Life is strange, isn't it? One day you are minding your own business, getting over being laid off and trying to find enough work to stay alive, and the next you are reading a tiny bit of your story for a commentary on NPR's Morning Edition.

If you've come here directly from NPR, or from hearing the commentary, welcome. You may be looking for the full story of my lay-off; you'll find it here, here, and here. After you read it, I hope you'll take a look through the Hidden City archives, or the suggested reading under the Writing and Dreams sidebar links.

If you like what you see, I'd love to hear from you. Leave me a note in the comments, or drop me a line via e-mail (hiddencity at Gmail). If you don't like it, well, it's a big Internet. I'm sure you'll find something more to your taste.

Either way, thanks for stopping by.

I just spent a few days in Washington, DC, visiting friends and going to a concert. My visit coincided — quite unintentionally — with the arrival of one of the heaviest snowfalls in recent memory. Here are a few photos.

The snow had just begun to fall.

My hosts' front yard was covered quickly.

The next morning drifts over 3' deep covered the lawn.

Trees bent ominously under the weight.

Being restless I decided to go outside a little after midnight. The stillness was wonderful, crystalline; we seldom get to experience that kind of quiet in Miami. I walked around a bit, reveling in the crisp night air, the utter serenity. The snow had finally stopped falling, leaving the black sky clear save for the stars and the billowing fog of my breath.

I know how awful and inconvenient and even dangerous this kind of weather can be. Much as with hurricanes, schools and businesses close, and there is a very real danger to life and property. And as I stood in the frigid silence I knew the morning would bring sidewalks to scrape, and cooped-up children to corral, and the reality of cold, wet clothing and creeping boredom. But at that moment there was only the night, the cold, the sky, and the snow.

It's late, long after midnight. Through my open window I can hear a train whistle in the distance, the pitch bent into a mournful wail as it rumbles toward its destination. I like it; it suits my mood. After all, it's my birthday.

When I was very young — around ten years old — I dreamed I died in a car wreck. It was a rather horrible dream, complete with all manner of icky viscera and a drawn-out, excruciating demise. Someone at the scene commented, "It's so unfair, he wasn't even twenty-five yet."

Given such an appalling and vivid nightmare, it predictably became lodged in the folds of my brain like a shard of windshield. Dead at twenty-five. That's a heavy weight for a kid to carry, particularly one cursed with an abnormally powerful imagination. Unfortunately, it also became a recurring dream, taking on an aura of prophecy. It began to influence my decisions, albeit subconsciously. Why plan for the future if you know you won't have one?

After fifteen years of regular dreams insisting I would die twisted in the wreckage before my twenty-fifth birthday, I was rather shocked when the date passed uneventfully. For months afterward my subconscious screamed at me each night that I was intended to be dead, and each morning I would do my best to clear the shadows and carry on with my life. While the feeling eventually faded, it never completely vanished. Even now it will grip my heart in the dark and quiet hours, a dry, whispery voice telling me I am on borrowed time, that I have overstayed my welcome.

Today I am fifty years old. According to the shadows I should have been dead twenty-five years already, and it is admittedly incomprehensible that I have reached this age. Nonetheless, here I am, what is left of me: jobless, beaten down, perhaps even broken, but still alive, still working out new plans, trying to maintain some optimism. And yes, still trying to ignore the whispers in the darkness.

Realistically it's just a day, just another marker, nothing worth noting. But while I've paid little attention to behavioral standards in the past, sometimes the baggage, the heavy freight of society's expectations is hard to ignore. "You're fifty," they say, "you're supposed to have done something with your life by now. You should have a home, a family, a career, a life. What do you have? Cats, books, the Internet? When will you get serious?"

Meanwhile, the voices of society and the echoes of my nightmare often speak in chorus, asking questions in the darkness I'd rather not hear, questions I can't really answer.

This is all far too depressing, though. It's my birthday, and society dictates that it should be celebrated, if only by me. So if you don't mind, I am going to pour myself another shot of rum, sit on my porch, and listen to the rumbling of that distant train.

I wonder where it's headed?

Blog has become a meaningless word.

Back in the early days — he says, leaning on his cane — blog had a fairly specific meaning. Before the creation of useful search engines we all relied on a loose network of sites to find the good stuff on-line. A "weblog" was a page (or pages) with short, reverse-chronological entries directing the reader to sites or pages the author found interesting. Occasionally editorial advice would be included, but that was not the norm.

