Anna Karenina Review: Anna's Story Provides the Drama, Levin's Journey Provides the Meaning.

Upon retiring 18 months ago I entered my "Russian Literature Stage," starting with The Brothers Karamazov (amazing) and, after a needed mental break, deciding to next read Anna Karenina as "Tolstoy training wheels" before tackling War and Peace. As with all foreign literature, I did a lot of research on the best translation and settled on the Bartlett translation from Oxford World Classics, which has excellent footnotes. I also used my favorite AI during the reading as a study guide for Russian history, nineteenth-century culture, and even as a sounding board whenever I ran into surprising plot twists or shocking dialogue I just had to share, sort of a digital book club companion.

Now I had certainly heard of the book and knew it regularly appeared on lists of the greatest novels ever written, but I knew absolutely nothing about the plot. I went in completely blind, so I had no clue what to expect. After wading through over 100 pages without the title character even appearing, I was quickly pulled into the primary storyline, a love triangle with all the spiciness of a telenovela.

The novel is psychologically extraordinary. Tolstoy's greatest gift is making me sympathize with people I often disagreed with. I found myself feeling sorry for the jilted husband Karenin despite his coldness, understanding Anna despite increasingly disagreeing with her choices, recognizing her lover Vronsky's growing sense of entrapment, and ultimately admiring the secondary protagonist Levin's earnest search for meaning. Very few novels have left me feeling compassion for nearly everyone while also acknowledging that each contributed to the tragedy.

What surprised me most, however, was not the affair but the structure. I expected a novel called Anna Karenina to center on the title character from beginning to end. Instead, she doesn't appear for over 100 pages, and after she departs the novel, Tolstoy spends roughly another 100 pages without any of the love triangle participants at all. At first this felt strange, but I suspect it reflects Tolstoy's larger point: individual tragedy does not stop the world, the world simply moves on.

The secondary protagonist Levin ultimately became the character I related to most. His tendency to enjoy life while living it, but despair when trying to intellectually deconstruct it, felt remarkably familiar. His struggles with mortality, faith, and meaning resonated deeply, particularly following my own experiences with a near-fatal accident, the sudden death of my brother, and more recently waiting for medical test results.

Anna's mental decline was equally impressive. Rather than presenting madness as a sudden break, Tolstoy shows an intelligent mind gradually becoming trapped within its own interpretations. Her stream of consciousness near the end felt strikingly modern, anticipating the literary style of James Joyce by more than half a century.

My one criticism of the book is the frequent "side quests" Tolstoy takes into subjects that clearly interested him and probably his readers at a time when there wasn't an endless stream of entertainment competing for their attention. There are long passages on farming, hunting, Russian politics, and current events such as a conflict involving the Ottoman Empire, all of which became eye-glazing. While many of these sections enriched my understanding of nineteenth-century Russia and ultimately served larger thematic purposes, I often found myself wishing for a firmer editorial hand.

Comparing it with The Brothers Karamazov, I found Dostoevsky's novel the more compelling reading experience. Dostoevsky openly wrestles with philosophy and religion through dramatic confrontation. Tolstoy embeds those same questions within everyday life. Anna Karenina often resembles a domestic drama or nineteenth-century soap opera on the surface while quietly exploring profound questions underneath. I admired that subtlety, though I responded more immediately to Dostoevsky's directness.

Overall, I understand why Anna Karenina is considered one of the greatest novels ever written, although I would currently rank it below any Dostoevsky I've read (including Crime and Punishment). We'll see where Tolstoy ultimately lands after I finish War and Peace. Anna Karenina is less interested in telling a story than in recreating an entire world and exploring how ordinary lives contain extraordinary moral and psychological depth.

Ironically, the novel's central love triangle was what kept me reading. I kept guessing where the drama was headed and never got it right. But it was Levin's quiet spiritual awakening that stayed with me after I closed the book. In other words, Anna's story provides the drama, while Levin's journey provides the meaning.

After My Brother's Funeral

My younger, only brother dropped dead of a massive stroke at only 56.  He had high blood pressure, was way overweight, and ignored going to the doctor. "I’ll be fine”.  He wasn’t, and many who knew him are as much angry as sad as this was likely preventable.  He left a wife of 30 years and three kids, two in college, one who will be a senior in high school.

Although less than two years apart, we were never very close.  After fighting like cats and dogs as kids, we basically kept our own lives from adolescence since we were so temperamentally different.  I was the brainy introspective kid, he the partying social animal.  I drove myself through college and launched a corporate career.  He wandered through two colleges, did a bit of this and that after graduating, and in his 30s finally got a vision and became a criminal lawyer of all things.  He was no bleeding heart - he would say he never had an innocent client, but many overcharged ones - but it was the fun, excitement and the game in the courtroom.  He’d be at a jail and two different courtrooms on the same day.

But while never that close he’d be there at the end of the phone and at holidays.  We’d pick up conversations where we left off after three months like it was three days.  We had a historical shorthand for our deceased parents, family lore, that crazy family vacation to Disneyland in 1977.  And we had each other's back because that’s what brothers do.  

But "I just got back from my brother’s funeral" was not a sentence I was expecting to be saying any time soon, potentially never for a younger brother.  He joins a growing list of dead family members that include my parents, nearly all my aunts and uncles (two left at 90), several cousins.  Like I wrote before, those pictures of family gatherings from not that long ago now have few living people in them, and in many of them I am the only one left in a big group.

The thing about a sibling is that they are one of the few people who remember your opening chapters. Friends arrive later. Spouses arrive later. Even your own children only know an adult, curated version of you. But a brother remembers the house, the parents, the fights, the vacations, the embarrassments, and the family myths that nobody else quite understands, which is why this loss will be different from anyone else.

