Back in 2013, I decided to try my hand at writing a mystery novel. I had interviewed Seattle's mystery literati for a cover story in Seattle Woman magazine, and I'd also steered the storylines on hundreds of mystery-themed computer games for my employer at the time, Big Fish Games.

Another of my chief inspirations, perhaps oddly enough, was the 20 years' experience I had as a yogi. I'd practiced anywhere from three to seven days a week, first the grueling style known then as Bikram (hot) yoga and then the very energetic Baptiste-inspired style called Shakti (like dancing on your mat).

I also lost Grace, my would-be mother-in-law, to pancreatic cancer in 2011. She'd made a great impression on me in the short time I knew her and was a huge inspiration for the character Grace in the series. She was also a very practiced yogi herself.

After that, I knew I wanted to do two things with the book: 1) create an older female character and 2) make her a magical sort of yogi. 

I was also a huge fan of the TV show "Medium," about a psychic who helps an Arizona police team solve crimes. Allison DuBois, played by the fabulous Patricia Arquette, often struggles with the limitations built into her gift, sometimes making mistakes. Her fallibility, not to mention her authentically portrayed marital relationship, made the show rise above the fray (for seven seasons!). And there's one more thing. I'm someone whose childhood trauma led to PTSD nightmares, which plagued me for many years. So the often disturbing subject matter in DuBois' dreams resonated with me personally. I was used to looking for the truth in my dreams, sorting out the terror from the lessons.

All of that background and interest is reflected in the Dreamslippers Series, a three-book saga (plus novella) about a family of psychic dreamers who solve crime using their ability to 'slip' into your dreams. Solving crime that way is a lot tougher than you can imagine, as it's not like the culprit will dream of his guilt, pointing the erstwhile dreamslipper toward all of the clues. The matriarch of the family, Amazing Grace, supplements her sleeping skills with waking-life pursuits such as meditation, visualization, yoga, and even a somatic dance style called Nia, which I practiced myself for a few years. Young Cat McCormick, the hero of the inaugural book in the series, has an entirely different take. She bends and breaks the rules, and she capitalizes on an emotional connection to solve a mystery involving a Midwestern, fundamentalist preacher and his (not-gay-at-all) right-hand man.

I released Cat in the Flock under my own imprint, Sky Harbor Press, in July 2014. It zipped up the Amazon sales charts, occupying the No. 1 spot in the Private Investigators category within the first year. It was praised by Kirkus Reviews, Midwest Book Review, Readers Lane, Book Fidelity, and countless other review sites, blogs, and institutions. I was contacted by a Hollywood producer about rights, and later, by more than one game studio interested in making an interactive novel out of it. Cat in the Flock won me my first IndieBRAG medallion, awarded to only the top 20 percent of independently published books. I would also be awarded the IndieBRAG for the other two books in the series.

Bolstered by the success of the first book, and full of more Dreamslippers stories to tell, I followed up with Framed and Burning. This second book in the series is set in Miami amidst the high-stakes art world, and its prescience can be seen in the Jeffrey Epstein case today. Cat and Grace follow the clues to a murder frame-up, which takes them into the Darknet and the powerful players behind a child pornography ring. While the characters and scenario are fiction, it's based on a great deal of factual research. I also lived in that colorful Florida city for two years while working toward an MFA in creative writing, which I earned from University of Miami. And I was once married to an artist, so my experience of that world is very much first-hand.

Framed and Burning was a finalist for the prestigious Nancy Pearl Book Award, and it was also nominated for a RONE Award, in addition to winning the IndieBRAG.

The third book in the series, Bound to the Truth, is in a lot of ways my best. It continues the series' sex-crime theme, but back in Seattle, with an informed, fair portrayal of the Emerald City's sex-positive community. Cat and her grandmother visit a sex toy shop and a sex dungeon in their quest to track down the killer of a prominent Seattle architect. It was my answer to the huge disappointment that is Fifty Shades of Gray, not to mention an homage to Seattle's openness to all, quirkiness of the best kinds, and kinkiness in spades. As a divorced woman in her late 30s living in Seattle in the 2010s, I don't think I could have had a safer, more colorful, more ripe-for-literary fodder dating experience in any other city.

