crucible of adolescent drama. Take 300 kids going through puberty and lock them in a building together for 5 days a week and see what happens. I’m guessing the gendered game of attracting boys is part of that. I’m hoping Cozy’s internal compass is rooted in enough self-efficacy that she won’t be knocked off track by that monstrous norm. But I’ll be on the look out for anything that looks like the surrendering of self that happens to girls in that patriarchal zone, including eating disorders. I think her girl squad will provide a buffer to that traditional pull.

When this blog started, my primary rants were about gendered baby toys and the lack of TV commercials that show men doing housework. Now we’re getting into the real stuff, from body image to sexual safety. This is where the feminist fatherhood business either pays dividends or goes into crisis mode. I have faith in my daughter. The rest of the world, populated by MAGA incels and Carl’s Jr. ads, I’m on guard against. What will happen?

Remembering My Brother Who Lived in the Woods

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

December 14, 2024

My little brother and I never got a long very well. One time when I was 12 or 13, and he was my daughter’s age, we got into a big fight at our house in Stone Mountain, Georgia. He threw a tennis ball can at me that sliced open my forehead (I still have the scar). With blood pouring out my face, I smashed through the flimsy suburban house door of his bedroom and Ronnie jumped out of the second story window, escaping into the woods behind our house where he spent the next two nights. I remember my mother saying, “Let him. We’ll have some peace and quiet for a few days.” I can’t imagine feeling good about Cozy, 10, living in the woods for a few days, but my childhood home was a firestorm of sibling chaos.

Last Sunday, Cozy and I went to spend some time with Ron in his room in the assisted living facility where he’s been in hospice care for the last year. We brought him snacks from Safeway, including requested chocolate covered pretzels. We told him about our trip to Vancouver to see Taylor Swift and I promised to bring him some eggnog on Friday when I got back from a short work trip to Washington, DC.

Yesterday, I sat on his empty bed in his empty room, eating those pretzels and thinking about his body in a funeral home down the street. When we were leaving Sunday, he had a look of terror on his face. I think he knew we’d never see each other again. I tried to reassure him. “You’re gonna be OK. I’ll see you on Friday.” Now I wish I would have stayed a little longer. He died in his sleep Tuesday night. Finally free of the pain of cancer and the nightmares of demons dragging him to hell.

It’s a strange experience, losing a sibling. He drove me crazy for 57 years. I remember the day he came home from the hospital to our little house in Parma Heights, Ohio. My mother tried to head off the inevitable sibling rivalry by giving me a box of building blocks and saying that they were from the baby. But our life was only conflict. That included a 17-year stretch that I didn’t speak to him after he went to prison for threatening to kill our mother. After that, I thought I’d never speak to him again. Now, I find myself missing him. It’s a weird, dream-like state. Is that the same kid who threw the tennis ball can at me?

About 12 years ago, Ron became homeless, moving into the woods in Cartersville, Georgia, about an hour north of Atlanta. He found comfort in the woods, where he told me he talked to owls and ghosts. He was never what you would call a “people person,” challenged by the requirements of modern living. He had a job washing dishes at the local Applebee’s restaurant and would call me to lament his exclusion from our family, including his estrangement from his son. We slowly began to reconnect. On one visit, I took Ron back to our old neighborhood in Stone Mountain, and stopped by our elementary school. I could start to interact with him without the weight of the past and focus on the good memories of our childhood.

And there are good memories. We’d take family trips every summer, often to Florida or to Colorado, where my cousins lived. A favorite picture of us is at Disney World, 50 years ago. We’re on Mainstreet USA with Alice in Wonderland. I refused to hold her hand because, at 10, I thought girls had cooties. Ron, 7, had no hesitation. I use that picture to talk to my students about how straight people come out as well. Ron and I fought a lot but we also found great moments of joy on those road trips, so when I went to get him out of the Georgia woods last year to bring him to Portland, it was one more road trip for us.