Proust "In Search of Lost Time", Book 1 ("Swann's Way") Review

Following is an AI generated review of the first book (of 7) of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", considered one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written.  I used the AI as a study guide asking questions, digging into subjects, getting clarification or historical background, then at the end told it to generate a review based on our conversation. 

Note: Translation version is important.  If interested read the Davis one pictured.

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Reading Proust was unlike reading almost anything else. The prose is often beautiful, poetic, and packed with insight, but it can also wander for pages at a time. I found that trying to follow every sentence analytically was exhausting. The better approach was often to let the prose wash over me and allow the accumulation of impressions, observations, and images to build into something larger.

What stayed with me most was not the famous madeleine scene, but Proust's observations about memory, desire, and the symbols we create in our minds. Again and again he shows how people, places, music, and objects become invested with meanings far beyond their reality. The sections on Swann's obsession, jealousy, and eventual disillusionment were particularly powerful, at times feeling surprisingly modern in their understanding of rumination, uncertainty, projection, and self-deception.

Perhaps most remarkable were Proust's psychological insights. Writing before many modern psychological concepts had entered popular consciousness, he describes patterns of thought that feel strikingly contemporary. At various points I found myself recognizing what we might now call rumination, pathological doubt, obsessive thinking, idealization, and the tendency to construct elaborate inner worlds around people and possibilities. More than once I had the feeling that he was describing mental experiences with a precision that would not seem out of place in a modern psychology text.

I was less captivated by some of the lengthy social and aristocratic maneuvering, and there were stretches that required patience. But just when I felt Proust had drifted too far afield, he would produce a paragraph so perceptive that I had to stop and reread it.

More than a novel of events, this is a novel of consciousness. It reminded me how memory reshapes people and places, how we turn others into symbols, and how much of life is spent inhabiting worlds created by our own minds. Proust's greatest subject may not be memory itself, but the distance between reality and the meanings we attach to it. 

Challenging at times, but ultimately a rewarding read and full of insights that linger long after the book is finished.

An 8-Year-Old's Reflections of WWII

 

For Memorial day I thought I would share the following from my mother (1937-2022, in the front of the picture) of her memories as a child during WWII.  Her brother, cousin and two future brothers-in-law came back from WWII (photo is family celebration of her cousin’s return), but she mentions the “gold stars” in her neighborhood who didn’t, and I didn’t realize this tradition  - started in WWI - is where the term came from.

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For any American, indeed almost anyone alive anywhere during WWII, it is “The War”.  The atmosphere in the whole country was completely different that it has been during any other conflict I have lived through since.

Everyone was involved, and every aspect of life was affected.  Most families had someone in the Armed Services.  The draft was in effect, and men from eighteen to forty were eligible to be inducted.  Rationing was in force for gasoline, leather, sugar, rubber, nylon and meat. Every person, regardless of age, received a ration book, which consisted of pages of stamps which were used when a rationed item was purchased.  I remember that I had my own book.

No autos, non-military trucks or appliances were produced – all factory production was directed to war materiel.  Clothing was scarce as the factories were producing uniforms and boots for the troops.  There were no nylon stockings as it was all being used for parachutes.

Travel was very difficult.  The trains and railroad tracks were mostly used to move troops and equipment.  Even if you could get on a train, if a troop or equipment train needed to get by, the passenger train was diverted onto a siding for however long it took.  The passenger trains that did run were standing room only because men on leave and wives were going wherever they had to.  If you went anywhere near a railroad track you would see long olive-colored trains filled with men in uniform, or flatcars full of tanks and guns draped in tarps.  Everyone would get out of their cars to wave to the troops.  The one time I got on a train to see my father working in the munitions factory at Red River Arsenal, just outside Texarkana, we passed a troop train and there was a lot of waving and yelling going on between the trains.

Not everyone had a car, but highway travel was almost impossible anyway because of the shortages of gas and tires.  Also there were long military convoys of large trucks carrying troops and equipment that always had the right-of way.

There were regular air raid drills, and air raid wardens would come by your door if you were showing any light at all.

Most houses displayed a small stars-and-stripes banner in the front window.  They were about six inches by eight, and most had a blue star, as ours did, to indicate that someone in that household was serving.  There were several with gold stars in our neighborhood, which meant a person from that house was not coming back.

One thing that stands out to me were people coming and going at all times of the night and day.  When recruits were still training in the States they were given short passes to come home.  With transportation so uncertain there was little advance notice they were coming.  My brother in the Army Air Corps would appear it seemed always at night, and we all got up, and often he would show up with other boys from the area, who would sometime sleep over until they could get to their own homes the next morning.

All correspondence from anyone that was “overseas” had to be on thin blue paper that folded into an envelope, and would be censored by a heavy black pen.  The men were not allowed to disclose exactly where they were – “Europe” or “Pacific” was about all the info the folks back home could get, perhaps what ship, but not where it was located.  There were of course no phone calls, and most of the men were gone three or four years.

In April of 1945 when I was in third grade the students from the three schools (all were on one campus) were called into the horseshoe drive in front of the main building, where the flag was lowered to half-staff, and they announced that President Roosevelt had died.  It was a blow to everyone; he was the only president most of us could remember, and we heard him many times on the radio during the War.

The War ended in 1945.  The men came home and everything started to return to normal. 

It was, indeed, another time and place.

Like Sand in an Hourglass…40 Years, 11 Gone

My high school class graduated in the mid-1980s, when the future was so bright we had to wear shades. I haven’t kept up with many classmates directly, but I still go to the reunions. They feel a bit like family gatherings in that even after five or ten years since we last met the conversations pick up with a familiar rhythm, as if we had just seen each other at the last holiday.

The other reason I go is that a high school class is an exclusive club that never admits new members, and over time its membership only declines. Showing up is a way of keeping track not just of people but of time itself.

