Month: October 2016

Last weekend, for the first time in three months, I got my hair cut.  I did so under direct threat from my wife, who’d months ago given up suggesting in favor of taunting.

“How does it feel to have a mullet?” she’d tease.  “Mullet boy!”

“How does it feel to be married to a man with a mullet?  What does that say about you?” Not my wittiest.

Whether or not I actually had a mullet is up for debate.  Like most men who play fast and loose with socially acceptable time periods away from the barber, I was somewhere on the bad-hair continuum.  Did I look like I could have played lead guitar in Spinal Tap?  Or second base on the Grafton County men’s softball team, circa 1987?  It wasn’t that bad.  But wasn’t I starting to enjoy songs with twangy guitars and lyrics about God, working moms who somehow do it all, and relationships consecrated in pick-up trucks?  Actually, no, not at all.

The thing is, I’m a man of principle.  And several bedrock, core principles stand in the way of my sitting in the barber’s chair at regular intervals.  For one thing,  I’m cheap — but only when it’s something that doesn’t cost much in the first place.  Show me an expensive hobby and I’m flying airplanes four days a week.  But a ten dollar haircut?  Let’s make that a special treat.  For another thing, I value my weekend time.  There are lots of studies that show, conclusively, that people who save their chores for the weekend are generally kind of bitter while they do them, but way more organized and focused for the rest of the week.  I can’t risk that bitterness.  I’ve got way better things to do on Saturday morning than sitting in the barbershop reading American Wolf Hunter while waiting for a couple of fossils named Fred and Larry are getting their seven strands of hair a weekly rearranging.  Like engaging in expensive hobbies, such as actually hunting wolves.

And while we’re on the subject, here’s a burning question: why do their haircuts — guys who’ve been bald as billiard balls since the early ’80s — take the exact same amount of time in the chair as everyone else?  Is the barber just pushing things around up there so they’ll think they need to keep paying him.  “Whew, sure looks a lot better, Larry!” the barber will say, then wink at the rest of us.  Couldn’t Larry just check in every time it’s a leap year and get roughly the same results?

Come to think of it, why do my haircuts take the same amount of time as everyone else’s?  Usually I get in there and all the other guys either have spotty coverage like Larry, or military flattops, or at least highly-regulated, disciplined operations (the kind you see on school principals).  Me?  I usually slink in there looking like a cross between Billy Ray Cyrus and Martin Sheen in “Apocalypse Now” after six months in the jungle.  My directions to the barber usually boil down to, “Please sheer me like a sheep.” By the time we’re done, the floor looks like hell and the poor guy needs new scissors.  Now how does that haircut take exactly the same length of time as Larry the Comb Over’s?  

And come to think of it, how come we’re both charged the same rate?  Shouldn’t Larry’s bill be like $2.00 — and shouldn’t mine be like $80?  Shouldn’t it be like property taxes: a variable fee based on acreage?

As you can probably tell, I do not get my haircut at one of those fancy salons.  I get my haircut at the barbershop: one of those old-school ones with a barber’s pole outside.  While my thirties have seen me evolve to the point where I can no longer set foot in a MacDonald’s, have a visceral loathing for Walmart (novelist Howard Frank Mosher wrote that his mission as a teacher in a northern Vermont mill town was “Keep kids out of the mill”; “Keep kids out of the Walmart” often feels like mine), still I have yet to feel the rumblings of a need for any haircut that requires making an appointment.

Besides, even if I don’t always like the reality of waiting in line for what are often objectively haphazard results, I like the idea of barbershops, which are ingrained in popular culture as places where we gather to chew the fat, philosophize, and talk politics.  Vermont author Garret Keizer, in his 1991 A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, wrote of his fondness for, “a barbershop full of regulars — each one a third part customer, a fifth part helper, and the remaining part permanent fixture.” As I made my way down to the barbershop last Saturday morning — a time slot I’m usually careful to avoid because of the crowds — I imagined I’d walk into a bustling waiting room lined with colorful regulars busily engaged in talking shop about the upcoming election.  In fact, because my barbershop is right on Main Street in an important swing state — a state and a street much visited by national candidates — forget political talk.  I wondered if we might be receiving a visit from a Hassan or an Ayotte — or even a Clinton or Trump.