Digital journals had been around before that, and earlier still there were personal sites of various types. We used to say "I have a website," or "I've got a webpage." A blog may have been a part of that, but it wasn't the thing itself. My own first sites were hand-coded — yes, knowledge of HTML was a requirement back then! — and focused on my hobbies of the time, along with a little personal writing. Nonetheless, when Pyra Labs introduced their Blogger site it didn't take me long to become an early adopter. I was so pleased I even paid for the service, and I still have my Blogger Pro stuff around here somewhere to prove it.

Blogger's simplicity of use — and that of the similar services that followed — made web sites accessible to many people who couldn't be bothered to learn HTML. With the later creation of the BlogSpot hosting service there wasn't even any need to own or configure a domain. Given the plethora of tools available today to enable painless publishing, for most people there's no point in learning to code, and no reason not to publish.

Features were added to Blogger and BlogSpot and the other services as technology changed our lives. Digital cameras made it easy for anyone to take pictures, and blogging tools gave you a way to show the world your new baby (literal or figurative). As web access speeds increased, so did the feasibility of showing your home movies, too. Soon enough almost any kind of content you could imagine was easily added to your personal web site.

But "personal web site" is five syllables, and "blog" is one, so it's easy to see who won that etymological slugfest.

Now a blog can be anything. There are photography sites with word counts approaching zero that are called blogs. There are sites with staffs of paid writers reporting on local news, and they are called blogs. There are corporate sites regurgitating their press releases as blog entries. A site without any original content at all, but merely linking to stories on other sites, is also a blog. A series of movies, citizen journalism, webcams, personal essays, corporate marketing: almost anything available on the web is now a blog, it seems.

Still, it's hard for me to think of what I do here as blogging. I write whatever I want to write, on any topic. I use blogging software to publish on the web, on domains I own. The stories are dated, with the most recent at the top. But is it really blogging?

Language is a living thing, though — it's a virus, according to William S. Burroughs. Its purpose is to facilitate communication, and there can't be communication if we aren't using the same definitions. I can be as pedantic as I like, smugly noting that (with apologies to Inigo Montoyo), "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." But to what purpose?

So I give up. You win, world. I own a website; my words appear there; ergo, I am a blogger.

I've been called worse.

In related news, it's time for the annual South Florida Daily Blog 2009 Post of the Year. While I still have reservations about calling all the nominees blogs, the term doesn't change the quality of the work nominated. There's some good stuff here, and I don't just say that because I was graced with a nomination (December, #10 in the list, vote for me). Take a few minutes, relax, and wander through some of the best content created by South Florida's bloggers in 2009. (Really, it's okay if you vote for me, I won't be offended. Think of it as a very inexpensive birthday present for an old man.)

One of the requirements for my high school graduation was completion of a three week course called "Americanism vs. Communism," typically offered as part of junior-year American History. Its purpose, obviously, was to explain to rebellious teenagers that commies are bad and consumption is good, or something like that. The course material itself veered wildly between the utterly dull and the ridiculously jingoistic, as you might expect from a curriculum last updated in 1963. The students generally regarded it as a complete waste of time, but then, so was the rest of high school.

My own experience with AVC was somewhat more entertaining, due to a singular combination of personal curiosity, naivety, assigned instructor, and class environment. In spite of being in Florida's pilot accelerated learning program — filled with the best and the brightest students South Plantation High School had to offer — American History was one of the only "gifted" classes I bothered to take. While I knew many of my classmates from the literary magazine and band, I didn't really know much about the expectations of the teachers.

My instructor for American History class was a genial older gentleman named Hiram Cox: a veteran of three wars, chock full of patriotic fervor and good intentions, unbearably predictable, and utterly unprepared to deal with a gifted class full of smart-ass kids. Every time he would try to ambush us with a surprise quiz (as telegraphed by the smell of mimeograph ink in the classroom), someone would launch a pre-emptive strike, piping up with "Mr. Cox, someone said you once boxed a kangaroo in Australia. That isn't true, is it?"

Hiram would smile, put the stack of papers back down on his desk, take a deep breath, and launch into a tale of foolish bravado and broken ribs. By the time he imparted the moral to us, class would be over, postponing the quiz for another day. This trick worked time and again. If he hadn't been so deadly earnest I would have suspected him of going along with it to get out of work himself.