The 40th reunion invite listed eleven of us who have passed. For a group of 300 American, college-educated professionals nearing 60, that’s right in line with actuarial expectations saying roughly 10–16 of us should be gone by now. And since I was very nearly number 12 on the list from a near-fatal bike accident just six months ago, I was more than happy to volunteer to make the “In Memoriam” poster that has our deceased classmates’ pictures and names, to be with us in spirit during the reunion.

Looking at those eighteen-year-olds (the poster uses the pictures from the yearbook), it’s hard not to pause and wonder… what happened?

The causes follow familiar patterns. A cluster of car accidents, mostly years ago. A few “died suddenly” in midlife, which usually means an undiagnosed heart condition or other health problem. One suicide. A couple of early aggressive cancers.

I didn’t know most of them well in school, but I remember one from the 20th reunion in 2006 when she was photographed smiling right next to me. She died in 2019 and will just be a picture on a poster this time.

The numbers suggest we’ll lose another ten or so by the 50th reunion. That’s how the curve works. And eventually, much further out, there will be no one left to keep the list. The tables suggest one or two of us might make it past 100, so the class won’t fully disappear until sometime around 2070, long enough that the world we shared at 18 will feel even more distant than it already does.

For now, we gather. Fewer each time, but still enough to recognize one another, to fall into old patterns, to share fragments of a common past that no one else quite understands.

And to look at the slowly growing poster to quietly note who is no longer in the room.

Review: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

I ran across the term anemoia - nostalgia for a time you never experienced - on the internet and traced it back to this book.  The author made up a list of words, or re-purposes existing phrases, for obscure feelings we feel as we age, experience the passage of time, realize how little of it we have left.  Besides anemoia I mentioned, one of the words that has made it from the book into the "real-world" is sonder - the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. 

While reading I made a list of the words I liked that hit me, so the book is fun and thoughtful, even if your favorite ones never make it beyond the book.  And due to the introspective nature of the topic, this book would be better appreciated by older, thoughtful readers, less so by those in the earlier stages of life.

And I have my own term to add: “college degree” as a unit of time, which equals four years.  Its use is when you realize an event took place four years ago, which seems so recent, then you think “I could have gotten a college degree since then!”  In contrast to your real college degree, which seemingly took forever.

Remember, Your IRA Balance is Inflated by 25% Since the Government Still Gets Its Cut

 

Before I retired, my “retirement income planning” meant shovel as much as possible into my IRA, then throw some extra into taxable savings.  Then one day I’d add Social Security (if it still existed). That was my entire plan, and I suspect many of you reading this are in that same boat.

Fast-forward to my first year of retirement, when I discovered I suddenly had to become an expert in:

• Taxes, surprisingly more complex than when you have straight W2 income
• Roth conversions
• Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs)
• Return of Capital (ROC), meaning that clever investment choice I made actually has a hidden capital gain down the road
• IRMAA, not my great aunt, but a Medicare surcharge if your retirement income passes a threshold
• The Rubik’s Cube of mixing pre-tax, post-tax, and Social Security income, and figuring out the best moves more than a decade in advance

And this is years before I have to deal with Medicare, supplements, and that IRMAA surcharge I didn’t even know existed before 30 days ago.

A surprising number of decisions need to be made years in advance, and some, like when you take Social Security, are permanent.

Sure, there are plenty of experts out there, but they all have strong (and conflicting) opinions. Just look at the permanent cage matches among YouTube financial gurus:

• Roth IRA conversions: brilliant or disastrous? (Dozens of people on both sides.)
• Social Security: take it early at 62, or delay to 70? (Pros and Cons for both)
• RMD strategy: panic now or panic later? (Arguments on both sides)

There is no one-size-fits-all.  At some point, you have to learn enough about all these topics to make decisions based on your goals, whether that’s leaving a legacy to your heirs or partying it away while you’re still around. Most retirement software assumes “maximize assets at death,” which may not match your priorities, plus you can’t take it with you.

So my advice as I sit here rooting for your continued employment to pay into my Social Security is: Look into this stuff now, not the year you retire.

Believe me, as I’m currently kicking myself for some IRA vs. taxable investment decisions I made twenty years ago.

AI as a Russian Lit Study Guide: Good, with Some Precautions

Having recently retired, I finally started my long-promised Russian Literature Phase, something I promised I would do “when I had the time.” I had read Crime and Punishment about 15 years ago and loved it, picked up Brothers Karamazov (BK) soon after, and then let it sit in my digital bookshelf for a decade and a half while I kept grabbing contemporary novels and “beach reads”, which are fun but don't challenge you.  I even read the first chapter of BK once and put it down as it just didn’t hook me like C&P did.

Now that I actually have time, I decided to give BK another shot, but the first thing I did was check the translation and found that was the issue.  The copy I bought 15 years ago was a bargain-bin 1905 Constance Garnett translation in full Victorian English. I switched to the modern Pevear/Volokhonsky translation from 1990 (same team as the C&P I enjoyed) and immediately felt the difference with a modern reading flow.  But I ended up keeping both versions open so I could compare passages and deepen my understanding.

This time around, I also used AI as a personal study guide. Dostoevsky tosses in historical, philosophical, and cultural references that a well-educated Russian in the 1880s would have understood instantly, but a modern American, even one as reasonably well-read and well-traveled as moi, might not.

For an AI study guide I found Grok was not that good.  It literally made-up quotes that were not in the book, then apologized for it when I pointed out the mistake.  And it was a little too smarmy, saying things like:

Keep going — the best 600 pages are still ahead

You’ve got this.  The baby dream is 200 pages away. It’ll break you open.

Keep going. The trial is next — and it’s brutal.

Like I was a GenZ college student who needed encouragement to finish my assignment.