That’s why I was so surprised when I swung open the door at 9:30 am on a rainy Saturday morning and found the place empty.  No regulars with their pants hitched up and their fingers in their suspenders.  No old-timers in “Hillary for Prison” shirts shooting me skeptical looks.  Nobody drinking coffee and railing on the local school system.  I was so dumbfounded as I was whisked into the barber’s chair that I believe I mumbled something like, “Um, the Sinead O’Connor look, please . . .” Where was everyone?

The first thing to know about my barber is that he carries a pistol at all times.  Not in his hand, but in a holster on his hip.  Now I have a few rules in life:  Don’t clog up the left lane.  Don’t tailgate — especially one of those trucks that’s carrying 12 loosely chained cars on top.  Don’t get drawn into an argument with an eighth grader.  And never, ever bring up politics with a man carrying a gun and holding a razor inches from your throat.  

But rules are made to be broken, right?

What can I say?  Per my previous column, I’ve become obsessed with “polling” everyone I meet.  And right then it occurred to me why I’d really wandered into the barbershop that morning: I hadn’t had a single face-to-face conversation with a real, live Trump supporter (one who wasn’t 16 years old) all year.  I’d come down here for some good political talk, and damned if I was going to let fear of bodily injury get in the way.

I’d brought a book with me, which I’d put down on the windowsill as I got inside.  This book too was election-themed:  J.D. Vance’s topical but rather ho-hum Hillbilly Elegy.

“What’cha reading?” my barber asked me by way of introduction, and we were off on what I quickly realized was, for me, a strange balancing act.  At first he was surprisingly coy about politics.  I baited a few increasingly tasty hooks — “Have you been getting all these crazy mail ads from Hassan and Ayotte?” — and came up empty.  Perhaps he had no interest.  Or perhaps he had too much interest — and enough self-control to realize it.  Whatever it was, I started to feel bad, and quit asking about politics.  We settled into a groove.

Bu then — right as I’d said something blithely non-political (“Geez, we need some rain, bad”) — “Zzzzzrrrrrrtttttttt!” The electric razor veered wildly off course.  

“I tell you what we need bad!” he roared, holding the razor up.  “For that woman to be behind bars!”

I simultaneously cowered and also craned toward the mirror to see if I’d be wearing a strange Z-pattern on my head for the next two months.

From that point on, it became hard to talk to him.  I’m not good in these situations.  I’m never sure how to handle volatile adults.  I’ve never been comfortable around yellers.  I feel the need to placate, but also a childish urge to push back.  It’s a balancing act: say the wrong thing and this guy is going to blow a blood vessel in his cornea and he’s also holding a razor four inches from your carotid artery.  But back away and suddenly you’re listening to offensive rants for the next ten minutes, and there’s nothing you can do but sit there and take it.  It’s a delicate balance — one I’ve never been good at.

I tried my best to hit the middle ground.  

“The Republicans screwed this up,” I said, shaking my head sadly.  “This was their chance, and they nominated a guy who’s barely going to win Utah.”

“That wasn’t the Republicans!” he thundered.  “It was the American people!  That’s what they wanted!”

I felt confused.  What was I supposed to say?  What I would have wanted to say — or what I might have said on the Internet — would come across as rude to his face.  And it didn’t seem worth it to try to argue: what would be the use?  This guy had his mind made up.

“I’m a big Second Amendment guy,” he was saying.

“Yeah, so is Kelly Ayotte,” I said — our New Hampshire senator locked into a tough reelection race — “and Trump’s taking her down with him.  He’s scaring the hell out of decent people.”

“I think the American people are too chicken to vote for a guy like Trump,” he growled.  “If someone comes in here and insults me” — and in perfect timing, just then a Mike Pence lookalike happened to walk in the door — “I’m going to insult him right back!” Pence looked back at us, terrified.  His face asked, “What the heck have I walked into?”  

“And that’s the kind of guy Trump is too!” he finished.

Perhaps it was the addition of a potential witness in the shop, but I started to feel less tense.  I also started to realize something: I was sort of enjoying hearing what my barber had to say.  It’s one thing to hear Trump voters interviewed on television, or to read their posts on Facebook.  But it’s another to hear it in person.  And this wasn’t some sociological experiment.  Though I joke about polling my friends, I’m not some Brooklynite reporter wandering through Iowa or Ohio; this guy lives in my town.  He cuts my hair.  I found myself wanting to know where he was coming from.  If he didn’t wish to hear what I had to say, so be it, but I’d keep listening.

