Take a gander at this group of old guys (and one younger lady):
You might think there’s nothing remarkable about them. But you’d be wrong. I met all the guys in the picture when they were young dudes, back in 1982. It was our freshman year of college at Xavier University. (I know that’s hard to believe, as we all look so young… there’s no way we’re in our 60s!)
And here we are, 43 years later. A band of brothers with a bond of friendship that’ll never be broken. That’s truly remarkable.
It stinks that it’s usually sad occasions that bring us together. The first photo above was after yesterday’s funeral for our friend LJ – that’s his wife Patty in the middle. She went to XU too – she and LJ started dating in college, so she’s been part of the gang for nearly as long as we’ve been a gang.
Our friend Ned isn’t in the top photo either – he passed away two years ago, sadly. And a few fellas couldn’t make it in for the services. But they were there in spirit.
In S.E. Hinton’s novel That Was Then, This Is Now, narrator Bryon Douglas said:
If you have two friends in your lifetime, you’re lucky. If you have one good friend, you’re more than lucky.
If that’s the case, then we all won the friendship Powerball lottery. When I showed up at XU back in August of 1982, I had no idea that I was about to hit the jackpot. Such rewarding relationships, with friends that are good as gold.
My buddy Rick (yep, he’s in the photo from yesterday) sent me a text today and summed it up beautifully:
I’ve been thinking this morning that of all the non-XU friends I have, there is not a single one who can claim a cohesive group of 30-40 people who are always there for each other no matter the distance, the financial status, or the time between interactions, the way our crew is. It is honestly a really great feeling, even in times of sadness that will inevitably draw us together again and again, but knowing that even in the sad times, there will always be great stories, great memories, and uncontrollable laughter as the by-product. I thank God for you and our whole group of misfits that somehow all fit together!
Sorry for the ouroboros-like post today. It’s been two years and one day since the passing of my friend Ned. Just like last year, I’m reposting my blog entry from October of 2023, and adding a few new thoughts on life and death (you know, just a couple of light topics).
It’s hard to believe it’s been two years. Maybe some of that is due to the fact that time seems to speed up as we age. But for me, I think a big part of it is because the pain, the sting, the overwhelming sadness of Ned’s passing diminishes over time, and yet the smiles, the joy, the love that Ned gave to all of us is still just as strong, just as vivid, just as real. His death was a punch to the gut that sent all of us reeling. But it had no lasting impact on our hearts. If anything, we love him more, because his absence gives us a greater appreciation for what he meant to us.
The sadness doesn’t go away, but it dulls over time. And the smiles are as fresh as today. Or yesterday. Or two years and one day ago.
Be Like Ned (from Oct. 2024)
One year ago today, we lost our dear friend Ned. (The “we” in this case includes the countless people Ned befriended during his too-short time on earth.)
I’m reposting my tribute to Ned from last October below. And adding a few more thoughts:
Be kind to everyone you meet, from the cashier at the supermarket on up, like Ned was.
Be caring, like Ned was. Ask others how they are doing.
Be faithful, like Ned was. A devoted husband, a proud parent, and a true-blue friend.
Be open to adventure, like Ned was.
If we could all be a bit more like Ned, the world would be a much better place. And to those of us who were lucky enough to know Ned, our part of the world IS a better place than it was before he came into our lives.
Photographs and Memories (from oct. 2023)
Back in my college days, if we needed someone to get swung around like a helicopter blade during a party, Ned was there.
If we needed someone to dress up like an elf, Ned was there.
Getting handcuffed to a loft? Ned was there.
Beer bongs? Ned was there.
For all of our Spring break adventures, Ned was there.
If we needed someone to man the grill, Ned was there.
At all those parties — in the dorm rooms, in the quad, and at the bars — Ned was there.
Whenever you needed a friend, Ned was there.
After college, when some folks from our gang got married, Ned was there.
At all the memorable moments over the past 40 years , Ned was there. Always.
Then, this past Monday, out of the blue, Ned was no longer there.
Suddenly — You were gone From all the lives You left your mark upon
Ned had a stroke back in May of 2020 – it caused all sorts of health complications. But his departure still came as a shock. Now he’s in another “there” and we’re still here.
Tried to believe But you know it’s no good This is something That just can’t be understood
Every one of us has a special place in our heart for the guy who was good-natured, sweet, kind, caring, smart, attentive, funny… and always up for a good time. Ned is still there. He always will be.