Getting my brother situated was a challenge, he was so used to being alone in nature. Finding him housing (after a few rough weeks on my couch) and getting him to chemo appointments were a struggle. Fortunately, there was a great amount of support from my friends in a fundraiser that got him into a care facility. Eventually, he recognized hospice care made more sense although he often talked about “getting better” and building a cabin in the woods outside Knoxville, Tennessee, where he had visited. Our road trips got shorter, the Oregon coast, the Japanese Gardens in the West Hills, until finally he was bed bound, with the trees of Forest Park barely visible out of his window.

It is of great comfort to know my brother isn’t suffering anymore. Anal cancer is the worst thing you can imagine. “Why does it have to be in my ass,” Ron would say as I’d deliver his opioids from the Safeway Pharmacy. It was excruciatingly miserable and he’d often wish he was back in his tent in Cartersville. “I’ll drive you to the airport if you want,” an older version of me would say, annoyed that he didn’t appreciate having a roof over his head and access to legal weed. But I knew Ron was doing me a favor by letting me play the caring older brother role I’d failed to as a kid.

Today, I will deliver his prayer shawl to the funeral home for him to be cremated with and a note expressing gratitude for letting me take care of him. In the coming year I will take his ashes back to Georgia and spread them in the woods where he found his peace. Fittingly, there are no photographs of all the times we fought, just of us in times of happiness. I’ll let that record be the memory of my little brother.

On Turning 60 in an Ageist Culture

~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

February 19, 2024

Life is timeless, days are long when you’re young

You used to fall in love with everyone

Any guitar and any bass drum

Life is a drink and you get drunk when you’re young

– “When You’re Young” by The Jam (1978)

Here’s what I remember about being 29 years old. Being in a panic for 12 months, that the youth culture, that I had pledged allegiance to, was about to kick me off the boat. I sat in an Atlanta cafe (Café Diem) and kept a journal chronicling my desperate attempt to stranglehold youth before I was put into the “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30” lane. The morning of my 30th birthday I woke up, wrung out in New Orleans, and realized I was the exact same person as the was the day before.

For most of our time on earth human beings have been clueless at the concept of birthdays and even their own age. Joan of Arc could only guess that she was 19 when she was put on trial for heresy in 1431. Cave people didn’t say, “Well, I’m a Virgo, that’s why this cave is so damn clean.” Birthdays are a modern invention and we put a lot of significance on them as meaningful moments of transition. But was 37 really that different from 36?

I say this because tomorrow I turn 60, which is either massively monumental or completely meaningless. I can’t decide. Sixty sounds really old. Or it sounded really old when I was 20, forty years ago. In 1984. During the Reagan administration. Before the internet. When you had to remember people’s phone numbers. To my students, all born in the 21st Century, I must be Methuselah. But I don’t feel old at all, just wise. Like Methuselah.

We live in an incredibly ageist society that has long devalued people who are above the mean age. Look at how Joe Biden, 81, is being aged out of competency. Biden is the same age as Mick Jagger (and only 3 years older than Trump, who, under that badly dyed mop on his head, is just another grandfather) and has done a pretty good job of pulling the country out of the ditch Trump drove it into. Age was once associated with invaluable experience and now it’s a measure of how good you are not at updating apps. Maybe Biden needs a Trump wig and spray tan.

I dread having to check boxes on questionnaires that say “Age: 60+,” but I’m pretty much the same guy I’ve always been. I love new music when it’s loud. I despise nostalgia and I’m still making sure I my exercise outweighs my excess. Maybe I lucked out holding on to my hair, unlike my dad. Will I be disregarded now that I’m 60? As a Gen X elder, I’ve got waves of Millennials and Gen Y whippersnappers to tell me how disconnected I am. My old stories don’t carry the same clout in the TikTok era. Nobody cares that I hung out with Bono. Have you seen Bono’s face lately? (Someone should tell the Irish about SPF.)  But as even craggier Ron Wood sang, “We all get old.” (Footnote: Ron Wood is in the Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger who Kesha sang about. Ask your mom about Kesha.)  Where do I fit in the AARP world where nobody retires and where this 60-something will be buying the new Taylor Swift album the day it comes out?