“All those women coming out of the woodwork right now,” he continued, “Why do you think they didn’t come out before?  Because they’re lying!”

Over in the corner, Pence was leafing through a copy of American Bait Fisherman and pretending that he couldn’t hear us.  

“No,” I responded, “Trump’s handing the election away.  He needed white women and then he started feuding with Ms. Universe.  He’s a terrible politician.”

“He’s not a politician!  That’s the guy we need!”

As our conversation finished and I got out of the chair, I found myself wondering something: If we Americans had had more conversations like this over the last four years, wouldn’t we be less polarized now?  On this day, our conversation was awkward, tense, unfulfilling for me, and — I’d bet — unfulfilling for him too.  But we’d listened to each other.  I hadn’t talked to anyone remotely like him in a long time.  And despite the fact that I never told him I was supporting Clinton, my guess is that he hadn’t talked to a lot of poll-wielding, William Buckley-quoting, mullet-wearing Independents in the last few years himself.  We hadn’t torn into each other the way we might have on the Web.  And we hadn’t sidestepped the conversation, either — the way our increasingly segmented society makes it all too easy to do.

After all, that barbershop was empty.

In my early twenties, I lived in a Washington, D.C. neighborhood that was remarkably self-contained.  It was nearly an island, surrounded on two sides by small creeks and on a third by the Potomac River.  Every morning two black SUVs arrived to ferry Andrew Card, George Bush’s Chief of Staff, to the White House.  Three doors down lived a top American kayak racer who’d once written “F.W.” in duct tape on his Olympic boat — a not-so subtle reference to his personal feelings about our esteemed president.  What our neighborhood was missing, I always thought, was a neighborhood pub — the kind of place where my friend the kayak racer and perhaps men like Andrew Card might’ve gathered for an after-work beer to hash out their differences.  We were a neighborhood full of people who didn’t know their neighbors.  We needed some place to bring us all together.  I think every American neighborhood should have a pub.  Few do.

Much has been written about the lack of front-porch discussions in our culture.  Revealingly, in Vermont one of the most popular digital meeting places for town residents is a site called Front Porch Forum.  As I walked home from the barbershop last weekend, I passed the spot on the pedestrian bridge where weeks before someone had written “White Power” on the wall beneath a hand-drawn Nazi swastika.  The message had since been painted over, but I can’t walk by without thinking of it.  Perhaps this election itself is just the kind of national conversation we might have at the bar or the barbershop — one in which previously unacceptable ideas that have long festered in places like Ohio or New Hampshire can suddenly come rushing to the surface, to be cleansed by the light of day?

I am skeptical.  First of all, the words “national conversation” are tossed around loosely.  A conversation implies listening.  If your conversation is conducted entirely over mass media, how much listening can really be done?  How much give and take can there really be?  If you don’t personally know anyone from the other side, how much do you really care to listen?  And how often, really, are we even in the same place — the same virtual bar or virtual barbershop — as people who think differently from us?  What I think everyone needs is a barbershop — a place to gather with people who think differently — that we can use to a put a name and a face to the other side.  

That’s why, as I slid out of the barber chair and admired my new haircut, I reached out and shook my barber’s hand. 

“I’m Alden,” I said.  He told me his name.  

Walking home, I thought to myself, “This is good.  I need to do more of this.” And I think it’s true.  

Especially if it means I get my haircut more often.

There’s a change that’s come over me in the last ten months, and it’s fairly subtle: I’ve become a raving lunatic.  Ten months ago I was a sensitive, compassionate guy who ate dinner while making eye contact with his wife, and basically had a decent grasp on reality. Then I started watching the news.

Ten months later — and just the other night I was making witty, intelligent conversation with my wife when I started developing signs of a condition that I call “the Election Shakes.” It’s a biological reaction to the overwhelming fear that at some point since the last time I checked, Donald Trump might have said something stupid.   It can be any news, not just Trump.  The fear is the same: I might have missed something.  I might be missing something right now.  That’s what hit me the other night.  At some point maybe twenty minutes later I looked up and realized that conversation had trailed off, probably right around the time I’d made a mad grab for my smartphone to check Politico, and that I’d likely spent the last twenty minutes muttering to myself about the newest Rasmussen poll, or about a senate race in a state I’d never been to.  When I came to and realized what I’d done, my wife was already muttering something like, “Maybe you should worry about your own ‘unfavorables’ with white women . . .”

You know who’s fault this is?  It’s Lester Holt’s.