Because my interests have always tended toward the obscure rather than the practical, I never paid attention to geopolitics beyond James Bond novels. I wasn't an idiot, though, so I knew about the Cold War and The Bomb, and some mess called Viet Nam, and hippies (who sounded pretty cool to me), and these people called Republicans who brought disgrace on America through the actions of Boss Nixon, and that politicians in general were a waste of good air. Sadly, that was pretty much the extent of my political savvy before the AVC class.

Being a lower middle class kid who believed at a gut level in helping other people, the discovery of communism was a revelation. After stripping out the obvious propaganda in the workbook — c'mon, 1960s paranoia wasn't exactly subtle — it was clear to my fifteen-year-old mind that sharing everything with everyone was a pretty damned good idea. The only problem with it I could see was that it completely failed to take into account the inherent greed in human nature. Yes, it was a fatal flaw, but the basic premise was just so good that my amazement overwhelmed my common sense. When we the class discussion part of the lesson came around, I shared my newfound wisdom with the rest of the students.

"In a perfect world this communism thing would be great! Too bad it would never work in real life."

The giggles started immediately, but I had to turn around to see why. Poor Hiram's eyes began to bulge, and his chubby cheeks flushed with anger. He started blustering about how evil commies were, how they are always looking for a chance to destroy our way of life, and how terrible it was to even pretend that there was anything good about their Godless way of life. Was I really so ignorant as to believe that communism was good?

The rest of the class stopped trying to stifle their laughter, which did nothing to calm the situation.

"I didn't say communism was good, Mr. Cox, just that it is a good theory! I know it doesn't work!"

He couldn't even hear me, deafened by his own rage. If not for the timely sounding of the end of class bell, I'm certain he would have died of apoplexy.

All the students laughed about it in the hall between classes, with one wit doing a wicked impression of the old man's fury. By the time stage band practice was over, though, I had completely forgotten about the incident.

The next morning I was called to my guidance counselor's office. We had a very friendly relationship, and sometimes I would stop by just to chat for a while. Not this time. Miss Talley cut to the chase: "Okay, what happened yesterday? What did you do to get Hiram so worked up?"

She took me by surprise, and at first I had no idea what she was talking about. I didn't even have a chance to figure it out before she interrupted me.

"Why did the FBI call me this morning asking about your school record?"

She now had my undivided attention.

"I just spent half an hour reviewing your school record with an FBI agent — GPA, class schedule, extracurricular hobbies, participation in student government. Do you know why they wanted to know? Maybe you want to tell me why Hiram thinks you are a communist spy?"

It took a lot of effort, but I managed to stifle my laughter. A spy? One remark in class and I was a spy? Was Hiram really that concerned about the purity of my precious bodily fluids? But, I supposed, in his mind the equation worked out like this: accelerated student + likes communism = spy, and spy = call the Feds.

After our previous class he must have called the Feds to warn them of a looming threat to the American way of life: me. The Feds called the school, Miss Talley answered their questions, they thanked her for her cooperation, and she sent a runner to get me out of chemistry.

I probably should have been a little more concerned, particularly since my father served in Army Intelligence during the Korean conflict, but as I mentioned, I didn't pay much attention to politics. Instead I stammered out "This is so cool!" to Miss Talley, and lost it completely. She had been doing a valiant job of maintaining a professional demeanor in the face of my irreverence, but at my outburst she finally gave up and allowed herself a small chuckle. Maybe the same image went through her mind as through mine: skinny, nerdy me, standing under a streetlight and wearing a trench coat, passing on all the national secrets I had gathered from the drill team during band practice.

She sent me back to class with a warning to keep a low profile around Hiram for a while, and to keep my mouth shut about this whole incident.

The remainder of the AVC course went smoothly, although my participation was understandably limited. We were lectured on all the important historical facts: Brezhnev banged his shoe on a desk, Oswald was brainwashed and/or acted alone, Cuba was one big missile aimed at Florida, and the jury was still out on fluoridated water. I doubt that anyone was swayed by Hiram's rhetoric, but we all learned that in the school system's opinion, communism was bad, and that topic was not open for discussion.

I never heard anything else from the FBI, so I doubt they even opened an official file on me. Still, the idea that they may have monitored me — or might even be monitoring me today! — makes me laugh. Maybe I've become a rite of passage for junior g-men, a kind of hazing. Imagine some poor shmuck fresh from the academy, listening in on my tedious phone calls, poring over my e-mail, cross-referencing my web site, and saying to himself, "This guys a spy? No wonder they lost the Cold War!"

[Note: If this sounds vaguely familiar you are probably a long-time reader of Hidden City. An abbreviated version of this story was published back in June, 2004.]