Steven Harper Piziks

 Oh look--it's Jimmy Kimmel all over again.

The FCC declared that Stephen Colbert's interview with Rep. James Talarico, who is running for Texas Senator, violated "equal access," which means shows are supposed to give equal air time to politicians from both sides of the aisle. Talk shows have always been exempt from this reg because they aren't news shows. (Fox has certainly ignored it.) But now the FCC has suddenly declared talk shows are NOT exempt from this, and Nazi-run CBS pulled the interview at the last minute.

Talarico is a Democrat who is saying that Texas could flip from red to blue.

It's been posted on the internet, though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiTJ7Pz_59A

As of this writing, it has 1.9M views and hasn't been up even for 24 hours yet. (And in the time it took me to write this post, it went up my 10,000 more.) For reference, Colbert usually gets about 2.4M viewers per episode.

Streisand effect! The interview is on track to get more viewers because the FCC forbade it than it would have gotten if it had just aired normally.

Go have a look, if you dare defy the baboon! :)

This retirement thing is throwing off my sense of time. It's a strange way to live.

I've always been a busy person. When I was in college, I joined clubs and made a lot of friends to hang out with. I also worked. At one point, I had three jobs at the same time. When I started teaching, my new job kept me busy in the extreme. Then I started coaching. And then Aran was born. And then Sasha and Maksim came to us. And then I became a single dad.

Into all this, throw writing.

When I started writing professionally, I took to heart the advice of an editor I knew who said new writers should write every day, and I did. Rigorously. It meant, though, that I had to give up stuff. I couldn't watch much TV, and I had to be careful about my social schedule. After a year, daily writing became a habit. Go me! But giving stuff up became a habit, too. I watched TV only when I was grading papers or running on the treadmill. I only read audio books, and then only while I was driving. I was careful to keep a trim social schedule--no more than one event per week, and it couldn't last more than half a day, except at holidays.

Irregular events became an imposition. Medical and dental appointments were a source of stress because they ate up so much of a day. Ditto for after-school stuff. And for socializing.*

Anytime I had the chance to do something else social--go to a movie, visit friends, go to a party--I checked it carefully against my mental calendar to see if I could shoehorn it in. I double-counted socializing with writing for years once I joined a bi-weekly writers group. It was both social time and writing time. Genius! When I started dating again after my divorce, I literally scheduled the time into my weekly calendar. When I met Darwin, I had to work him into my calendar.

Irregular events generated a lot stress. I couldn't cut out time out of my job for them, or out of family needs, or out of anything but writing time. But I hated and feared cutting writing time because I was afraid that not writing for one day would lead to two days, and then a week, and then a month, and I wouldn't be able to start up again.

This did happen once. I was under contract for THE HAVOC MACHINE (which, by coincidence, is now available as an audio book). It was due on March 1. The September before this, my life exploded in difficult and unusual directions. Every moment I was awake, I was either at work or dealing with a home situation. And I do mean every moment. I remember one day I was sitting at the pharmacy waiting for a prescription and I realized that these ten minutes were the extent of my "me" time for the last month. I certainly wasn't working on THE HAVOC MACHINE. I had no time, and even when I did have the time, I had no spoons. One day without writing turned into a week, which turned into a month, which turned into two. By November, I'd written only one chapter.

I called my editor and for the first time in my career, asked for an extension. My editor told me the book was already listed in the catalogs, and it would be REALLLY difficult to deal with if it was late. I slowly hung up the phone, turned to my computer, and started writing. I pounded through THE HAVOC MACHINE. I stayed up late, I got up early. No one but the boys saw me outside of work. On March 1, I emailed the finished manuscript to my editor. It burned me out so badly that I couldn't even write blog entries for three months. 

Things did get better. The boys grew up and got places of their own, reducing my parenting time by 90%. And on June 13, 2025, I walked out of Walled Lake Northern High School for the final time.

Overnight, my schedule evaporated. It was completely empty. I had no job, no commute, no real parenting to do. I wasn't even under deadline.

No, I didn't do the "what will I do with myself?" thing. I love being retired and having an empty schedule. If I want to spend the whole damn day playing a Batman video game, I can. And sometimes I do. It's frigging awesome, and I highly recommend it.

But ...