The difference between now and then (cue Beatles song), is the life lessons we are lucky to collect along the way. I have no way of really remembering my life at 20. It’s filtered through all the experiences in the 40 years that connect those two points in time. I can’t remember what it was like to hear the Replacements in 1984 because I think about it in relation to the 40 years of other things I’ve heard since my friend Tim put their Let It Be album on his turntable. All those moments of youth are similarly filtered. But I do know I’ve learned some things (and forgotten more).

So if Randall at 60 was to zip back to Randy at 20 and give him three nuggets, this is what I’d share with him.

First would be to be a sponge. To stop and soak up the moment. We are super shitty at being “present” in this life, always looking ahead. So I would tell him to try this exercise I created. I call it “5 Senses 5 Moments,” and it goes like this:

Stop and take a moment to be in the moment by doing these 5 things. 1. Close your eyes and listen to the sounds of the space you are in. What’s the ambient background noise? Can you hear others breathing? 2. Look around you and let your eyes settle on one thing. It could be the complex pattern of a brick or the way a plant sways in the breeze or the hair of the person next to you. 3. Open your mouth and take a gulp of air. What do you taste? This morning’s coffee? 4. Smell the air of the space you are in. What do you notice and where is it coming from? 5. Lastly, find a surface around you to touch and notice. It could be the texture of your pants or the warmth of your forearm. How does the air feel on your skin? (I’d like to thank Yoko Ono, whose 91st birthday was yesterday, for helping my brain to work this way.)

I wish I had taken more moments in my life to stop and smell the roses. It was moving so fast and I missed a lot. Now I stop. There is beauty in the present moment.

The second thing would be to remind Young Randy is that he lives in the world with other people, they are not just passing through his world, in Randyland. American youth culture fosters narcissism. It was all about me and the performance of coolness. I read Walt Whitman in the early 80’s as a license to celebrate myself at the expense anyone I was close to.  But I only exist in tandem with others so I should have been more curious about their lives. I thought I was in a movie starring me, but I was also bit player in their stories.

And the third thing would be to stay away from credit cards. Pay in cash. Much worse than being broke is being in debt.

When I think of how I spent my time 40 years ago, much of it was rooftops, or on my Vespa racing to the top of parking decks, with a girl on the back, to take in the steaming skyline of the city. I spent so much energy trying to find the nooks and crannies in their world to inhabit. An abandoned warehouse that was a brief punk rock refuge or a back alley that we could spray paint our hopes and dreams on. Now my energy goes to transform my own spaces, including the world my child will inherit. I’m not afraid of 60. I now have the resources to help create the reality I wanted to see when I was young.

Yeah, at 60 there is more behind you than ahead of you, but there is still plenty ahead. I’m excited to see what’s next.

I have found what I was looking for, Bono.

~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

April 14, 2019

I have climbed the highest mountains

Whenever friends or family would come to my little Georgia town, we’d force them to climb its namesake, Stone Mountain. It’s the largest exposed piece of granite in the world and offers a pretty spectacular view of countless pine trees from its nearly 1700 foot summit. On a clear day, you can see Atlanta, which calls itself the “city too busy to hate” in an effort to claim a full agenda gets white people off the hook. We took everyone up that mountain, even my grandparents. There was something spiritual about rising above the tree line, while seeing the graffiti of lovers from the 18th century etched into the rock.

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As a kid I didn’t understand the historical significance of the mountain, which features the largest Confederate memorial carved right into its face. On Thanksgiving night, 1915, a group of hooded white men, including two elderly members of the original Ku Klux Klan, climbed the mountain, raised the Confederate flag, opened a Bible, and, for the first time, burned a 16-foot cross. The modern KKK was born on my mountain. The century of murder and terror it waged against Americans had its inglorious beginning on Stone Mountain. The land beneath it was owned by a Klansman and they still return to its summit, like a white supremacist Mecca.