The Bound to the Truth cover is my favorite of the series, too. All three covers were created by Toronto designer Monika Younger, who's designed book covers for several of Harlequin's mystery imprints and brought a great deal of experience and vision to the series.

After that, I went back and tackled Amazing Grace's origin story in a novella, Work of Light. It's only found in the ebook boxed set. Set in the past, when Grace first discovered her powers, it follows her to an ashram in the 60s, where she uncovers the guru's true nature.

I'm grateful to the many BETA readers who gave me feedback on drafts of the books. We writers are far too close to the work to judge it subjectively, especially the further into the drafting (or development) process we get. My BETA readers put on their "cruel shoes" and gave it to me straight, and I revised to the best of my abilities. I think it shows in the higher-than-average quality for not just an indie but for publishing as a whole.

Another dose of gratitude goes out to all of you readers who told your friends about the books, posted reviews hither and yon, and otherwise showed support for my indie publishing endeavor. When I look back on those heady three years with the Dreamslippers, I see that it truly takes a village to raise a book!

Finally, it's time for an important announcement:

In honor of the fifth anniversary of the series, the ebook boxed set of all three books plus the bonus novella is entirely FREE wherever ebooks are sold, except Amazon, where it's only 99 cents (that is the minimum price we are allowed to offer through Amazon). So please tell your friends. And thank you for your interest in my work. I'm so thrilled you find something of value in these words.

Handy book links here.

You Might Also Like:

Amazing Grace, the Seventy-Something Power Yogi: Could You Keep Up?

Sex-Positive Research for Sexy Mystery 'Bound to the Truth'

All It Takes Is a Red Door

From the Ghetto Tarot by Alice Smeets.

I begin most days by drawing a tarot card. It's part of my spiritual practice to think about the current challenge or lesson and draw a card that, when it's all working well, gives me insight. One day last week, I drew The Devil.

This can be an alarming card to have pop up in a reading, thanks to the bad rap the hooved one gets in Christian-influenced culture. I'm many decades away from the colorful images of El Diablo that illustrated my Catholic children's bible, and it still gives me pause. These days, I see the world less in terms of good vs. evil and as more of a continuum. But The Devil in a one-card reading is cause to sit up and pay attention nonetheless.

The deck I currently use is the Ghetto Tarot, created by talented photographer Alice Smeets, who based it on the 1909 work of another artist, Pamela Colman-Smith. There's a lot to love about Ghetto Tarot. First, it's a photographic representation of each card in the traditional deck, of which most people are familiar, and set entirely in the Haitian ghetto. The images are stunning and powerful, showing how the themes in the traditional deck resonate well in a culture outside that tradition. Second, this deck uniquely embraces the darker side of the tarot. Smeets offers her argument:

We tend to concentrate on the light aspects of the seemingly more positive cards and are afraid of the apparently negative cards such as Death, the Devil, and the Tower ... That's because we are conditioned by our society, our parents, and our teachers to categorize the negative as bad, instead of helpful. Many of us fear pain instead of welcoming it. But every negative situation is an opportunity to grow and learn, while every positive situation has the potential to spin out of control.

The deck plays on "shadow" as well as "light," with each card in the deck possessing both sides. The Devil's shadow side can be "acting against your convictions." The "light" is "finding and accepting your dark side." 

Drawing The Devil would have been reason enough for me to mull over the idea of finding and accepting my dark side, but sometimes the Divine hits you over the head with things that seem to have extra importance.