I'm having trouble adjusting to HAVING all this time. Whenever something comes up that requires some kind of time commitment, I get stressed. Will I have enough time for this? What will I have to give up? How can--

And then I remember IT DOESN'T MATTER. If I want to spend a couple hours plus driving time having lunch with a friend (as I did today), I can. If one of my sons needs support at the doctor, I don't have to say, "Try to make the appointment after 3:30 so I can get there after work, and not on a Monday." I just say, "When is the appointment?" If I need to do some unexpected grocery shopping, it's no big deal. 

Wow.

Recently, my mother had some medical stuff going on that required my sister and me to shuttle multiple times back and forth to her house. She lives about two and half hours from me, and over three hours from my sister's, so it's a hike and a half. The entire incident took up the better part of two weeks. (Everything's good now, by the way.) When the problem passed, I realized I was bracing myself to go back to work frazzled and stressed because I'd had little down time.

Nope! No more job. I spent the next couple of days doing little and enjoying it.

I took half a day to clean and reorganize our big closet, and didn't have to feel like I was eating away at "me" time. I drive out to visit my cousins every month on a Sunday afternoon, and I don't get back until after 11:00. So what? I don't have to get up at 5:30 anymore. 

But I still have to remind myself of this. The groove hasn't filled in yet.






*Time with my sons didn't count as socializing, by the way. It was family time, which was its own animal.

My viral post about the baboon went crazy nuts. It got ten and twenty thousand views every hour, then every half hour. Every time I checked the number, it had jumped.

I now understood a tiny bit some people's obsession with how many views they get on their social media. Checking the numbers became a day-long activity. Any time I finished something like clear the driveway or make dinner, I'd check the numbers first thing. They were always up.

Would it hit a million? 

The post climbed and climbed. Eight hundred thousand. Nine hundred. In the mid-nine hundreds around midnight, it stalled. Well, shoot. It's still pretty awesome that it got that much! Darwin and I went to bed.

In the morning, I checked it again. It had shot upward, and reached a million views. Wow!

And then it was 1.1 million. 1.2 million. 1.3 million. It kept climbing. Geez, how far was this silly thing going to go?

Around 1.4 million, it finally sputtered and slowed. As of this writing, it's at 1,443,292 views about two days after the original posting.

I spent a large part of the last two days putting up more posts, both political and non-, to see what happened. All my newer posts got more than double their usual views, and some got triple, so they were in the low thousands. One shot up into the five digits.

I've only gotten two new friend requests. I've gotten only two pieces of hate mail, calling me a liberal f***ot. I reported, deleted, and blocked. I also got a handful of people who attacked me in their comments. I deleted a few and let others stand. As they say, clicks are clicks and views are views! Interestingly, these incidents didn't upset or anger me as they have in the past. I was more amused. I struck a nerve somewhere, and provoked a reaction from these people. Dance, puppets! Dance! :) 

Now, though, I've climbed on the social media treadmill. I'm still getting higher views than before, and I don't want to lose that audience. But to keep an audience, you have to create content. Dance, puppet, dance.

I've been watching The Copenhagen Test lately, and I'm halfway through the third episode. (The full season dropped on Peacock a few days ago.)

I'm watching it partly because Simu Liu is in it. You know, the guy from Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings? I like him, and he needs to be in more stuff!

And I'm watching it partly because Brian d'Arcy James is in it. Brian and I were friends back in high school and early college when we both were doing amateur theater and did a few shows together. I went into teaching, and Brian went to Broadway--and Hollywood. For non-theater folks, the shows you might have heard about are the musical SHREK (he originated the title character), SOMETHING ROTTEN (he originated Nick Bottom), and HAMILTON (he originated King George), though the role I remember him most for was reporter Matt Carroll in SPOTLIGHT, the movie about the reporters who broke the story about child molestation in the Catholic church.

Anyway, Alexander (Liu), is a spy who, it turns out, has been unwittingly loaded up with technology that broadcasts everything he sees and hears to an unknown adversary. Brian plays Peter Moira, a nattily-dressed fatherly figure who is second in command of the division where Alexander works. The two of them have to figure out how to trust each other while also figuring out who the adversary is. Pete has the nagging feeling that Alexander is in on the sensors in his brain, while Alexander wonders if he should vanish before Pete has him quietly killed. Trust is a major over-arcing theme in the show.