You see, I used to come home every night, have dinner, curl up with a book, and then fall asleep — blissfully unaware of all the stupidity in the world.  The only times I watched TV, Steph Curry and Lebron James were involved.  The only “debates” I cared about were about rebounds, or Pete Carroll’s playcalling, or whether Kevin Love’s teammates actually invited him to the championship parade.

But then came the presidential primaries.  And because I wanted to do my civic duty of staying informed — and also because I’m a sucker for a good old-fashioned train wreck, followed by an explosion, followed by a nuclear meltdown, followed by a Cleveland Browns game — I started watching the NBC national news every night.  And once I started watching the dapper and unflappable Lester Holt every evening, I found it hard to stop.

I knew the risks.  I knew that to hook viewers, the networks have been known to perhaps, very slightly — sensationalize things.  Okay, so you might as well knock back a case of Red Bull and snort enough cocaine to get Rick James interested as tune into the nightly news.  Most news shows — unless you’re watching PBS or something, which is sort of like eating bran flakes when you could be snorting cocaine — should basically all go by the same name as that old show on FOX: “Fear Factor.” That was the show on which people were dared to eat live millipedes, or lie in bathtubs full of scorpions.  But “Fear Factor” would be a good name for the news.  And while yes it’s true that the other evening I refused to go outside after dark to take the trash out because there could be scary clowns in the neighborhood, what can I say?  It’s hard to stop watching.  The news is exciting.  They don’t hold back.  It’s all war metaphors and hyperbole.  Everything’s a “meltdown” or a “campaign,” or “wreaking havoc.” It’s all drama, high stakes.  It’s hard to turn away.

And during the primaries, it was even better.  Donald Trump bragged about the size of his “polls,” Marco Rubio repeated the same line over and over like he was in Milli Vanilli , and John Kasich made the, “Who the f**k are these idiots?” face every time anyone opened their mouths.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the evening news, here are the main components of your average broadcast.

The Lead:  They always start with the day’s biggest story, which is never something like,”wave of racial harmony overtakes American cities.” No.  It’s almost always about something truly horrific and ghastly, like a major terrorist attack happening inside a nursery school that is inside a church that is on a pony farm owned by armless orphans — all reported with the kind of appreciation for nuance and subtlety that makes you want to start stocking up on canned goods and ammunition.

The Second Biggest Story:  This is also typically about someone getting shot, or blown up, or eaten by terrorists.  This is usually when I start drinking.

Politics:  Expect stories such as, “Putin decides to revoke his endorsement because Trump allegedly groped him on an airplane.” Then a leaked tape of Trump saying, “What can I do?  When I see a beautiful dictator, it’s like a magnet; sometimes I just start kissing him on the lips.  Maybe Paul Ryan’s just jealous?  I don’t know.”

Sometimes while watching the news, I take out my passport and gaze at it fondly.

The Household Scare:  If a quick look at American politics doesn’t have you halfway out the door, headed for the Canadian border, here’s the part where they really start boring holes into your skull and draining the sanity out.  Now you learn that a familiar household item, such as your fabric softener, or your couch cushions, or possibly the oxygen in your house, could be plotting to kill you.

The Ridiculous Health Story:  Here’s the part where they present some new health study that sounds like it was conducted by teenage researchers who just learned about things like “science”: “New study shows that eating whole wheels of cheese may lead to constipation.”

Now, if it stopped there — if the only news I was consuming was once a night, for thirty minutes (which is to say, ten minutes of news and twenty minutes of Viagra commercials) — I’d probably still be able to mimic a normal human being.  But, oh, that’s not where I stopped.  Not by a long-shot.  The other day when I decided to pull over on my commute home from work to because I just had to check The Washington Post on my phone because I was starting to get the shakes, I realized something: I’ve become a full-blown news junkie.

Here a few signs of what has happened to me:

–For one thing, I’ve stopped watching sports.  I’ve barely watched any football.  There are stories going around right now (which I of course know about, because I’m a news junkie) that the NFL is really, really worried because ratings are way down and they’re concerned about long-term viewership.  But that’s ridiculous.  Everyone’s getting their fill of exciting and possibly brain-impaired competition from our presidential candidates.  Yesterday instead of cuing up my usual NFL podcast on the way home from work, I thought, “Nah, that’s boring,” and pulled up a political podcast instead (“Keepin’ It 1600”).  Just in case, you know, there was some new angle on anything, anywhere.  But we’ll be back after November 8th.  Don’t worry, Rog.