The same day I drew The Devil, I went to the library to pick up a book I'd requested through interlibrary loan. I had learned of the book from a review and either hadn't seen or didn't remember the cover, which is this:

Yeah, I know. Pretty interesting coincidence. The book is a provocative read, all right, challenging everything I've believed about my parents' generation. Maybe that was the lesson of the day: To go there, to push my thinking into a dark place again. The book sort of chose me, along with a few others on class in society--after this in my stack are White Trash and Poor But Proud. It's all research for an in-progress novel based on a real-life murder.

My previous work is a lot of light: the Dreamslippers Series. Back in 2012 when I began to write those stories, I started to take my first book in a darker direction, and the result is that I relapsed into PTSD nightmares, which I'd been free of for some time. So I backed away from that and wrote a cozy-ish series about a 70-something yogi named Amazing Grace instead.

But of course, some of the darkness seeped in. It's called conflict, and you can't have a story without it, especially if your sleuths are solving murders. Besides murder, I also tackled anti-gay violence, racism, murderous jealousy, BDSM, child pornography, and incest. So, yeah. Even when I've got my head turned toward the light, the darkness fringes. At the corners, at least.

I'd been content to relegate it to the edges. But this Devil showing up in my life with such force made me wonder. A recent bout of writer's block specific to the aforementioned novel-in-progress came to mind. Maybe the block had to do with suppressing the dark side? Not wanting to go where I sense this story will make me go? And if I had any doubt, scanning through my email the same day of the two devil-related incidents above dispelled it, as one subject line in particular jumped out at me:

Writer, give in to your dark side

The email came from one of my favorite follows, Colleen M. Story's Writing and Wellness Blog. And lo and behold, the entire newsletter was devoted to this "dark side" issue, and specifically for writers. The articles? Here you go:

• Why You Need to be Bad Now and Then to Write Well
• Get Mad: Marketing from Your Dark Side

 The email was illustrated with another devil:

At this point, I'm like, OK, OK! Dark side! Got it! Thanks, Spirit! Paying attention now, I promise!

But ugh.

Didn't I already know this? 

Over the winter, my stepson turned us onto a movie he loved called Inside Out. It's a Pixar animated film, brilliantly done, and the gist of it is that [spoiler alert] the character you think is the hero, the one who's relentlessly positive, actually turns out to be the villain. At least of a kind. The movie does a remarkable job of illustrating how terrifically bad it is to suppress feelings because they're "negative." The filmmakers consulted psychologists in making the film. I highly recommend it for anyone who's convinced--or is tired of those who are convinced--that positivity is the only way to go, all the time. You're welcome.

There's a real benefit to healthy expressions of negativity. If someone's wronged or harmed you, swallowing your anger or outrage could actually make you feel complicit in their act, an enabler to your own victimization. Denial, sugar-coating the truth, false positivity--none of these things serve us well. 

But there's a balance to it.

One of many dead manuscripts I have in a drawer is something I finished back in 2007 called Meat: A Memoir. I gave it to the agent I had at the time, and, based on the title, she had high hopes. (She described me at a party once as "very talented and very intense.") She loved the short story collection she was then shopping around to publishers. But Meat? "I couldn't get through it," she told me.

It was all darkness, with very little light.

So that's my challenge, as both a writer and a human being.  To integrate my shadow and light sides, to allow them to coexist without judgment, suppression, or imbalance.

But how do you do that? Here are five ways I strike the balance:

1. Be honest about your feelings. This starts with your own awareness: If something's bothering you, check in to see what exactly it is. Take a moment to get present; close your eyes; see what bubbles up. Writing can be a very powerful discovery tool as well. Sometimes I'll free-write about my project if I've got writer's block. This story is difficult right now because...
2. Don't guilt or shame yourself into forced happiness. It's OK to feel angry, disappointed, sad, depressed... feel all the feelings. A spiritual leader I know once advised that sometimes, lying on the couch and sucking your thumb is exactly the right response to the situation. This goes for fictional characters, too. My best writing comes when I "torture" my characters and let them respond in very human ways.
3. Don't guilt or shame yourself into silence. Talking about the darkness can help bring it into the light. I once had a writing teacher say that Shakespeare's work continues to resonate to this day because most of the characters are speaking at moments of high crisis. This is where the best fiction lies.
4. Don't let anyone else guilt or shame you into silence. Whenever I get to the point where I feel someone is just not capable of hearing me, I stop the conversation and find other ways to express myself. Truths can be uncomfortable, and when they threaten status quo, there can be a tendency to silence the truth-bearer. But silencing someone is a power play that comes from insecurity. This goes for writing groups, too. If someone's critiquing your work in a way that feels silencing, it might be time to reevaluate whether the critique is constructive or even helpful.
5. Don't wallow. If you find you've been wading in the darkness for some time, and you're far past the point of gaining insight from it, then it's time to get up off the couch and rejoin the world. But even then, don't do the things people want you to do but rather what brings you happiness. That goes for the writing, too. Like my dead manuscript example above, an all-dark world doesn't actually make for good storytelling. Without the victory, conflict can feel relentless and suffocating. 

What it comes down to is your shadow side and your dark side actually need each other.

Thanks to Alice Smeets for her lovely Ghetto Tarot and Colleen M. Story for her insightful essays. I hope you'll check out their work.

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Sometimes I like a good film noir classic, as in the 1944 movie "Laura," named one of the 10 best mystery films of all time by the American Film Institute. This one was just right for a Saturday night movie binge because it features a young Vincent Price as a pretty boy gigolo, if you can imagine that, and a victim who's made a life for herself as a successful advertising exec, a rare career woman for her time.

 What I didn't expect in this strange but clever whodunit is that one of the main characters and ongoing suspects is an eccentric writer, a dandy who pens columns while sitting at his bathtub desk. From his posh penthouse apartment in New York, he brags about making fifty cents a word on his writing.

 Hold up, I thought. Fifty cents a word? In 1944? 

 Those of you who've never tried to make a living with your words probably don't know this, but fifty cents a word is considered a good rate today. Yeah, in 2016. I'm part of several online freelancer forums, and there I regularly see rates of $150-300 for a 700-word article, which works out to about 20-40 cents per word. The top echelon magazines reportedly pay their freelancers $1-$2 dollars per word, and there are a rare handful of freelance writers making bank, but the vast majority of words that get written in America today sell for far less. Disturbingly, there are plenty of publishers who expect writers to work for "exposure," or for mere cents per word. 

 Here's what writers today should be making per word, if we take 50 cents in 1944 and adjust it for inflation: $6.82.

 That would be almost $5K for a 700-word piece, which is a far cry from reality. And you wonder why so much of what's out there is written in listicle format and laden with gifs! Even if the 50-cents-per word bit were a dramatic embellishment, and let's say the actual writer pay at the time was half that, at 25 cents per word, or a quarter, at 12 cents per word, which is about what I make today on stories for my local paper, we're still looking at serious stagnation, or even devolution. Depending on whom you ask, the publishing industry is either experiencing a glorious renaissance or is in its death throes. If it's the former, writers on the whole aren't experiencing the golden part of this age, and if it's the latter, then I suppose things will only get worse from here on out. 

 In my overly long, SEO-designed headline above, I promised I'd mention how this relates to the overall brokenness of the economy. This writer wage stagnation/devolution is another example of how we've been shafted in the last generation as productivity has actually gone up but salaries haven't kept pace, pay for CEOs and others at the top soared while most other pay stagnated, and benefits such as pensions and employer-paid health care became a thing of the past. I'm no economist, though, so let me refer you to these nine sobering wage stagnation charts put out by the Economic Policy Institute.

 Sure, EPI is considered by some to skew liberal and/or is tainted by its labor backing. But you know what? It's hard to argue with the data. For example, since 1979, middle-class wages rose only 6% and low-wage workers' salaries actually fell by 5% while those with the highest salaries saw a 41% increase. Here's another: In the 1960s, CEOs typically earned 20 times what a typical worker earned, but today they rake in 296 times what a typical worker makes.