I'm liking the show quite a lot. There are layers to the storytelling, when the story backs up and shows us the same set of events from an entirely different perspective that changes everything we know. I always enjoy that kind of thing.

Another plus is that the writers got rid of that stupid, tired spy trope in which the spy is not only fighting bad guys, but is also fighting his own dysfunctional agency (because of bureaucracy, a mole, political pressure, or that the spy has been forced to go rogue and now everyone wants his head). Instead, we have an agency that WANTS the spy to succeed and WANTS to protect its own people. The administration, as embodied by Pete, is actually supportive of the spy and does its best to help him. Goodness, who knew that could happen? It's refreshing and it lets us viewers concentrate instead on the complex plotting--another thing I like.

It's way worth your time to catch the show.  

The end of the ACA subsidies is looming. A lot of people are worried--rightly--that their insurance costs will go up thousands and thousands of dollars per year. Or per MONTH. But there are other horrors coming down the pipe.

There are patients starting chemo now who won't finish the treatments before January 1. Those on ACA insurance won't be able to afford to see it through.

There are pregnant women who are due in January and who will face thousands and thousands of dollars in hospital bills right after the baby is born. Those who have complications will face even higher bills.

There are children in long-term care wards in hospitals whose parents won't be able to afford treatment after January 1.

There are people waiting for life-saving surgery who were scheduled for January and now won't be able to afford it.

There are people in hospice, or who will enter hospice soon, whose heirs will have to deal with the bills to the estate after the person passes away.

There are people who need regular doses of medicine to stay alive (insulin, for example) whose costs will leap so high, their families will have to choose whether to buy medicine for their loved one or buy food and housing. Some of those people are children. ("Without insurance, Carrie's meds will cost more than our rent. If we buy the meds, our entire family will be homeless. If we pay the rent, we'll watch Carrie die. What do we do?")

This will happen on January 1. It won't be gradual. There won't be a one-week or two-week period of ramping up as people gradually lose their insurance because they can't pay it and then go without medical care. No, it will start =immediately.= There are people who are alive now who won't make it to February. There are children who will open presents on Christmas morning and be dead by mid-January.

This isn't a slow crisis. This is a building explosion. When it goes off, people will die.


 

 When it comes to drugs, is it just me?

Now that I've retired from teaching, people often ask me if I miss anything about my job. I always gave a firm, "Nope! Not a thing!" 

But today, I was surprised to come across something I do miss after all: snow days!

"What's that?" you say. "For you, every day is a snow day, just without the bad weather."

True! But here's the thing.

When you hear that a winter storm is sweeping toward your town, a particular feeling touches the air. It's both anticipation and trepidation, like something sinister is coming, but ultimately you'll be cozy and safe, as long as you do the right things, like stay home and drink hot chocolate. You wonder if you should run to the store.* You check the weather report again and again to see how much snow is expected. You scan the sky for the first dark clouds. You can feel a winter storm coming just like you can feel a summer thunderstorm. The air goes still. It's drier than usual. The sky is gloomier. All the signs say a storm is coming.

At home, you keep checking the weather for updates. Three to five inches of snow. No, six to eight. No, eight to ten. Twelve in some places. How much will there be?

And there's always the important question: will they cancel school tomorrow?

That question always brings about a delicious anticipation. In the 1970s, they canceled school in the early morning, never the night before. There were no robo-calls or mass texts. There were no phone trees. The TV stations wouldn't start broadcasting until seven. You had one recourse---turn on the radio and tune it to the closest local station. (On our huge, combination radio/record player/TV/hi-fi system, which was the size of a sofa, my mother had written the frequency number of the station on a piece of masking tape and put it over the tuning dial. That piece of tape is an indelible mark of my childhood.) You ate breakfast with the radio on and waited. Then you put your coat and boots on so you could run out to the bus in case school was on, and waited. My sister, brother, and I always sat cross-legged in front of the giant radio thingie like pilgrims worshiping at an altar. We were certainly praying, anyway. Eventually, the radio announcer would say, "Here are today's school closings." You got tense now and held your breath. 

Sometimes you were disappointed. The announcer said, "Those are all the closings we have for now. Stay tuned for updates," without listing your school. Sigh. You trudged toward the door and braced yourself for the snowy trip to school. But more often, your wish was fulfilled, and the announcer named your school. A cheer went up. It was a snow day! Anticipation fulfilled! And since you were already up and dressed for outdoors, you ran outside in the dark and played in the snow, leaving your parents to their coffee. 