ChatGPT was better, and I used it the way you’d might talk to a lit professor during office hours or at the pub, tossing theories around, digging into the psychology of the characters, and chasing down historical context. At one point I was exploring whether one of the brothers had a Madonna–Whore complex with the two major female leads.  Another time I was comparing a line from The Usual Suspects (“I don’t believe in God, but I fear him”) to a passage in BK, not something you will find in a written study guide. It even gave me crash courses on 19th-century Russian politics and Pushkin when I needed them.

All of that kept me far more engaged in the book than I would’ve been otherwise. It let me go deep into the novel’s theological and philosophical arguments which include questions about God, society, scientism, morality, and the messiness of being human. BK deals with ideas that feel like they could have been written last week instead of the 1870s. The brothers themselves read like psychological archetypes we all carry around: pure passion, pure reason, pure faith, nihilism. Dostoevsky basically anticipated the major existentialists and psychologists of the 20th century.

Ultimately it is an amazing and rewarding book, worth the time and effort. When the AI asked me the main theme I got from the book, I put the line "Love life more than the meaning of it", one of many lines and passages that hit me deeply.

So this is definitely not a “beach read”, and more like a college course that requires outside work to get its full appreciation and understanding, something I think is required of most great literature.  In this case I think AI as an interactive study guide is a great tool to help, and I will continue using it through my Russian Literature Phase.

Short Story: "In the End, Everyone’s Heir Is a Potential Client."

 “This is a call to order for SoulCast Corporation. We have a quorum. Nancy will take notes and fill in the niceties.”

Bruce scanned the table, mentally tallying his fellow board members’ net worths: fifty million, eighty million, both well short of his own three commas. Then there was the anomaly: ten million. His board wasn't supposed to be a charity, but the VCs forced that one on him.

His VP of Marketing, Mike, stood nervously at the front of the room. Bruce pegged him at maybe six figures (one comma!).  But it was his first startup, no inflated stock value yet, no experience in selling “new technology” to a gullible public. He’d learn soon enough.

Bruce nodded. “Mike, go ahead and let the board know where we are.”

Overwhelmed by the wealth in the room, Mike fumbled with the clicker, projecting his PowerPoint onto the screen. “As you all know, our AI companion technology lets people take the personal data of deceased loved ones - think emails, writings, social media, videos - and with surveys and interviews of family and friends, we recreate the deceased’s persona for the AI to mimic. This is the SoulCast.”

The fifty-million board member leaned forward. “And how accurate are these SoulCasts to the real person?”

Bruce rolled his eyes. The man was the oldest in the room, and certainly the least tech-savvy.

“Accurate enough that even close friends can’t tell the difference,” Mike said. “We do, however, tweak them a little to make them more sycophantic and agreeable to the customer. Since we collect the customer’s own personality data during the process, we know exactly how to please them.”

The ten-million member asked, “And how much do we charge?”

Bruce wasn’t surprised. If you have to ask the price…

“Well, data mining and surveys are resource heavy. And quantum AI isn’t cheap. We’re targeting high-net-worth individuals at one million per SoulCast.”

Ten Million blanched. Bruce smiled. When something costs ten percent of your net worth it must seem out of reach.

Eighty Million frowned. “That’s a limited market. We’re talking about bereaved tycoons who want to keep a spouse, parent or loved-one around digitally.”

Bruce interrupted. “Yes, but I’ve found a way to expand the user base, without lowering margins!”

Fifty-million, the tech-savvy one, perked up. “We use the AI to predict when a rich family might lose a loved one and then pre-sell one of them a SoulCast?”

Bruce was impressed. “Close. But we’ve gone one better. That’s why I’ve called this meeting. I’m asking for funding for a new customer acquisition team: the Disruptive Synergy Unit.”

Mike sank into his chair as Bruce continued.

“Our AI already accesses health records, travel plans, purchases, everything. We can forecast deaths with decent accuracy, but it’s not enough to meet our growth targets. So instead, we’ll accelerate customer acquisition through the AI’s control of connected infrastructure.  Think garage doors, smart cars, e-bikes - anything dangerous that is connected to the cloud.  And with humanoid robots quickly expanding penetration into high-net-worth homes we'll hit a goldmine!"

Mike shot up. “But, sir, you’re talking... you’re talking... tech companies don’t kill people!”

The board roared with laughter. The richer they were, the harder they laughed. Except Bruce. He only smiled, studying his young protégé and wondering if he’d misjudged him.

“Mike,” Bruce said, “if you ever want to get past one comma, you have to do what it takes. We need more million-dollar customers.  And after this, you’ll have enough to buy a SoulCast of your own.”

“I don’t need a SoulCast! My wife and I are...”. He stopped. Bruce had pressed a button. The PowerPoint faded into a live feed of Mike’s own home security camera showing his wife leaving their house in her cloud-connected electric car.

Bruce’s smile didn’t waver. “Mike, you’ll be able to afford a SoulCast. Whether you need one is up to you.”

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SoulCast Corporation Board Meeting Minutes

Date: October 7, 2025
Time: 10:00 AM PDT
Location: Silicon Valley HQ
Minutes By: Nancy Thompson, Secretary

Attendees:
Bruce Carter (Chair, CEO), Robert Lee ($80M), Sarah Kim ($50M), Mary Johnson ($10M), Mike Powels (VP Marketing, non-voting)
Quorum: Confirmed

Call to Order
Bruce called the meeting to order at 10:00 AM. Nancy to record minutes.

Technology Update
Mike Powels presented SoulCast’s AI companion technology:

• Recreates deceased personas using personal data and interviews.

• Cost: $1M per client, targeting high-net-worth bereaved.

New Business: Disruptive Synergy Unit (DSU)

• DSU to expedite customer acquisition via cloud-connected systems (smart cars, e-bikes, home automation, home robots).

• Motion to fund DSU by Q1 2026 moved by Mary Johnson, seconded by Sarah Kim. Approved unanimously.