Have some woman in West Chester, Ohio read the story, and send the main photo from it to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon for potential use in his “Lookalikes” segment. (I don’t know who you are, but thanks Kathleen Bentley!)
Watch what happened on Monday night.
File this in the “Never in a Million Years” category.
I’m so happy that Cincinnati Magazine got a shout-out, and the crowd cheering “Freekbass! Freekbass!” was surreal. It should be noted that the amazing photo that served as inspiration for the late-night lunacy was the handiwork of Devyn Glista.
(And yes, Jimmy looks more like the guy from Night Moves.)
Bill McKibben is leading the… no pun intended… charge. Please spend a few minutes pondering these points he made in a recent episode of the Volts podcast.
You know, we have called this stuff alternative energy for 40 years. And that has its effect. You know, that’s the corner of our brain in which it ends up. But it’s not alternative energy. Ninety-five percent of new generated capacity around the world and in this country last year was clean, renewable energy. The shorthand I’ve been using is, you know, we’re kind of used to thinking about it as the Whole Foods of energy.
It’s nice, but pricey. Actually, it’s the Costco of energy. It’s cheap, it’s available in bulk, it’s on the shelf ready to go if we choose to use it. And as I say, the fossil fuel industry and Energy Secretary Wright and everybody else are just as cognizant of that as I am. They’re just fighting desperately to try and keep people from making this liberating realization.
the sun gives us warmth, it gives us light, it gives us photosynthesis, and it’s now willing to give us all the power we could ever need. That’s so mind-blowing and so liberating and so beautiful that hopefully we can figure out how to use that to start and kind of shift some of the tired axes of our political debate.
If the current powers that be really wanted to Make America Great Again, they’d get on board the Sunshine Express. But their minds are tiny… and their pockets are weighed down with money from the fossil fuel industry. China, meanwhile, is zooming past – in an EV.
If you look at things like car sales data from around the world, now the entire global south, their vehicle fleet’s going to come from China and they’re going to be electric and they’re not going to be using U.S. oil or anybody else’s, and on and on and on across a wide range. If we have any serious pretension to making America an important part of the world economy, then we’re going to do this. We’re going to have to do this. The alternative is to decide — and I think this is really sort of close to Trump’s heart — to decide that 15 years from now, America is going to be the global museum for internal combustion, where people from other countries who can wangle a tourist visa come to see what the world looked like back in the olden days, you know.
McKibben covers more about the divergent paths the U.S. and China are taking in his latest Substack post:
We only care about now—the president has an attention span of three minutes, and corporate executives can’t see past the next quarter. Whereas the Chinese are clearly thinking many decades into the future, which they plan to own.
right now, Beijing is offering cheap, clean power, employment, trade and a route to prosperity. Washington is offering tariffs, policy chaos, White nationalist memes and South Korean workers in shackles after a raid on an EV battery factory. This is no way to win the grand strategic contest of the 21st century.
Sunshine isn’t just free. It’s a path to energy freedom.
We’ve been locked in an energy system since the Industrial Revolution that was all about centralization. Energy came from a few big facilities and was piped down the line to us, and we took it, and that was that. And it was controlled by people who controlled those relatively rare and scarce deposits of fossil fuel around the world. But that’s not necessary anymore. In 1954, people invented this solar cell in Bell Labs in New Jersey. And it turns out that it’s able to directly translate the power of the sun, those billions of hydrogen-into-helium reactions every second, and make that useful power for all of us.
It liberates us from dependence on those oil companies and all the other parts of that structure, because all of a sudden we can produce on our own homes or locally in our own states, the stuff that we need. It liberates us from the incredible threats that we’re now facing and that darken our world all the time, the threat of climate change above all. And it sends us up into a kind of — well, a kind of sunny upland, you know, “Energy from heaven, not from hell.”
And no one owns the sun, which makes it more egalitarian.
Look, we live on a planet haunted by climate change, and we live on a planet made grotesque by the inequality that we see around us. The biggest structural change that we could make, easily and immediately, that would do at least something about both those crises, is to switch from fossil fuel to energy from the sun. That’s the one big good thing happening on planet Earth.
Yes, there are environmental costs to solar panels and batteries. But it’s way kinder to the Earth.
A boatload of solar panels will provide, over its lifetime, about 500 times as much energy as a boatload of coal. If you let that sink into your consciousness, then you begin to understand the possibilities of the world ahead.