–Then there’s the fact that I’m so desperate to know who’s going to win the election that I’ve become obsessed with getting the real story.  I’m haunted by the notion that I’m getting biased coverage, so I’ve dealt with that like a true obsessive: by checking all news sites.  Sure, I check Politico, but I also peruse Breitbart (Breitbart!) to keep in touch with the latest perfectly reasonable speculation from the Alt Right — such as Hillary Clinton’s alien love child who has Parkinson’s, wasn’t born in the US, and once groped O.J. Simpson on an airplane.  Sometimes I not only check what local papers are saying in swing states, but I check the comments sections to see how voters are reacting.  Comments sections!  See?  I’m insane.

–I’m obsessed with polls.  I check RealClearPolitics.com constantly.  The other day I believe I said something to my wife such as, “That new lawnmower we got is about as reliable as the LA Times/USC poll.”*

And we laughed and laughed.  Because we both knew what that was.  

*(A national poll that always shows Donald Trump winning.  As though you care.)

–I’m also obsessed, like a lot of political junkies, with Fivethirtyeight.com’s electoral map.  Quiz me on it right now.  Go ahead.  Try!  The other day I was walking through the high school where I work.  On the wall in the atrium, I saw a giant poster of Fivethirtyeight’s election map and it was WRONG!  I turned to the nearest person, who was, I believe, some four-foot tall seventh grader, and started ranting about how Pennsylvania really hadn’t been purple for months because of the Philadelphia suburbs.  Right around the time the kid was running in the opposite direction, I realized that this was a giant map showing the location of US colleges.  Pennsylvania was purple because — well, who knows?  It was just purple.  But I have conversations with my wife all the time that begin, “Can you believe that Utah might go blue for the first time since Johnson?” I love the map.  I might as well start wearing a suit and change my name to Josh Lyman.

–If I go too long without checking the Washington Post or the New York Times, I start to get the shakes.

–I need new stories to break.  Finding breaking news is like probably a lot like what winning at gambling feels like.  Finding some crazy new story about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is like finding $100 in your pants pocket.  I don’t know why it’s so addictive.  I just know that I need more of it.

–When I talk politics with anyone, I try to suss out not only who they’re voting for, but who their friends are voting for.  Without, you know, being rude.  I consider this “taking my own personal polls.”

Me:  “Sounds like white, college educated women are turning on Trump.”

My Wife:  “Stop interrogating our guests.”

–I can name more journalists, commentators, and politicians than I can NBA and NFL players.  I watch so much Meet the Press and NBC news that I’ve developed whole long lists of favorite media prognosticators.  Here are some of my favorites: Joy-Ann Reid, David Brooks, Katy Tur, Robert Costa, Andrew Sullivan, Chuck Todd, and Kelly Ann Conway (just because I like to imagine her curling up with a bottle of scotch right after the interview).

–I speculate about who everyone I know is voting for.

–Sometimes I pretend I’m having political discussions with my students, but I’m secretly polling them to see who they think won the debate.

–I’ve started checking Twitter.  ‘Nuff said.

Now, let’s get this election over with, so I can return to being a normal human being.  Unless the post-election coverage is interesting.

The last few months has been a weird time.  Here in New England, we’re having our worst drought in 30 years.  In presidential politics, the great orange snapping turtle is closing in on the Oval Office by tapping into perfectly legitimate feelings of total insanity in some of the less affluent and more brain-dead parts of the country.

Strangest of all, I have finally taken up jogging.

Yes, jogging.  The very word calls up images of pain and suffering and the sort of “purposeful living” and “taking care of yourself” that have frankly never been part of my playbook.  During grad school, my diet basically consisted of everything I would have eaten when I was nine if I’d had a credit card and no legal guardian.  Weekends were spent on the couch disappearing whole tins of day-glo orange cheese balls, and downing large amounts of low quality beer.  But the key thing was: I was watching sports on TV.  Dammit, I was watching people exercise.

It’s not that I’m averse to exercise.  It’s just that I’ve always turned up my nose at jogging.  If I’m going to be leaning hard on the important ventricles, I’m going to need better scenery than the shoulder of Route 302 between the gas station and Applebees.  I want to be kayaking a river, or hiking a mountain, or kayaking down a mountain after downing large amounts of low quality beer.  Why jog when there are far more sublime ways to make sure your pants fit?