 So writers in this analysis are low-wage workers whose salaries have fallen over time. Our economy is one big film noir movie, but the villain is greed and the policies that support and enable greed. Spoiler alert: The mystery of who killed Laura, the advertising exec, is far more fitting and poignant than anyone in 1944 could have imagined. Yep. You guessed it. The writer did it.*

* Or at least, he thought he did (plot twist!).

The other day I thought about how much I wish I had a bionic spine, and I remembered that back in the 70s, they totally promised us bionic everything when "The Six Million Dollar Man" debuted on television. Here it is 40 years later, and still no bionic dude.

The show only ran for four years, but in the monoculture of the time, everyone watched it. We kids fantasized what it would be like to have superhuman powers, which seemed well within the reach of science. "We can rebuild him," the narrator intones. "We have the technology." This is a great example of what I like to call "hand-waveology." Whenever science is used to further a plot without tackling sticky improbabilities like resource scarcity, return on investment, or actual scientific laws, the writers are sort of waving their hands, expecting us to accept it, no questions asked.

The other thing about the show is that it suggests technology can turn us into a better version of ourselves. Not some clunky inhuman cyborg but a man who's only a robot on the inside, where it doesn't mess up his man-ness, and the robotics only serve to make him stronger, faster, less vulnerable. And all for only $6M. I can remember that sounded like a lot of money back then. It doesn't anymore.

I wondered what that $6M would be in today's dollars, and it turns out it's $29,118,985.80. So the remake would have to be called "The Thirty Million Dollar Man." 

Of course, if they really did try to "rebuild" an astronaut today (LOL), assuming he's given permission to use his body as a science experiment (apparently not an issue for 1970s viewers), and assuming for the sake of argument that the technology actually does exist, it would probably run at least a billion, and there'd be cost overruns and delays. It would cause a huge controversy in a number of areas: government spending, the whole scary robots-taking-over-the-world-thing, the ethics of experimentation, etc., etc. There'd be lawsuits and counter lawsuits. #whyamisocynical #howcouldinotbe #thatisall

The author in 1991, when she ran the summer canvass for Missouri Public Interest Research Group (MoPIRG).

Every time a social commentator dusts off the old generational saw and puts forth a new theory about what's happening with Generation X, I groan. After 25 years, it's tiresome to be told over and over that my entire generation is comprised of a bunch of "slackers," that my friends and I have somehow failed at the game of life. That is, when I have time to read the stories. I'm usually too busy working. 

When the movie "Slacker" came out in 1991, I didn't have time to see it in theaters. That year, I was enrolled in college full-time while simultaneously running what was then (in terms of membership) Missouri's largest environmental organization. I was also holding down several part-time jobs and putting myself through school on a mix of scholarships, loans, and my own income, as no one was paying my way.

When I finally saw the movie on VHS, I thought the "Madonna's pap smear" character had a sense of humor that was cannily similar to my high school best friend's, but other than that, the movie didn't resonate with me.

None of my friends seemed to be slacking off, either. That high school best friend went to one of the best journalism schools in the country, was politically active, and had launched her own paper devoted to animal rights issues. Most of the other people I knew were working in "the movement" in some way, knocking on doors in the evenings trying to raise money and grassroots support for bills that would, for example, bring least-cost utility planning to Missouri or raise corporate auto fuel efficiency standards. Not as sexy as a 60s protest, but these are the nuts-and-bolts of real social change.

So whenever Generation X gets unfavorably compared to the baby boomers, I feel defensive, and justifiably so. We've been living under the shadow of the baby boomers all our lives, and enough is enough. It's time to question the authority that taught us to question authority.