Walking in the footsteps of those first Klansmen would lead the way towards a lifetime of studying hate and trying to understand organized racism. This included time spent undercover in the white supremacist movement. I’ve seen crosses set alight by men in robes and it made the blood freeze in my veins. This long career has been dedicated to trying to undue what those men started on my mountain in 1915. It’s taken me around the world and brought me to what I had been looking for all along, the antidote to hate.

I have kissed honey lips

Most of my life I have been untethered. I felt like I was floating from one 4 minute music video to another. Even when I was “in love,” I had a few toes out the door, ready for the next song cycle to carry me where it might. There were some epic romances, followed by a divine right to the blues and red red wine. My passport was full but I wasn’t going anywhere, locked in a Möbius strip.

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For much of that life fully lived, the music of U2 provided a soundtrack of freedom. The summer of 1986 I ended up back in Dublin (after working in Copenhagen for a few weeks). U2 was recording their soon-to-be revered Joshua Tree album. I was meeting with Bono as he wanted me to help him compile a release of unsigned American rock bands for their vanity label, Mother Records. (The compilation never was finished but he loved the tape of my roommate’s band, drivin’ ’n’ cryin’ and they were soon signed to U2’s label, Island Records. “Randy, I am a drivin’ ’n’ cryin’ fan,” he said, grabbing my shoulders.) The summer of ’86, I told him way too much about my challenging love life. Part of that summer had been spent with Sinead O’Connor in London, watching her shave her head for the first time. Part of my heart was back in the states with my girlfriend who was leaving me for a life in Paris. I was 22 and had no idea how love was supposed to work.

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He told me the new album would have more love songs and be less political in its themes. The band was exploring more colors from its sonic palette. The following spring, I was driving in Los Angeles when I first heard the final product on KNAC radio; “Where the Streets Have No Name,” soaring as I drove across Mulholland Drive on top of the Hollywood Hills. The world opened up below me. The definitive musical statement of the 1980s had been made and it reflected everything I was at that moment, searching, running to stand still.

You broke the bonds, you loosened chains

My work studying racism and finding an audience in the ancient world of the university earned me the top rank as a tenured full professor at Hogwarts. I had leveraged my position, pushing the faculty to strike against the swollen trolls of the administration to build a university the cared more about easing student debt than the ever-expanding supply of overpaid deans. (If you didn’t know, Hogwarts has more troll deans than you can shake a wand at.)

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All that fell silent when she walked into the room. All the colors bled into one. Angel or devil, I couldn’t tell. I tried to put her out of my mind and went back to my lectures about how romantic love was a “social construction of reality,” a lie that we believe because we’ve been brainwashed by sappy songs and rom coms. I was still in my Möbius loop. “Maybe I should try online dating,” I thought. I tried to avoid looking at her. I worried it would be like B’rer Rabbit and the tar baby. One look and I would be stuck.

After the class was over, I ran into her in a bar. She bought me a shot of tequila and asked if I’d like to go out sometime. “I don’t date students,” I said, feeling the floor slipping out from under me. She bought me another shot. I heard Bono singing, “I can’t live with or without you.” Our friendship became more than that. I saw in her the end of the loop. She knew everything about me. All my flaws and the way out. Why had I been paying a therapist all those years? I saw in her the future mother of my children. We would not be only two people for very long. I saw in her the person who’s dreams I wanted to spend the rest of my life supporting. “I’m with her!” Soon we were married and the parents of a miraculous child who was conceived in a moment of brilliant foresight. “Let’s make a baby!”

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The trolls at Hogwarts used this love of loves as a cudgel to silence a trouble maker. (It seems on-line wizard training is much cheaper than tenured full professors, leaving more money to hire more troll deans.) I was dragged in before the council of witches, their mouths dripping with the anticipation of scoring points for the queen troll. They treated our love as some grand violation. They wanted to destroy my lifetime of work against hate. Perhaps I should have fought harder, but I was in love with my wife and new baby and seeing the monsters that profited behind the hallowed halls of Hogwarts disgusted me. I was forced resign my position and left to create something new, away from their sickness. I let go of the hand if the devil and was free.

