I was born in fifty-One and I can’t fathom today’s mindset. Today, when someone is hungry it is off to the supermarket to spend two-hundred or spend that much for a meal to a restaurant. We used to have conversations at restaurants. Now when people go it to eat it’s like watching livestock feed-especially with every pair of eyes gazing entranced into those fucking smart phones. If I didn’t need it for my business I wouldn’t have one. It’s a curse. The last two times I’ve been to a family get together over the holidays, everyone under fifty is staring a smart phone, like they are more connected with this consumerist bullshit than the people in their life.

We lived off of Belair Road over on Ancona. We had coal heat. That was back when we had winters—when it actually got cold for weeks on end—and it was my job to bank the coals in the furnace each morning. You ate with your family—information was exchanged, none of this floating in and out of each other’s space like roommates. If you were hungry you ate what was there. Kids weren’t drugged up for being hyperactive. You told them to stop jumping around at the table and if they didn’t you smacked them until they learned to control themselves. It sounds terrible today, but it built people with self-control, not this constant surrender to impulse that this culture is built around. Sure, some people went too far and hurt their kids so laws had to be enacted to protect he kids. But how many kids have had their brains scrambled by the alternative, by being drugged up through their entire formation. That’s has got to have something to do with why this society is so drug-dependent.

I sat at the table with a father, a man, before being a man was outlawed, who told me, “Boy, I don’t care if you want to eat it, that is what’s for dinner and was put there in front of you by the sweat off my back and if you don’t appreciate it you’ll feel the back of my hand.”

Every person you see on the street—anywhere—unless they work in the trades, has a brand new pair of shoes that would have looked like science-fiction attire back then. My parents could not afford to buy me a pair of shoes every year. When the soles wore thin and got holes I packed them with cardboard. I still remember, in the winter, when I was eight—and I know this would be child abuse today—my old man giving me fifteen-cents and sending me down to the shoe repair shop. There was this old eastern European man who worked on this very loud machine. I would hand him the shoes and the payment and sit and wait in the cold in my bare feet and watch him work. He always listened to Radio Free Europe and it never occurred to me then that he must have been a refugee who had survived World War Two.

Imagine a boy now, at eight years old, walking a mile in February to get his shoes repaired. It wouldn’t be allowed, nor would there be a place to repair shoes, because were so busy throwing everything away so we can get something new.

-Steve