As a student activist for all of my undergrad days, I took part in quite a few public demonstrations: to protest the first Iraq War, to fight racist policies, to uphold Roe vs. Wade, to protest the Catholic church's stance on gays. But what I'm most proud of is the measurable change we brought about in the form of community gardens planted, food distributed to those without, and bills passed to protect our rights, our air, and our water. Some of the members of my generation did a fine job of continuing the legacy of the boomers, and the world is better off than it would have been without us. And we did it without burning down any buildings.

But Generation X has always been on the cusp of an empire in decline. And what that means is that a lot of us, despite our practical idealism, find ourselves in adulthood having to shift from savior mode into survival mode.

We've lived through a recession in the 90s followed by a short-lived boom followed by terrorism, wars, and economic collapse. Pensions, the likes of which many of our boomer parents still enjoy, have albeit disappeared for us. The very notion that a person could work for a company throughout her adulthood and then count on being taken care of by that company in her old age seems quaint and unreal to us, like Beaver Cleaver's white picket fence. We've had to do more with less than our parents. As this chart vividly illustrates, the U.S. was recently surpassed by China as the world's number one economy.

Most of us are saddled with student loan debt we might still be paying off in our old age. I don't know a single person who doesn't feel deeply depressed after clicking through her company's online retirement calculator, if she's lucky enough to have a job with a 401(k) plan. We know Social Security likely won't be there for us when we need it. The money taken out of our paychecks now funds the baby boomers' retirements, but it looks like it won't be there by the time we can no longer work. And even if by some miracle it is, it won't be enough to live on, especially since many of us won't own our own homes. Most of us figure we'll just have to keep going till we drop.

Even those Gen Xers who never tried to change the world were working hard at what they were doing: starting businesses, raising children, making art, you know, little things like trying to become writers during the collapse of the newspaper and publishing industries. That high school best friend of mine never got a chance to be a journalist despite her J-school pedigree.

By the time I hit my 30s, I had shifted from politics to non-profit fundraising to education, hoping to effect social change on an individual level with every student I taught. I turned down a university teaching post in favor of working for a community college, reasoning that I could have more of an impact with that student population than I would at an expensive, private university.

But even after earning tenure, I was still making far less than median salary for my region. Because my raise each year would be lower than the rate of inflation, I was staring down the barrel at a lifetime of personal economic struggle, in which I'd be effectively making less every year while the cost of living would continue to rise. 

And not only that - I felt like my impact on students was very limited by the broken educational system in which I tried to function. Washington state had put its funding into community colleges at the expense of four-year universities, and both students and teachers suffer as a result.

I'd expected to teach a traditional community college population of students in transition, some of them underprepared for college due to the challenges of their circumstances. Instead, community college instructors in Washington state are effectively asked to cover the first two years of a four-year education for the majority of students in the state, but for far less money than their university cohorts, with far fewer resources, and with a higher classroom student/teacher ratio. It's essentially McEducation.

On top of that was the pile of student loans I had to pay off. Then I rode the roller coaster real estate market, buying a house, selling it high, buying another, and having to sell it again, coming out on the whole deal with no gain and more debt.

So in my 30s, for the first time in my adulthood, I went to work for Corporate America, eschewing my idealistic mandate in the process. It's taken me a decade, but I'm almost out of student loan debt. Even so, I'm priced out of the housing market where I live, and my retirement calculator still makes me weep.

Perhaps in our shift to survival mode, we have failed to fight the good fight. These days, I'm an armchair activist at best. But some of my Gen X friends stayed in teaching, and they've done a lot of good, even if they haven't been able to change any of the frustrating aspects of the structure in which they must teach.

The author with her husband, raising money for their spiritual center's trip to Cambodia.

Have I given up my idealism? I help my family, friends, and community whenever I can, and I donate an annual tithe to worthy causes. I've committed a portion of the sales of my book, Cat in the Flock, to Jubilee Women's Center, a fantastic org that helps women transition out of homelessness. At this point, I've donated more than I've earned on the book, and that's OK.