This happened several times every winter, bringing with it that unique sense of anticipation and trepidation, and it adhered to your psyche. But eventually, you finish school and start your life as an adult. You don't get snow days anymore. If you do stay home during a storm, you have to use a sick day or go without pay. And you're stuck in the house with your kids, who are excited and full of beans and louder than a pack of puppies. The anticipation part of storms fades away, replaced with only dread that on top of everything else in your life, you now have to deal with driving in the snow, worrying about accidents, and clearing the driveway. Snow days as fun days have faded to a distant memory.

But not for me!

Teachers don't have to let go of the anticipation. Teachers still get snow days as fun days, along with the anticipation/trepidation cycle. Traditionally, teachers are still paid for snow days---one of the few perqs teachers still get---so you don't have to worry about PTO or vacation days. And you're in a school-ful of students who are also anticipating and trepidating. A storm is coming! Will they close school tomorrow? You get to say things like, "School isn't canceled until it's canceled, so don't put off your homework!" When I started teaching, you joined a phone tree to alert you if school closed. Later, we got robo-calls. So part of the anticipation was waiting for the phone to ring. When you snatched it up and saw the name of the school district on the screen, you knew. Yes! A free day off! I had this for thirty years.

And now it's gone.

Yesterday, a storm swept through my area overnight. It didn't deliver a lot of snow, but the temperature hovered around freezing, giving us a slushy mess that might freeze and turn the roads into icy death traps. These days, schools recognize that most parents juggle work and child care, and it's hard to find the latter on short notice, so they often cancel school the day before. That evening, school closings started rolling in on local news web sites. My district, Walled Lake, was one of them.

It had no impact on me whatsoever. I could still feel the storm coming in the air, and there was some worried buzzing around in our family circle about who had to drive to work and how careful they should be, but that was it. I'm retired. I don't have to drive to work, or anywhere else, if I don't want to. I didn't have to deal with the storm except to push a snow shovel over the driveway. The delicious snow day feeling was gone.

Last night I got ready for bed, shut off the lights, and realized I'd left the curtains open. Without the lights on, I could see outside. The full moon shone brightly enough to penetrate the cloud cover and leave a pleasant twilight. The pine trees out back were catching the snow and turning white. The yard and the back walkway were covered with snow marked by animal tracks. I was alone in the house, so it was silent. A hint of chill came from the windows, though they're very modern and weatherproof, so it was probably my imagination. For a little bit, I felt like I was ten again, sitting on my creaky bed and staring out the window at the silent, snowy countryside, hoping school would be canceled tomorrow, but also admiring the stark beauty outside. A tiny bit of the old snow day feeling returned.

So I suppose I do miss one aspect of teaching. But there won't be anything else! Nope. Not a thing!

Unless ... 



*When I was a kid, we lived way out in farm country, and more than once we were literally unable to get into town for days at a time after a major storm. If the weather report said a storm was coming, you went to the store. Always.

You know that thing people say? That they didn't know how bad a situation was until they got out of it? I've come to realize that for me, this was teaching.

Every day that I don't go in to work (and these days, that's every day), I feel a profound sense of relief. A major weight is gone from my life. I hadn't realized how incrementally awful my job had gotten over the decades, or how much worry had been slowly and steadily forced on me, until the day I walked out the door for the last time.

One of the biggest indicators of this experience? My dreams.

Around the pandemic, when stress levels went through the roof for everyone, my dreams underwent a shift. Most of them were intense and ... bad. Not nightmares, per se, but just intense and crappy. The kind of thing where you wake up and say, "Oh! So glad that was just a dream!" A recurring image was that I lived in a ramshackle house with a broken sewer pipe flooding the bathroom. In retrospect, the symbolism was clear.

Now that I've left teaching? My dreams are ... fun. I have more about leaping high or flying. I don't wake up and feel relief that it was just dream. I just wake up. I'd forgotten what it was like. Hell, I forgotten that it was =possible.=

The changed happened overnight, so to speak, and the difference was stark. Bad dreams had become part of my nightly routine, to the point where I didn't think of them as strange. They were NORMAL. It was like a pain that you get used to and forget you have until it suddenly stops.

I'm glad it did.