I love sports, but running isn’t a sport; it’s a necessary evil.  I loved lacrosse.  It’s fun to score goals, to make passes, or to punch guys in the crotch when the ref isn’t looking.  But if you can’t run for four minutes without staggering around like Ryan Lochte trying to find a gas station wall to urinate on, you probably won’t score any goals, or make any passes, or outrun any guys whose groins you just violated.  To keep us in shape, my lacrosse coach had us run “San Diegos” — sprints that were so long, you felt like you were running to San Diego.  (In California, they call them “Lakeville, Connecticuts.”) Sometimes, slumped on the ground in a semi-conscious state after running San Diegos, we’d happen to notice the varsity baseball team down the hill.  Their practices definitely did not consist of running.  They mainly involved chewing gum, adjusting their crotches, and making sure their pants were fully tucked into their socks at all times.  We’d look down at them having a grand old time and definitely not doing San Diegos, and you know what we’d think?  We’d think, “Boy, their uniforms look stupid.”

So why did I start jogging?  Because marriage is a compromise.  My wife is one of those people who actually enjoys jogging.  She likes jogging so much that doing it for 26 miles — a marathon — was not enough jogging for her.  She once ran a 50K.  That’s 50 kilometers — which translated into miles equals “you don’t want to know.” It’s one of those races that when you finish, they give you free water, free food, and mandatory psychiatric testing.  Let’s just say I’ve become fatigued while driving shorter distances.

Here are a few random quotes my wife and others have said to me over the last few weeks that we’ve been jogging, with some commentary afterward.

1.  “Come on, it’ll be fun!”

Never a good sign.  My wife says this to me before we go jogging.  Think about it: have you ever gotten home from something truly amazing and said to yourself, “Gee, there’s no way I ever would’ve agreed to go fly out to the Super Bowl with my buddies on a private jet and throw things at Jerry Jones from our luxury box — if I hadn’t been told ‘It’ll be fun.'” No.  That’s something your mom tells you to get you excited about running errands, or about going to Aunt Judith’s house for Passover.

2. “You’re doing great.  I’m really impressed.”

I start my runs at a torrid pace.  World-class pace.  A tremendous pace.  From the first thirty seconds, I’m Mo Farah.  It has to do with my superb conditioning, mental toughness, and the fact that the first quarter-mile is downhill.  After we hit flat ground, my wife is usually a speck on the horizon, yelling comments like the one above back at me.  At that point, I settle into a more realistic pace: definitely not a run, but not quite a walk either.  Dignified.  Or like a guy who once voted for Harry Truman shuffling off to his bingo game in Del Boca Vista between hits from the respirator.

3.  “So . . . how was your day?  Mine was great.  Um, are you still breathing?”

I look at going jogging the way a sled dog driver looks at going out when it’s -50: I’m just happy to make it home.  My wife on the other hand looks at it as a perfect time for us to catch up and talk about how our days were.  “So you can’t believe what happened today on my commute,” she’ll begin as we’re starting up a steep hill, and then proceed to continue talking non-stop for several minutes without gasping for air.  Then she’ll turn to me and say, “You haven’t said anything in awhile.” I’ll respond with what sounds in my head like, “Not trying to be rude, just focused on keeping oxygen flowing into my lungs,” but which actually comes out as, “Umuhuhuh . . .  Ughhhhh.”

4.  “There’s no way you could do that.”

On the morning after our first jogging trip, I woke up to find that I was hurting in places I was not aware I had feeling, such as inside my capillaries.  I looked like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in his last season, when he was 87.  Dick Cheney was more mobile that morning than I was.  I swore I’d never jog again.

That evening we happened to run into a friend at the Coop who’d just run his second ever 5K.  I asked him his time.  On the way home, my wife seemed impressed.  “That’s not that fast,” I said.  She gave me an incredibly skeptical look that said either “You could never do that,” or “Did  you really just wear sweatpants to the Coop?” That did it!  That’s like questioning Donald Trump’s wealth.  Records were going to be shattered!

That night, I went to work.  I mapped out a 5K route for my wife and me that was perfect in every respect, except that I’d be jogging it.  The next day we started the stopwatch.  After my usual blistering first thirty seconds, I fell completely behind the pace, only making up for it by taking the last mile or two at a dead sprint and collapsing on the front lawn, fully expecting to wake up weeks later hooked up to machines.  But I had beaten the time!  I couldn’t have been more proud if I’d been able to actually stand up during the next few days.