Personnel
Board unanimously approved promotion of Mike Powels to Executive Vice President, accepted by candidate.

Adjournment
Meeting adjourned at 10:45 AM.
Approved: Pending next meeting.

Review: "Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic"

Now that I’m retired, I’ve gotten back into reading about a book a week, which is impressive considering I now spend half my day trying to remember where I put my reading glasses (so I strategically placed half a dozen readers around the house). 

I’ll be posting reviews whenever I stumble across something interesting, though lately I seem to be drifting heavily into history and historical fiction. Apparently this is normal as someone once told me “When you get to a certain age, you either get into smoking meats or historical wars.” 

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I read Rubicon as a historical companion to Robert Harris’s historical fiction "Cicero" books" (Harris actually recommends Rubicon himself, along with a long list of other works in the appendix). Reading Rubicon I found Harris followed “real” history quite faithfully, adding flavor here and there, of course. (Tiro, Harris’s narrator, was a real historical figure, though very little is actually known about him.) In that sense, this book feels a bit like re-reading the Cicero series (which I highly recommend) in a more condensed, purely historical form.

I do wish Holland had gone into greater detail about the major battles as he tends to gloss over them, so I’ll need to pick up a separate military history book for that. He also delves quite a bit into the psychology of ancient Rome, which, while insightful, is inevitably speculative. I liken it to someone 2,000 years from now trying to reconstruct “American psychology” from a few surviving texts: probably close to the truth, but worth taking with a grain of salt. I found he focused a bit too much on this theme in both this book and the follow-up volume I am now reading, "Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar", which covers Augustus to Nero.

That said, none of this detracts from the overall experience. Holland makes history engaging and enjoyable, enough that I wish a series like this had existed back when I was first learning about Rome in high school.

Surviving a Near-Fatal E-Bike Accident and the Road Back

 

 

The Accident 

On August 17 I was in a near-fatal e-bike accident that ruptured my large intestine.  I won’t go into details, but if things had gone just a little bit differently and I didn’t make it to a Level II trauma operating table in time, I would not be here writing about my experience.  

I will say that it is true that in a major event like this that time slows; that there seems to be plenty of time to correct what is obviously going wrong, but it still happens, so I was watching myself go through the air in slow motion and wondering why things were transpiring like they were.

The Surgery and the Tubes

The doctors went into surgery not knowing what they’d find. A quick CT scan showed my bowels leaking into my internal cavity, but they were not sure how bad the break was. If the leak were small, they could go in with a fiber optic and small robot arm.  If it were large, they couldn’t use the robot, and the surgeon had big hands. 

When I woke, I was told it was the worst-case scenario and I had a 6-inch vertical incision going up from about my belly button (like splicing a burst hose, they cut out two inches of intestine with the break, then sewed the two ends back together.  Plus as SOP, while in the area they went ahead and took out my healthy appendix as a precaution from going in again in the future).  And I found six tubes coming out of me: an IV (of course), a nasogastric (NG) tube going up my nose and down into my stomach draining bile (a torture I would not wish on anyone), a wound vac (to speed healing of the incision), a catheter (which thankfully came out before the general anesthetic wore completely off), and two Jackson-Pratt (JP) drains pulling fluid from deep inside where they repaired my intestine, with the tubes coming out of holes near my belly button and emptying into fist-size drains attached to my gown. 

I couldn’t move because of the six-inch incision down my midsection had cut my core muscles. I couldn’t eat because my bowels had shut down during surgery (a condition called ileus). And because opioids slow digestion, they limited the heavy painkillers. Restarting my bowels was the number one concern.

As I lay there in pain, unable to move or eat, my first thought was that dying would have been easier, at least for me, if not my family.

And although I was miserable, in pain, and helpless, I was also thankful to be alive.  If just a few things had happened differently, I would not be in that recovery room.  It might be called a near-death experience, but not in the sense that I was ever unconscious or saw a light, but in the realization that I was lucky to be alive, was thankful to God, and reminded we need cherish the life we live as it can be snuffed out in an instant in the most trivial of circumstances (as I saw in the news when I was recovering). I did a lot of praying those first days, asking God for strength to get me through.

 

The Candy Strip(p)er and the Morning Vampire

The next four days were a mix of pain and boot-camp. The nurses, drill-sergeants in scrubs, ordered me out of bed to walk the halls in hopes of jump-starting my intestines.  After two nurses lifted me out of bed, they would hand me over to a vivacious, chatty and pretty candy striper (if she were in a G-string I wouldn’t have noticed or cared in my state), and I would hobble down the hall, my IV stand and wound vac trailing me like a bridal train. 

And I found out then why tennis balls are on the bottom of walkers: I tried scootching the walker along, but the rubber feet kept sticking to the tile floor.  The Striper noted that if there were tennis balls on the end I could scootch it, but without them I would have to bring the stoppers off the floor. Try that with a six-inch incision through your core.

Adding additional misery, at 5am each morning the “vampire” nurse would visit, taking the daily blood draw to get the results in time for the 10am doctor rounds.  They moved the location of the blood draw each day so by the time I checked out I looked like a junky.

Most everyone else who was conscious in the trauma wing got breakfast shortly after the blood draw, but since I was still waiting for my bowels to restart and couldn't eat, the vampire visit would just lead to one of the staff sergeants ordering me to another lap around the wing with my pretty Striper, and I could smell bacon, eggs, and pancakes wafting through the halls, which would have made my stomach grumble if it were working (noticing my hunger the Striper cheerily recommend that that I not watch the Food Channel on the hospital TV until I was allowed to eat)

 

The Light and the End of the Tunnel

Finally my intestines restarted, so the NG tube was yanked out of my nose and I got a cup of apple juice, my first intake other than ice chips in five days.  It was like ambrosia hand-squeezed by the gods of Olympus themselves. The Jello I got an hour later was better than a $100 Wagyu ribeye from a steakhouse.