Last Wednesday, I went to Camp Springs Tavern to hear my buddy Keith Neltner and current Tavern owner Tyler Shelton talk about how they revitalized the bar… and its brand.
I worked alongside Keith for several years at an ad agency. (Ahem, design studio… that way they could bill at a higher rate.) I’ve blogged about his prodigious talents before.
Keith’s skill level, his talent, his “eye”… is off the charts. Yet it’s matched by his work ethic, which came from spending his entire childhood (and beyond) working on his family’s small farm in Northern Kentucky.
Keith and his wife Amy bought the Camp Springs Tavern in 2016. With two young kids and no background in slinging beers, they really had no business getting into the bar business. But Keith’s love of the community, and desire to pay homage to history, overruled his brain.
That’s Keith’s grandpa, Lawrence, at left in the photo above. He delivered locally-brewed Wiedemann Beer to Camp Springs Tavern by horse and buggy through the 1940s.
Keith and Amy took a run-down, dusty (and smoky) hole in the wall bar just a spit down the road and turned it into a place where everyone in the community is welcome. The smoke has cleared, and the bar is alive with good conversation, cool music, and amazing artwork.
Open bluegrass jams every other Thursday. Wine from 4 Mile Wine Company (another local business). Live music occasionally.
When COVID hit, Keith (at left below) and Amy figured out a way to turn lemons into lemonade. They enlisted friends (most notably Rob Warnick, at right in the photo below) and their kids to help paint a whimsical mural on the outside wall.
Keith and Amy passed the torch — in the shape of the keys to the bar — to Tyler Shelton last year. He’s a local kid whose talent took him away from Camp Springs for several years, before his heart called him back home.
The talk by Keith and Tyler last week was very cool. Nearly everything they do has an element of collaboration and community in it. Here are two true stories that illustrate that:
There’s an 81-year-old man named Jim Kuper who lives “five hills over” as Tyler put it. He walks to the bar, and he used to walk back home along the road, with no sidewalks or berm in sight. Keith and Tyler created t-shirts with “Get Jim Home” on them, and proceeds went toward a fund to pay for Uber/Lyft rides home for Jim. To this day, there’s a Mason jar in the rafters where folks can contribute to the fund. (Although thanks to the community they’ve built, usually someone at the bar will be Jim’s chauffeur.)
Tyler’s beer coolers (all three of them!) gave up the ghost, and right now he’s doing a “beer-raising” campaign to pay for a new one. Selling locally-brewed Wiedemann, of course.
What struck me most as I scanned the crowd at the talk was that there were dozens of people there — artists, photographers, writers, illustrators — that I’ve met, and become friends with, through Keith. All great people, and my life is richer for having met them.
Keith’s an amazing artist. He can capture the magic in his mind and bring it to life in ways that are visually arresting and strikingly beautiful.
But I think his greatest work of art is a piece that’s been under construction for decades and has yet to be completed: it’s the living, breathing, caring community he’s grown with those hard-working farmer hands of his.
Sometimes it happens one pint at a time.
At last check on Instagram, Tyler’s 500 pints campaign was just over the halfway point. If you’d like to join me in boosting that total, hit me up.
And if you’re in need of a super-talented graphic designer/illustrator/art director/muralist who pours his heart and soul into every project, hit Keith up.
In an apartment building where my wife lived with her friend after she graduated from nursing school.
The building is owned by a guy I know from pickleball.
Two of the victims — ages 20 and 22 — worked at Good Samaritan Hospital, where my wife worked. The other victim was 27. Pretty much the same ages as our kids.
A guy who lives across the street is a fellow parent from our kids’ grade school. His son was in the same class as one of our kids.
Another neighbor who heard the gunshots was just in my company’s office last week. I arranged for him to give a “Green Team” talk about planting native plants in your yard.
I know “it could happen anywhere.” Because it did. And because it does. Every damn day. In some other neighborhood, in some other city.
Wednesday, it was Minneapolis. Innocent young kids, praying in church.
Sunday, it was Cincinnati.
Today? We don’t know where the fickle finger of gun violence will point to. But we know it will.
We fixate on the “why” of it. Because we already know the “how” – and we know it’s way too easy for people to get guns into their hands.
It shouldn’t happen.
Yes, we pray for the victims and their families.
I also pray that our elected representatives will grow a backbone, and finally pass the common sense gun regulations that an overwhelming amount of Americans want.
Because until they do, every neighborhood, in every city, in every state… could be the scene of horrific violence.
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