Felt the healing in the fingertips

I should have felt like a freefall, loosing the security of a salaried tenured position and the benefits that came with it. (It was easy to not go to the dentist when you have full dental.) Thanks, Obamacare! I became a hustler, selling assets, picking up random gigs here and there. She carried the cross as I stayed home with the baby. I’d hold my little girl and chant, “Everything’s gonna be alright. Everything’s gonna be alright,” hoping the words would be a magical incantation, bringing the answer in a mighty flash of financial stability. “Vengeance is mine!” I would say, as I put some money, any money into my savings account.

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Instead, a strange healing happened as my world, once so big, was shrunk down to three people. It was a bizarre love triangle, like we were our own holy trinity. Not really us versus them, because we’ve had so many amazing people on our side. Us and them (and we think about the trolls less every day). There is a burning sun in our home that has melted us like glass into one perfectly clear entity. It might look like a blob to the outside world, but we are three voices in harmony, and, too each of us, it sounds like it’s coming the tongues of angels.

Being bounced out of my university security gave me back the hunger of my youth. I published a novel and proposed a reality TV show and found my way into cable news commentary. Each experiment was latched to hope that this would open a door that I could take my family through. My wife had her own ascendency, through her art and academic paths. She now grades her students’ exams as I write about our seemingly endless war on racism, from Stone Mountain to Trump. We are recreating the world in our image.

In the middle of all that I found what I was looking for. Hearing our daughter sing in the bathtub. Watching my wife see how her presence can help heal the great divide. Being asked to bring my experience to table after table. I had to lose it all to gain it all. I was of the world and now I am of we three, in this world. All the pieces fit. Like a teenage rock band that’s ready to take the world by storm (as U2 was in its infancy), our vision is unclouded.

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When Bono wrote the words to “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” he was still childless. He didn’t become a parent until 1989. I’m guessing he would have written a different song if he had been a dad the summer of 1986. Maybe I’ll ask him someday. (He’s about as accessible as the Pope these days.) That song seemed woven into my cellular membrane in those days. Now that I’ve found it, nurturing it is what drives my bass drum beat. Only to be with you. Only to be with you.

Postscript: A lot of us have lived that song. Have you finally found it? Or are you still running? In this unhappy time, let’s share our answers. Post it, tweet it, Instagram it, shout it from the top of the Hollywood Hills. #Ihavefoundwhatimlookingfor

The Need to Work

~ Randy Blazak ~ 9 Comments

June 22, 2017

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It was a blessing in disguise. My paternity leave from Portland State University was involuntarily extended thanks to a bizarre collaboration between a clinically psychotic felon and a couple of administrators with a clear agenda. That time away from full-time work has allowed be to help my daughter transition from a baby into a little person. It’s also allowed me to publish a book, teach on a tropical island, write this weekly blog, start a podcast, and “man” the homefront while my wife advances in the work world. And I got to be home with Cozy from the first gurgle to her saying things like “Let’s check it out,” and “I ran like a cheetah.” It’s been a beautiful experience filled with art, adventure, and great love.

And now it’s time for it to end.

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The truth is I’ve been looking for work ever since I jumped off the gangplank at PSU. But I had a nice cushion made up of a settlement, savings, some publishing money, and a perfect collection of rare Avengers and Hulk comic books that now (sadly) belong to someone else. A $50,000 loan from my retirement was going to get us through to my next gig. Now, suddenly, I can see the bottom of the well. The money is about gone. Invest the last bucket in Powerball tickets?

Two years ago I thought I could just make a local lateral transition. There was a visiting professorship at Reed College (they wanted a quantitative methods teacher and I’m a qualitative schmoe) and a tenure-track gig at the University of Portland (they could have me but only with my tenure). I was sad but not shocked when those didn’t pan out. (They must not have known how awesome I was.) So I branched out and got an interview at CUNY in Manhattan and then a second interview with the provost. (I must have asked for too much money for that one.) What seemed like it would be a relatively smooth “mid-career” move looked increasingly more and more difficult. On top of the fact that universities are replacing tenure-line professorships with the academic slave-labor known as “adjuncts” and “on-line education,” the person that was applying was me, and, according the rumor mill, I have baggage.