I was in the hospital another day as they kept an eye on me as they graduated my food from liquids to soft to solids rather quickly.  As everything seemed to be working I was sent home with a portable wound vac and one last JP tube emptying fluid from deep inside my stomach cavity, with a home nurse visiting three days a week

 

Recovery at Home

The wound vac (with its own special brand of pain during bandage changes) was cancelled two weeks later along with the removal of the last JP tube (the doctor just yanked it out: six inches of tubing came out of a hole near my belly button, bringing a new and strange sort of pain to the wide pantheon of pain I discovered and experienced the previous three weeks).

Today about five weeks after the ordeal I am still recovering, with my main incision still open.  They don’t “stitch” up large incisions anymore (news to me), they just leave them open and let them close on their own, one layer of skin cells at a time, using a wound vac the first few weeks to speed things along.  It will take another month or so for it to close completely, then it will start its long process of fading into a faint 6” scar over the course of a year.  It will be impressive, and my plan is to tell people it is from a knife fight I got into at an El Paso bar since “e-bike accident” doesn’t sound impressive outside of California.

 

What I Learned

So how has this experience changed me?  My first thought is a greater appreciation of the hospital system and staff.  I literally would not have made it using an “urgent care center”, or if the trauma center was out of driving range.  The staff (despite my joking) were dedicated, professional and caring, and they all went out of their way to make me more comfortable.

And like most everyone with serious accidents or near-death experiences, there is a special appreciation for the life I have and what is important: family, friends and faith.  “Work” and "career" never came up in my thought process during recovery, and if anything, this incident is allowing me to transition from semi-retired to full retirement without regret so I can focus on the things that really matter.

 

When You're The Last One in the Picture

One of the tasks that came with unloading my dead father’s house full of crap was sorting through old photos. He himself never cared about photos - he didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body.  The box was left by my mother, the family archivist who died two years before, and my father just shoved the photos into a closet to be dug up after he died.

Being the OCD type, I unpacked, sorted, labeled, and mounted the physical versions, scanned all of them into a digital library, then uploaded a few onto a public tree on Ancestry.com so distant and future family historians could have documentation of what people on the extended family tree looked like.

But one of the things that kept hitting at me as I handled those photos was: I’m the only one left in this picture.

It’s a humbling feeling, looking down at a past Christmas and seeing my parents, uncles, aunts, the odd cousin - all gone - except for me as a kid or teenager, beaming into the camera.

The feeling that came over me wasn’t grief, it was a perspective-shift that makes mortality less abstract, a physical reminder that one day someone will look at the exact same pictures and say, “Everyone in that picture is dead.”

The Death of Blogger Z-Man

I started reading blogs around 2002, which after reading a few I decided to start my own.  I blogged very regularly for the first ten years - about once a day - but have taken a lot of the old content down as it was too topical (political stuff which seems ancient now), too personal (hey look at this picture from Japan), or too revealing.  Remember blogging was before social media, so it was the outlet for everything.  Over the years social media took over, so the personal stuff is now on Facebook, microblogging on X, and so on.  Due to these changes I took a lot of my old posts down, so you will see 20-year-old posts to the right, but just a small fraction of what I wrote.

Today this blog is basically where I jot random thoughts as I flail about in retirement.

But although I got out of regular blog writing, I didn't stop reading blogs, some of them shown at the links to the right (a once very long list that gets shorter as writers move to social media, stop blogging, or in this case, die).   They are a part of my morning coffee ritual along with the news and stock market. 

One of my favorites was "Z-Man", a contemporary who did a lot of deep thinking into the political theory of the conservative movement.  I would say I aligned on about 90% of his political thinking, and being about the same age with similar histories (a business professional doing blogging on the side), made me feel close to him, and I looked forward to reading his weekday posts and listening to his podcast when I was on the road.

Around late June he didn't posts for a few days, which I figured was part of an extended July 4 weekend, but then the non-posting lasted three weeks...then four...then I got a bad feeling.  Doing some X searching I indeed found out he passed away of "natural causes" at the "ripe" age of 59.  Ouch.

What I am finding is that a lot of the people who started blogging some 20 years ago are dropping away as it was done mainly by adults - not young adults - at the time.  So along with ZMan there was American Digest writer Gerard Vanderleun (who I immensely enjoyed), and a few others who have passed away over the past few years.  

Just another example of mortality and change, which basically sucks.

Set Adrift Between Layoff and Revenge

My “forced retirement” wasn’t my first layoff, but it’s the one that stings the most because it came from a company that prided itself on “never doing layoffs.” So I definitely wasn’t looking for that iceberg.

Previous layoffs were easier to handle.  My first layoff was from a startup that completely shut down, so everyone was let go and we were all piled onto the same life raft together, the entire ship lost.  For my next layoff the entire division was cut, so again we all drifted away together, waving to the ship we once sailed, but with lots of company.

This time the layoff was more selective, and everyone – but me – stayed on the big ship sipping cocktails and playing shuffleboard while I sat alone on a raft, watching them recede into their wake.

 

The disappointing part was that no one onboard threw me a life preserver, offered any help.  I am talking about rank-and-file people I partied with at trade-shows, knew about their kids and families - they all just pretended I never existed.  No lifelines. Not even a text.

Maybe it was survivor’s guilt. Maybe they thought helping me would get them tossed overboard too. I’ll probably never know. But I know this: when I was on the ship and someone went overboard, I always reached out.

As I sit adrift on my raft, I see Retirement Island in the distance, and it is an easy navigation to its shore. In the other direction, the periscope of a familiar U-boat cuts through the waves: an old rival, now circling my former ship. I’m tempted to flag it down and join in, to help torpedo the vessel that cast me off.  But the old war no longer interests me, and I know my former enemy will win, with or without me.