5.  “Yeah, that’s . . .  not bad, I guess.”

Don’t make the mistake I did.  Don’t go into school the next day beaming with pride and tell one of your students, who happens to be captain of the state championship-winning cross country team, about your pathetic old-man exploits.  Because a small smile will cross his face.  Not a wide one — he’s not that crass.  And frankly, you’re not even worth it.  But a small smile.  Then he’ll be as diplomatic as possible.  “”Yeah, that’s . . .  not bad, I guess.”

“Say, how fast do you usually run it in?” you’ll ask foolishly.

Now it’s not important how much faster he is than I am.  It’s not important that on his slowest days, when he has just consumed a box of donuts and is wearing snowboots he would have time to finish the race, shower, and do his AP Physics homework before I’d cross the line.  What is important is that I beat his time now.

So if you need me, I’ll be in my altitude tent.

I’ve been thinking a lot about young voters during this election cycle.  As a high school teacher with many of my students turning 18, or already 18, I often talk politics these days with the youngest part of the electorate.  What have I found?  The short answer is this: most (though certainly not all) think Trump is crazy.  But I haven’t found a single one of them who is excited about Hillary Clinton.  None of my male students, none of my female students.  The majority of them wanted Bernie.

While this is hardly surprising at a Vermont high school, my students’ opinions echo a broader trend: young voters — the so-called “Millennials” who helped sweep Barack Obama into office — are not excited about either major candidate.  Trump is nuts, but Hillary is the old guard.  She’s out of touch.  A lot of them have “trust issues.”

As David Brooks points out in the New York Times this week, they’re not inspired.

“There is no uplift in this race,” writes Brooks.  “That poetic, aspirational quality is entirely absent from what has become the Clinton campaign.” Clinton, says Brooks, not only fails to connect with voters, but fails to inspire them.

I get it: Hillary Clinton is about as inspiring as your high school principal.  She’s a policy wonk.  She’s not a “natural” politician, and admits as much herself.  She’s more comfortable ticking off programs and agencies.  Her speech is stilted, her interactions robotic.  Ronald Reagan she is not.  Barack Obama she is not.  Her husband, the famously gregarious rope line-worker, she is also not.

And I understand that all voters — not just the young, but the young in particular — look to our leaders for inspiration.  We want to feel hopeful about our lives.  We want to believe that our country will improve.  We want to feel part of something — a movement, a revolution, a march toward progress.  Something.  All of us want to look at the candidate on the screen and get that warm feeling inside and say to ourselves, “That’s who we need.” We want to pull the level for a woman who excites us, not for the lesser of two evils.

I’m a “young” voter too.  In fact, I’m a Millennial — albeit an old one.  The first time I could have voted, I didn’t.  It was November of 2004 and I’d just graduated from college and was living in Washington, D.C.  “What are you doing?” my African American coworker asked me when I told her I didn’t vote.  “You don’t want Bush to win, do you?” What could I say?  I’d watched the debates.  John Kerry didn’t move me.  He didn’t connect.  George Bush won the election.

Four years later, I stood with tears in my eyes beneath the Washington Monument with more than a million of my countrymen watching as our first black president was sworn to office.  That morning I’d biked the ten miles into the city, and all the bridges over the Potomac River — Key Bridge, Chain Bridge — were closed to cars, but full of pedestrians.  They’d come from across America to make the last mile of their journey, this journey that our country had made together since its founding, on foot.  Months before, my students celebrated the outcome down at the White House, chanting at George Bush inside: “Yes we did!  Yes we did!” Never before or since have I felt so distinctly like I was part of something.

I was lucky.  I had my guy.  At 26 years old I got to pull the lever for a once-a-generation politician: not only our first black president, but a gifted orator, a public-minded man of immense dignity whose entire life embodied the American Dream.  I got my inspiring candidate.

Now I’m 34 and I no longer require politicians be inspiring.  I want them to get the job done.  Give me a worker bee.  Give me a policy wonk.  I want someone competent, someone qualified.  I look for stability.  I’m not an ideologue.  I’m not even a Democrat.  I’ll cross the aisle for someone reasonable, capable.  If inspiration’s not part of the package, fine.  I like some who can lift our spirits, but I like someone who can govern a whole lot more.