I'm relying on a lot of anecdotal evidence here to make the argument that my generation has never deserved its "slacker" label. You can mesh that with the statistics that have been flinging around the Internets for years about rising education costs, skyrocketing student loan debts, wage shrinkage for everyone except the topmost earners, the dissolution of the middle class, the real estate debacle, the dismal propects for Social Security, etc., etc.

While this argument is structured as a defense, I hope I don't sound overly defensive. Is it right to generalize any group of people, especially on so arbitrary a foundation as birth? Generational theory is specious at best. It's only meaningful in the event of a short-term, measurable spike in births, making the baby boomers the only true cohort we can examine. While I can look across the experiences of the men and women around my age and defend us in a general sense, I also see a great deal of variance.

 The baby boomers were the last generation that shared a common culture, focused as the nation was on a handful of TV and radio stations and newspapers. There used to be more of a collective gaze, a shared set of role models and celebrities. Everyone paid attention to the Beatles, or what was on top 40 radio. But now entertainment and media are balkanized, broken up into a gazillion cable and YouTube channels, Twitter feeds, and Instagram sensations. These days we gravitate toward tribes and identifications. My stepson, who's 15, has no idea what's happening in Seattle's indie rock hipster culture. But ask him about rap stars, and you get a dissertation. The very notion of a "popular" culture is being replaced by demographic preferences.

Generation X was on the cusp of this shift, and many of us are overly nostalgic about our vanished American childhoods as a result. We go wild when listicles like "You know you were born in the 70s/80s if you recognize these" pop up on social media, and we can't help but scroll through, pining for our lost Garbage Pail Kids. Despite acrimonious divorce and/or real abuse that sent many of us into therapy, our childhoods from this vantage point can seem recklessly idyllic. We picture ourselves back then, drinking from garden hoses with abandon and riding our bikes without helmets, the breeze blowing through our Farah Fawcett wings.

We also saw a shift in the idea of role model. Our parents' generation to this day continues to idealize men like Bobby Kennedy, JFK, and Martin Luther King - men who were rubbed out in the prime of their lives. My cynical Gen X mind wonders what would have happened to these men's legacies if they'd lived to old age. It's Ted Kennedy, after all, whom we link to Chappaquiddick, and the baby of the family hasn't been lionized like his brothers have. JFK may have been involved with Marilyn Monroe, but that just deepens his appeal.

By contrast, many of Gen X's would-be heroes have lived long enough to have flamed out in big, embarrassing ways: Pee-wee Herman's public masturbation, Bill Cosby's string of 13 (and counting) rape allegations, Bill Clinton as the highest office of sexual harrassment in the land. Then there's Michael Jackson, Gary Hart, Dennis Kucinich, Whitney Houston, Pete Rose, Tiger Woods, Mel Gibson, Ted Nugent, the list goes on.

Some of them recover and reinvent, like Bill Clinton and Robert Downey, Jr. But still. 

A line from a Gen X-era song sums it up well: "Who'll be my role model/ now that my role model is gone, gone? He ducked back down the alley/ with some roly-poly litte bat-faced girl." Notably, the songwriter is Paul Simon, beloved baby boomer, adopted by my generation.

Perhaps the last best hope many of us had was Barack Obama. But when he reversed his campaign position on the Iraq War and government overreach in his first term, he kind of broke us. But then again, as much as that hurt, it didn't really surprise us. We've come to expect it. Some of us even voted for him a second time, because you know. Politics.

But just think for a moment about what kind of legacy he would have if god forbid he'd been assassinated during his first year in office.

Of course that couldn't have happened; we're in a different time and place than the baby boomers. Our struggles are not to change the social fabric of society the way the 60s hippies needed to do. While our parents were questioning the very authority that was the Great Empire of the United States, we're too busy trying to survive, or change what is still in our power to change, as that empire slowly but surely declines.