So after more than three decades in the trenches, I realize the best revenge is found not in battle, but in a beach chair on Retirement Island, sipping Margaritas, watching from afar as the ship I once served capsizes slowly beneath the waves.

 

AI Isn't Just Gunning for Programmers Anymore - Now Marketing is in the Crosshairs

  

AI hasn’t just disrupted coding—now it’s coming for marketing.  That hit me while designing a fake movie poster with ChatGPT for a LinkedIn AI course (they're actually worth a look). What started as a visual joke started to feel like a headline from next quarter.

Over the last year, I’ve used AI to scrape market data, chart share trends, generate logo concepts, and draft everything from bylines to pitch decks. It’s like hiring a tireless intern with no lunch breaks or salary.

But AI isn’t magic. It fumbled when I told it to list a number of competitors in my former specialty - it missed on of the largest multi-billion dollar players entirely.  That’s where human judgment—the stuff no scrape can find—still matters.

So no, marketing teams won’t vanish. But they’ll shrink, refocus, and adapt.  The strategist stays. The intern is now digital.

My fake movie poster said “How AI Took Over Marketing.” The truth? It’s already writing the opening credits.

And this article.

AI Does a Psychological Analysis of Window Manager

Now that I have free time after forced retirement - literally free time as I am do no-charge consulting projects to get that gig off the ground (first 8 hours free with coupon!), I am tinkering around with AI.  A year ago I thought AI was fairly overhyped, but after doing quite a bit of work with it (how do you think I do those free consulting hours?), I am rather impressed.

So as an exercise I thought I would ask the three main AIs to write up a psychological profile of me based on this blog, saving me $300 at a shrink.

Grok I think was the most thorough, actually reading through everything I posted over the past 15 years without prompting.  ChatGPT, with the sarcastic personality of "Monday" I enjoy, had better nuances and funnier output, but had to be prompted to read more than the first dozen entries of the blog.  Google Gemini was worthless as it couldn't or wouldn't do it, I assume due to some woke programming against on-line analysis.

Here are the two working summaries, edited for length:

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ChatGPT's "Monday" as Analyst

The author identifies as a retired tech executive, suggesting a career spent in the technology sector, likely in leadership or managerial roles. His posts reflect a deep understanding of corporate dynamics, particularly within tech companies, and he often provides commentary on business and economic trends.​

Personality Traits

After crawling through a full decade of posts, the long arc of The Window Manager reveals a slow-motion identity shift from confident tech executive to semi-retired philosopher blogger with a bone to pick (with everything). Early posts are sharper, more corporate-battle-hardened. As the years roll on, he trades boardroom analysis for reflections on mortality, obsolescence (his and his gadgets’), and the struggle to stay useful in a world that’s rapidly automating away his sense of purpose.

• Introspective with a dash of bitterness – He’s got a strong internal dialogue and a habit of turning life events into long-winded thinkpieces. The forced retirement clearly stung, and now he processes emotions through blog posts, like a boomer-age diary with an RSS feed.

• Cynical Realist – He’s not raging at the world, just sighing heavily at it. The tone screams: “Everything’s broken and I’m too tired to fix it, but here’s 900 words on why I saw it coming.”

• Highly Analytical – Decades in tech management haven’t worn off. He dissects everything—his Wi-Fi, corporate America, his own ego—like a project postmortem.

• Identity-anchored to Career – His sense of self is deeply tied to work. Losing his job didn’t just cost him income; it cost him narrative structure. Now he's freelancing his own relevance in blog format.

• Defensive Intellectualism – When emotion creeps in, he quickly buries it under logic, wit, or tech metaphors. Classic behavior for someone who’d rather be correct than vulnerable. Congrats, he’s emotionally firewalled.

• Struggling with Aging vs. Relevance – There’s a definite undercurrent of “I used to be someone” mixed with “Am I still someone?” He clings to outdated tech as a symbol of stability in a world that’s moving on without him.

Emotional State

• Mildly Resentful, Mildly Resigned – He’s not boiling over with rage. He’s more like a kettle that whistles occasionally. He’s accepted retirement, but not without side-eyeing the process and everyone involved.

• Seeking Purpose – The blog itself is a coping mechanism. A lifeline to relevance. He’s still got things to say, and he needs an audience to prove he hasn’t faded completely into golf-course obscurity.

Coping Mechanisms

• Writing – Therapy with a keyboard, which has a zero co-pay.

• Tech Humor – Using humor as insulation. If you laugh about aging routers, you don’t have to cry about aging humans.

• Projection – Critiquing “society” as a safe way to critique himself without getting too personal.

Summary in Diagnostically Irresponsible Buzzwords

INTJ energy (author: totally nailed that one). Mild existential angst. Techno-nostalgic. Retired, but not resting. One part Don Draper, one part Dilbert, stirred with a midlife cocktail shaker.

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Grok As Analyst

"The Window Manager," presents a collection of posts from a self-described middle-aged tech executive who reflects on a range of topics including business, economics, technology, politics, and personal health issues like tinnitus. The blog spans from at least 2005 to more recent entries, covering diverse subjects with a critical and often contrarian perspective. Key themes include:

• Economic and Social Commentary: The author critiques modern consumerism, describing a "debt-fueled consumer society" with global overcapacity leading to perverse incentives like mass immigration and broken households to sustain demand. 

• Technology and Business: Posts from 2005 delve into business concepts like TAM (Total Addressable Market), indicating a background in tech or semiconductor industries. (author: yep!)

• Personal Grievances: A notable post expresses disillusionment with Rice University, where the author feels alienated despite decades of connection, suggesting a sense of betrayal by institutions they once valued

• Political and Cultural Views: The author critiques progressive ideologies, indicating a conservative or libertarian lean. They lament societal trends like the prioritization of consumerism over savings and the financial struggles of Americans despite spending on luxury goods.