What started off as a few disheartening roadblocks became dozens of rejections. Some positions I was a stretch to qualify for. (I would have made an awesome dean at Eastern Oregon University.) Some positions I was definitely an over-qualified candidate. (After my great interview, nobody could tell me why I didn’t get the job teaching Intro Sociology at Green River Community College.) Some jobs would have pushed me out of my comfort zone. (Oh, how I wanted to be the new executive director of Caldera Arts.) And some jobs were tailor-made for my experience and skills. (Whoever ends up being the new Diversity Program Specialist for the Portland Police, I challenge you to an equity duel.)

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Why am I not getting these jobs? You’d think people would want an award-winning professor, published in his field, with a long record of community service, who is likely quoted in your copy of the New York Times or making points on CNN while you’re on the treadmill. Are all the other candidates that much better? Or is something else going on?

I left PSU under a cloud of suspicion. It’s no secret that there were a few higher-ups that had it in for me. They were fueled by the rumor and innuendo that I was some type of campus playboy. A old bogus post on an internet gossip site that had a picture of me with my girlfriend of almost three years and the assertion that she “slept with me for an A” gave them additional ammo. There was never anything of the sort ever in my academic career. No human can say they got any special treatment in any of my classes for anything. But when gossip rules, you can’t win. (Hillary Clinton, I feel your pain.)

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Then a “former racist skinhead” named Steven Stroud decided he was going to try everything he could think of to attack me for some perceived slight that existed in his psychotic mind. He began writing numerous letters from his prison cell to the university, accusing me of everything under the sun. Out of pure luck, he finally hit on one thing these powerful few could use.

My crime: My wife was a former student.

That’s all it took. Forget that Andrea and I were consenting adults. Forget that she was the one who first asked me me out (after the class had ended). That was it. I had signed an agreement five years earlier that I would never date a PSU student after a stalker went all Basic Instinct on me and it was a quick way to resolve the matter. Now the torches were relit. They even traveled out to Eastern Oregon to visit this guy in prison to see if there were any more salacious details he could add to their “case.” They were giddy.

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I have zero regrets about my relationship with Andrea. We are incredibly happy and more in love every day. And that love produced our beautiful daughter. Cozy is the sun my little planet was destined to revolve around. She will change history. I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. My only regret is that I quickly settled my lawsuit against the university. I had the moral high ground and could have won, especially if I took the story to my colleagues, students, and the general public. But we had a new baby and I was scared I would burn up our nest egg on lawyer fees while they used tuition and taxpayer dollars to fund their highly skilled legal team. I settled and thought I could just leave my academic home of twenty years and move on.

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Now over two years later it feels like I have been blacklisted; that the rumor-mongers are still waging their campaign against me. I need to work. The loan has to be repaid, the mortgage is due, and my daughter deserves the life I waited 50 years to give her. (I was one of those people who said, for decades, “I can’t have children, I’m not financially stable enough!”) She is so excited to exist in this world, I should be able to give her some security (although I will be eternally grateful to WIC for making sure my child at least had $8 worth of fruits and vegetables each month). This kid already deserves more than I will be able to give her.

So here’s the deal: I’m a passionate worker with a PhD. from Emory University and a long employment record. My last full time salary was $82,000 for a 9-month contract. I will work for less than that, but it’s gotta cover the bills. And I need benefits. Republicans  have made it clear they want to kill the Affordable Care Act which, at the moment, provides health care to my family. We’d like to stay in Portland but for a decent job we’ll move to Arkansas and just annoy the locals by playing Bikini Kill and drawing Hitler mustaches on Trump posters.

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I was an awesome professor. There’s plenty of people who will tell you that my classes at Portland State changed lives. I’d like a job that makes the world a better place. If you can convince me that selling vacuum cleaners can do that, I’ll listen. But it’s time for me to get back to work. My family is depending on me.

Please share this with anyone who might be able to help. References and my mother’s secret cheesecake recipe available on request. Email: blazakr@gmail.com

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