Indulge me here, please: so much of my professional writing has been about structured, often grant-oriented work and epistolary pieces intended to persuade; and more often than not written to be said, sent or published under someone else's name. I do want to post a few blog posts to exercise my own voice, which is more typically conversational and about wending threads that come together at the end. This is my second post. You can find the first one here . These are extraordinary times. We are living history, right? It’s odd, because so much of my upbringing I have felt a sense of the ahistorical: that we are beyond history; that polemics about socialism vs. capitalism were passé; and the future was so uncertain that we could no longer see ourselves as part of a continuum, but instead near the end game. Why prepare for the future? A lot of this is what defined Gen X, I think, inspired by Richard Hell and the idea of The Blank Generation. Now, we are in the midst of an unpre