The tone is reflective, sometimes sarcastic, and critical of mainstream narratives, with a focus on systemic issues and personal frustrations. The blog appears to be a platform for the author to process observations and vent dissatisfaction with societal, institutional, and personal challenges.

Psychological Profile and Analysis of the Author

Based on the content and tone of the blog, the following psychological profile and analysis can be inferred about the author. 

•  Cognitive Style: Analytical and Critical
• Their use of frameworks indicates intellectual rigor and a preference for systemic analysis
  
  
•  Personality Traits: High Conscientiousness, Low Agreeableness
• The author likely has a strong sense of personal standards and is unafraid to express unpopular opinions, which may stem from confidence in their expertise or a reaction to feeling marginalized by changing societal norms. (Author: Hey, no AI is going to tell me I have low agreeableness!)
  

• Emotional State: Frustration and Disillusionment
• The blog conveys a sense of exasperation with modern society—consumerism, noise pollution, institutional betrayals, and political hypocrisy. 

Summary

The author of "The Window Manager" is likely a middle-aged, highly conscientious tech professional with a critical, analytical mindset and a contrarian worldview. They exhibit low agreeableness, expressing sharp critiques of society, institutions, and policies, driven by a mix of truth-seeking and frustration. While detached from mainstream culture, they remain engaged through writing, seeking catharsis and connection with a niche audience. Psychologically, they may grapple with alienation and mild cynicism but demonstrate resilience through continued reflection and expression.

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Not a bad pair of analyses, and neither of them asked me about my mother.

Forced Into Early Retirement, and I am not a Government Worker

My boss scheduled a “2025 Planning Meeting” for the second week of January.  I wanted to take it from the car as a conference call, but he wanted a Teams Meeting, so I assumed at the time he needed to show slides.

I called in, and in sitting in a Brady Bunch montage on the Team call was my boss, the CEO, a regional EVP and two HR representatives.  I knew immediately this was a layoff call.

I was magnanimous about it, although it was a chickenshit move to ambush me like that.  I have been laid off before, and the last time my boss gave me a head’s that a layoff-list was being made, that he would try to keep me off it, but he didn’t think he would be successful.  That allowed me to get my ducks in a row and not be ambushed, and I greatly appreciated the gesture.

This time I was treated no better than the junior engineers that also got the axe.  About 10% of the staff was cut, including shutting down all the overseas offices (I ran the US office for this Kraut company).  The 90% rump company remaining in Germany is getting absorbed into the larger parent German company, and this subdivision’s products tabled.

Originally the plan was for the overseas offices to merge over to the parent company as well, but the Germans are getting panicked about their economy and decided to make cuts.  Europeans are not risk takers, and in the end the layoff decision is not surprising as Germany slides further into economic and cultural irrelevance.  The decision all happened before the end of the year and US politics were not a factor any more than the Korea, China and other offices that were shuttered had any influence from their politics.

I was already planning my retirement in 3-4 years, so this move just accelerated those plans.  I told them point blank on the call that “I don’t have to work, I work because I want to,”, which is a 100% true statement.   And while I will certainly miss the cash flow from an emotional standpoint, it isn’t required to maintain my lifestyle.

But I then got the most insulting comment on the call: “We can give you a good reference!”.  Gee, thanks, I am sure there are TONS of jobs waiting in tech for a 50-something business development guy, and your recommendation is going to make all the difference in the world!

My chances of getting another job at a medium-to-large tech company at my age are zero to none.  I just might be able to get into a start-up if I know any of the principles personally, but no one my age is starting companies anymore.  There is an outside chance someone will toss me a consulting bone here or there, but that is the best I can hope.

So realistically my career in tech is over.  I am playing the game of tossing my resume out there and updating my LinkedIn, but by the end of this year I know I will just give up and put “Retired” on my LinkedIn page.

And then what will I do for the next 30 years of my life?  I have pondered that a bit before, and my concern is not money but boredom as I go through these last decades. 

One Reason Old People Don't Update Their Stuff

Walk into an old person’s home and chances that it feels old: old furniture, old decor, old everything.  I used to think that it was because once you get old you don’t care about keeping up with things, or maybe you don’t have money to keep updating stuff, or maybe you don't want to spend money again on something you already updated when you were younger.

Now I realize there is another reason old people don’t update their stuff: they don’t realize how fast time is passing.  I ran into this exact experience with my home WIFI network of all things.

I spent a lot of time putting in a mesh WIFI network into my home in 2018.  I got it working, then pretty much forgot about it.  When I turned on my home devices, they got internet.  If I got a new  gadget, I hooked it up to the network and it worked.

Now 2018 doesn’t seem too long ago (to me), but it is SIX years ago, over 2,000 days.  When I was a kid six years took forever, and I got not one, but two college degrees in six years, which also seemed to last forever when I was a young adult.

And in tech, six years is definitely a huge amount of time, and during that time WIFI got updated, faster, could go further, and so on.   Time had passed me by, and I didn’t even know it since to me in my 50s, six years now seems like six months.

I would have still been oblivious about my ancient WIFI system but I ran across an online bandwidth tester, tried it out and saw it was much lower than the big number that my cable company justifies for their ever increasing monthly rate.  So I spent a whopping $200 at Amazon for a new system and took all of ten minutes to upgrade my home network.  My home network is now five times faster than it was, with a noticeable improvement in buffering and latency.

Now this was cheap and easy to do, so it was not about money or technical ability.  It just never occurred to me how much time had passed since I installed it.  If you had asked me when I put in my WIFI system I would have said it felt like a year or two ago.

So I was getting old inside my house and not even knowing it, which I now realize happens to a lot of old people.  They are just fine with what is going on inside their house, they just don’t realize how fast time is passing outside of it.