It’s not that I’ve been disillusioned with Mr. Obama.  Instead it’s that I know I’ve been spoiled.  You don’t get someone truly inspiring and capable and visionary and practical (sorry, I wasn’t “feeling the Bern”) like Barack Obama — every four years.  You don’t even get one every twenty.  My parents’ generation had one Kennedy, and almost had a second one.  I had Obama.  You don’t get a chance to vote for a historic candidate every election.

Except that we do.

I liked Hillary a lot from the get-go precisely because she wasn’t inspiring.  But over the past six months of watching what she’s had to go through, and watching the incredible double standards and the incredible criticism she’s gotten that no man would ever face, I’ve come to one conclusion: she’s incredibly inspiring.

The Onion summed it up well in an article called “Female Presidential Candidate Who Was United States Senator, Secretary Of State Told To Be More Inspiring.“  Wait a second, the article says.  Isn’t Hillary Clinton’s life story — a story about breaking every conceivable glass ceiling — professor, lawyer, senator, Secretary of State — pretty darn inspiring?  The woman was the first female senator from New York.  What does it say about us that we’re not inspired by that?

Up until a few months ago, I wasn’t either.  Then I started watching her closely.

You know what my favorite Hillary Clinton moment has been so far?  That ludicrous “Commander in Chief” forum on TV a few weeks ago.  The idea was: Hillary and Trump each come out on stage, separately, to be interviewed by the loathsome Matt Lauer and to take questions from voters on national security.  Sounds fair, right?  Except it wasn’t.  In fact, that forum was the epitome of everything the first female candidate has had to fight through.  Let’s take a closer look.  First of all, the audience was small and packed with military vets, most of them white males — hardly surprising given that the event was taking place on an aircraft carrier.  Not exactly Democratic territory!

But more importantly: definitely not woman territory.  That evening was the glass ceiling: the mostly-male audience, the aircraft carrier, the military-industrial trappings.  And of course the fact that the male host, Matt Lauer, basically treated Clinton like she was some 24 year-old self-help guru hawking a new all-hemp weight loss diet on The Today Show.  “Secretary Clinton,” he’d say in a soothing, patronizing voice, “we really have to move on.”

But you know what was great?  Hillary gave it back to him!  From the moment she walked out, she had a look on her face that could’ve cut steel.  A look that said, “I know you’ve got all lawn signs — those of you who own lawns — saying I should be in prison.  But I’m Hillary Rodham Clinton and I was Secretary of State and don’t you talk down to me.” She knew that Lauer is a daytime TV lightweight.  Not only did she bull through his interruptions, but — this was my favorite part — whenever an audience member asked a question, she pulled the same alpha-dog power move that she used on Obama back in 2008: she stood up to answer.  It’s a way of asserting power because it makes the person sitting look small.  And I swear she purposely stood right in front of Lauer, blocking him from the cameras and making him feel like a little kid while the adults are talking.  I loved it.

What struck me most about this night was the optics: here was a woman in a man’s world.  The first to do this, the first to get this far, the first woman to have to make her case to the whole country on aircraft carriers.  It reminded me a lot of Barack Obama back in 2008.  You’d see him — a black man going into those all-white diners in Ohio, in Iowa, and you’d think to yourself: that can’t be easy.  In those places, you’re The Other.  It goes beyond political party for him and for Clinton, of course.  It’s about race, it’s about gender.  Clinton was, in that moment, a woman in a place where women don’t usually go.  And while she was criticized for not smiling once during the evening, she didn’t take one bit of crap from any of them either.

That, to me, is inspiring.

Now I realize that everyone views all of this differently, and I’m not seeking to influence anyone into voting for Clinton.  Goodness knows everyone’s mind is probably made up already.  And David Brooks does have a  point: Hillary Clinton is no Barack Obama.  Her vision, her oratory — is not inspiring.  But now I’m thinking about that young Millennial voter — me twelve years ago — who loathes Trump, but still might not vote because he does not feel either candidate connects with him.  To that young man, I say this:  grow up and take a look at the big picture.  History is going to look back on this election as a much bigger moment than most of us can even realize.  Hillary Clinton is a historic candidate.  Say that she’s the wrong candidate, that she’s not trustworthy, that she’s not right for the job, or that her vision is not inspiring — that’s fine.  Heck, say that you’re not voting for anyone.  But don’t say that you’re not voting for her because Hillary Clinton isn’t inspiring enough.  Because when you really step back and look at it, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense.