The Millenial Who Didnt Buy into the Thirty Year Grind

I read Jay and Lauren’s story in the New York Times in 2018, shortly after it happened. I was intrigued. Not so much by the horrifying way they died, but the crashing together of different cultures on a deserted mountain highway in Tajikistan. I was also intrigued by what motivated Jay and Lauren to leave well-paying Washington jobs and take the road less traveled. After writing a proposal for the publisher and digging into some research, I found Jay’s declaration that “he didn’t want to waste his years in front of a small rectangular screen at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, retire at sixty-five, and then die ten years later.”1 This resonated with me; it fit in with Americans who have thrown a conventional life aside to pursue a life less certain. Jay and Lauren’s desire for adventure or a different American dream fits the pantheon of people looking for something beyond the safe confines of a world without risk. American history is littered with adventurers, from Amelia Earhart’s daring aerial exploration to Teddy Roosevelt heading West to the Badlands, to Jack London’s famous trek into the Yukon, to Mark Twain lighting out for the territories, to Thomas Stevens, who in 1887 biked around the world on a big wheel bicycle, all the way back to Thoreau, and up to the present day of Chris McCandless’s journey into the wilds of Alaska.

A Couple Who Wanted a Different American Dream....Evil on the Roof of the World

On a bleak highway in the mountains of Tajikistan known as "the roof of the world", in July of 2018, Lauren Geoghegan and Jay Austin along with two other cyclists, were brutally murdered by five ISIS terrorists. They were both Georgetown University graduates who had quit their well-paying Washington, D.C. jobs to pursue a bike trip around the world, looking for a different kind of American Dream. Pieced together from Jay and Lauren's Simply Cycling travel blog and social media posts, interviews with their friends and family, and media coverage of their murder, author William Elliott Hazelgrove creates a complete, narrative retelling of Jay and Lauren's story. Evil on the Roof of the World combines biking and travel adventure with true crime elements, sensitively presenting the trajectory of Jay and Lauren's hopeful beginnings; the difficulties and meaningful experiences they found on their journey; the foreshadowing leading up to the attack; and the way they, their loved ones, the media, and the perpetrators made sense of this violent encounter. Like Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild, this is a story of a couple who went off the grid to find the great adventure of life.

The Brilliance of The Great Gatsby

The critics have not been kind but they are wrong. The Great Gatsby shimmers on the screen. The film does what Fitzgerald did; it takes us in the eye of the metaphor and jumps into it and then does what any art does...exaggerates. Take the green light. Perfect. Of course we build around that visionary beam of the American Dream. It is nothing less than Gatsby's soul and in the movie the green light beams and beams like a laser strobe across the bay from Daisy's dock. It is the coalescence of the Fitzgerald novel...the magnet that catches all the metal filings. And we open and close with that green vision of hope... but lets move on.

The flowing billowy curtains that takes Fitzgerald's prose and puts it into form. The eloquence of that metaphor is the women and the room are all floating around the ceiling and when Tom Buchanan shuts the door he shuts it all down and everyone floats back down...the effortless ether of the rich against the hard malice of Tom. And then of course the parties that seem to bother everyone. Have you never partied? Maureen Dowd of NY Times and others just couldn't get around the fact that these parties were over the top  and fantastical. Did we ever live through the first twentieth century boom before income tax? During prohibition? And of course the original prose was over the top. When Fitzgerald describes the party it is the top of the top doing what they do best.

And then of course the driving. The crazy driving and Gatsby's car which is described as a leather conservatory in the novel and an amazing yellow car nickel plated and swollen with hat boxes and fenders and curves and so we create Gatsby's car and the way he drives and the way everyone drives in the roaring twenties. And could the party in Toms apartment been any more than the drunken bacchanal of sex, jazz,  and booze that was the twenties?  And then we go on to the showdown at the Plaza and Gatsby cracking up against Toms hard malice. And what is amazing is the film stayed on Fitzgerald's metaphors and prose giving way to the book by putting the actual words on the screen and yes the use of Nick Caraway as the writer might have bothered some but it did anchor us in time and yes the relationship between Nick and Jordan Baker was lost but a small point for finally taking on the  love story of Jay Gatsby and Daisy and giving the story its markers as the last will and testament to the American Dream.

I was all set to hate this film. In fact I never believed the novel could be brought to life on the screen but the movie brought to life the story and tipped its hat to the prose all along the way. The brilliance of the movie is that it made brilliant Fitzgerald's prose....a film of metaphors and for someone to pull that off in the year 2013 and bring high brow entertainment to the masses...I'll drink a highball to that any day and say with Jay Gatsby in his pink suit...
Cant repeat the past!...of course you can old sport!

Rocket Man...the upside down American Dream

Why Gatsby Will Always Elude Film

We all saw Coppola's effort to capture The Great Gatsby with Redford and Mia Farrow mooning after each other in seventies grandeur. Great clothing. Great cars. Great music. Terrible movie. And yet here was Fitzgerald's masterpiece, but of course Coppola's problem was he was too in love with the novel. He tried to interject Fitzgerald's prose wherever he could and it was like laying silk on charcoal. "Cant repeat the past, of course you can old sport!' Redford choked on that one.

And if the characters didn't choke on the prose then the narrator did. "I have been turning over some advice my father gave me once...." The stertorous Nick Caraway years before he was a TD Waterhouse mouthpiece just couldn't handle those lines without dropping them like lead into the Long Island Sound. And why shouldn't he? Voice overs are tricky anyway and literary voice overs feel like syrup dribbled all over perfectly good scenes. Scream when the metaphors become too much.

But metaphor was Fitzgerald's gift and that elegiac elegant prose does not translate to the eye or the ear. It was meant to be read. Sadly for DiCaprio and everyone else involved in the new attempt to bring Gatsby to the twenty first century they will only succeed in sending people to find the book. And even if they update the story will not translate. The intelligence of Fitzgerald and any first rate novelist is they understand the keening of a read line of prose and its impress on human consciousness. No amount of CG will ever bail out a visual medium in this area.

And so we will be left with the plot without the fine linen. And so, we will beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaseless to the novel. And not the film.

Rocket Man...The American dream turned upside down
 

The Hyperactive Moment

We do not live in the moment anymore.  We live in the hyperactive moment. One moment to the next. We know longer know what the moment is. Computers have done this to us. The speed of our lives is such that we can not afford to stay in the moment. We have to be to the next or we will get left behind. Sure. Go ahead and lose that phone or that computer. You will be living in a tent. There is nothing less than survival at stake.

We think about it. On vacation. We slow down some then. And we think about slowing down and enjoying the moment but even then our phone is going off. Even then we are afraid of missing something and we look to the next moment. That is why we are always checking our phones. The present moment is no longer enough. There must be something better  coming.

And we wonder why kids have ADD. Is it the kids or is it the speed of our life. We cannot afford to have our kids take their time. They will be left behind and nothing less than their survival is at stake or so we thing. So we run even faster. Lose another moment to the next and before we know it we are all out and we are not even sure we have lived at all.

Rocket Man...the American dream upside down

www.williamhazelgrove.com

 

Guilt Parenting

A lot of parenting is out of guilt. Guilt over spending too much money. Guilt over not spending enough money. Guilt over not enough vacations or any vacations. Guilt over giving them a phone or not giving them a phone. Guilt over not giving them a car or not giving them a better house, a better neighborhood. A more progressive life. A less progressive life. A better school. A better upbringing. What is there not to feel guilty about?

Work more and feel guilty about not spending enough time with your kids. Work less and feel like you should be doing more to make more money for your kids. Give them allowance and feel guilty they don't understand the value of a buck. Don't give them an allowance and feel guilty about being stingy. Send them to a great school and hit them with debt. Send them to an affordable school and feel guilty about not sending them to a great school.

Feed them what they want and feel guilty about giving them crappy food. Give them good food and feel guilty about not getting them what they want. Talk to them too much and feel like you are being a bother. Don't talk to them and feel like you are ignoring them. Take too many pictures and feel like you are putting them on the spot. Don't take enough pictures and feel like you don't care about having pictures of your kids.

So I don't know. Maybe at the end all you have is guilt. That and a lot of pictures. Or not.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the American dream upside down
 

The American Dying Grounds

Florida is the American dying grounds. Dress it up how you will but this is where our people go to finish out their lives. The modern corporate state needs lots of workers and once the workers are finished they go down into the boot of the country to watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune and wait to die. Of course American retirement is not painted this way. It is painted as the Golden years or the time to do what we want. But Florida belies the lie. Here is where people are parked under a tropical sun among the alligators and swamps.

It is our modern Casa Blanc with no flight out except for one. The final flight to the great unknown. And so there is no culture. There is only what people bring to the dying grounds and  while away their time trying not to become senilitic. Because America is for the young. On this we can agree and our country has a funny way of disposing of old people. Forget the Death Panels of Obamacare. The Death Panels were here long before in the form of a people without purpose in a land without soul under a scorching sun.

We are a funny country. We have decided in the American Dream our lives should begin at the end. In truth our lives are what we live during the working years. This is the real retirement in all its connotations. This is the best years of our lives. Banished to Walt Disney's Swampland with nothing to do for years on end is the hell capitalism has created and sold to people looking for the golden watch at the end.

And so we will play Bachi ball and smoke our cigars and drink our wine and watch the sunset. Take our meds and get our operations and trundle down to the Southern most tip of America. The great boot full of the last gasp of our collective effort; the American dying grounds.

Rocket Man...the American Dream upside down

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Disney has changed

Some would call it a horror. Some would call it a Mecca. Some would call it a hell of a good time. But lurking under that vision of Mickey Mouse child-dom is an amusement park. And every amusement park has a bit of the carney lurking in the corners. The guy with no teeth running the rides or the trucks blasting diesel smoke from a generator in the back. And Disney is no exception except everyone does have teeth and there are no diesel generators. What there is is thousands of people and millions upon million in infrastructure to keep the illusion in place

And it is all about buying ultimately. You buy to get in there and once inside you continue buying everything. It is the Mecca of American consumerism...the manna of all the pitches you heard as a kid now attached to every product under the sun. And the middle class is buried somewhere under all this branding as they trudge from one ride to another eating pretty bad overpriced food and buying Mickey Mouse ears for themselves, their kids, grandmothers. And yet this is what everyone came for.

And Disney world is for kids and there is magic. Maybe not in the over run cafeteria style foodaramas where things get a little disgusting or in the hip hop music where kids are doing the Harlem Slide or singing lyrics that are really all about sex. But Disney has had to morph to popular culture because Disney's blood is popular culture and so the thump thump thump of gangsta rap rewritten into something more palatable for families chases you as you run from one mile long line to another and wait for hours for ten minutes of pleasure.

And as the fireworks break over Magic Kingdom you think maybe it was always this way. Maybe Disney World has not changed at all.
Maybe we have.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the American dream upside down

What American Vacation?

Americans do not take vacations anymore. Not really. Paid vacation days are down from even 2011. Fourteen days was the average then and now we are down to twelve days. But here is the kicker. Most Americans didn't even take them all. Ten days. That's the average. The Europeans bust out at twenty five days of vacation and take every one of them. It gets worse. If we do take them we don't even go away for a week. Three days. We take a whopping three days then it's back to work. So I go back to my original question...what American vacation?

It used to be our right. We deserved a vacation for busting our collective hump all year. And that vacation was a glorious two weeks or more. But somewhere that all was lost and vacations became something to be looked down upon. I know a man who ends up with two weeks at the end of each year of vacation days and then he stays home because he has to take them or lose them. What does he do with his two glorious weeks? He said he does projects around the house. Fuuuuun!

When I was growing up we always went to beach for at least two weeks and usually three. My dad worked for a corporation and was a manager and so he had good perks. We would go to North Carolina and hang out in a cottage for our two, then three, then (are you ready for it) five weeks of vacation. And this wasn't odd. Everyone went on at least two week vacations. Many on three weeks. And here is the kicker. My dad would drive down to some salty weather beaten store after the first week and half and use the phone.  He was on the phone for about ten minutes and then that was it. That was staying connected!

Now we can't be disconnected for a day. That's really what killed the American vacation. Us. Sure the companies are stingy but we bought into that we have to stay connected or the world will fall in. The sad thing is those family vacations are what I remember most about my childhood. Everyone was relaxed and while I was bored (what kid isn't) I still loved being at the beach and reading and going out to dinner and just being with the family. Who wouldn't right?

Compare that to my vacation in the North Woods where I tramped through the woods in the middle of the night to get a Wifi signal for my Iphone. Pathetic. But I have bought in too and while we used to always go on a two week vacation now if we can squeeze in a week then it is a victory. Such is the state of the American Dream.

Or at least the American Vacation.

Rocket Man...the American dream turned upside down
 

The American Dream as it stands

Watch this video.
http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-10-Americans-are-completely-wrong-about-this-mind-blowing-fact-2
Ok. Now you know. And if you suspected you are working harder for less you are right. The thesis of Rocket Man and every novel dealing with the American Dream is that it is really a phantom. Take Gatsby. Jay Gatsby had rightly figured out that the American Dream was ultimately to be wealthy. Fabulously wealthy. And he attained it but then he was literally crushed by the forces that be. The Tom Buchannans. The one percent of his time.

Gatsby had tried to crash the gates and had been found wanting. He really didn't understand the forces against him as we know now. Income inequality. Even if you are doing fine you still have to be staggered that one percent of the population owns forty percent of the wealth. Or twenty percent at the top owns eighty nine percent of the wealth while the bottom eighty percent  (us) have 11 percent of the wealth! That is what we divide up. Think about how about the fact that one percent owns fifty percent of the stocks while the middle class own less than five percent. Think about that. These numbers are staggering.

Look around. People are working longer and harder for less. They literally look unwell. People have aged dramatically in the last ten years. Their clothes are older. Their cars are older. These all point to the shrinking pie. What is it...four hundred families own more wealth than one hundred and fifty million Americans! Clearly the American Dream has become one of unloading before the next catastrophe.

I would say the new American Dream is one of downsizing now. Not getting something bigger, but something smaller. It is something unheard of in the march of our country. It was always forward. Now it is one of trying to jettison property before someone loses their job. The American Dream is now simply one of finding something we lost along the way.

Rocket Man...the American Dream upside down

 

A Books Final Pass

Recently I was doing the final pass on my forthcoming novel, The Pitcher. The book isn't out until September but this was my final edits. Maybe I would get another crack at it after copy editing but that is just a few tweaks. No. Now was the final pass and it was a bitch. Every word counts. All those rewrites and there were many count for nothing. There was always the I'll fix that next time. Next time was now here and so I could not kick the can down the road anymore.

And so here is where the difficulty comes. If every word now counts because this is how it will appear on the page then each sentence has to be as close to perfect as you can get. It is a nut cracking process and amazing. Amazing because so many bad sentences slipped through and the amount of overwriting was still amazing. I was still cutting like a butcher and this is the final pass! But it is because this is it that you have the guts to make those cuts that should have been made long ago.

But of course you don't see it until you see it. And now with the copy editor waiting this is the last stop of the good ship author input.  So you make your stand. You do your best. And when you send it off and know that there will not be a second chance, you hope you got it all. 

Of course you know you didn't.

Rocket Man...the rollicking story of a writer whose piece of the American Dream falls apart...Chicago Tribune

Men are as stressed as moms

So says a New York Times article. Apparently men are trying just as hard to juggle fatherhood with making a buck as women are now. The fathers of old don't know how easy they had it. The old days of just going off to work and returning with a martini in the living room before dinner and then a send off kiss to the kids as they troop to bed are long gone. The old Jonathan Franzen Corrections days are DOA. The new dawn of stressed daddydom is here.

You see it everywhere. Men trying to get home to make those kid sports, recitals, concerts, scouts, birthdays. They just cant see to be in all the places all the time. And of course with the two income household now a reality they have to share in the domestics. Do the dishes. Help with the homework. Laundry, etc. But of course the reality is moms still carry the lion share of domestic duties according to the article.

But the stress of not being able to be provider/great dad is very real. There still are some men in the classic mode. I know them. They are gone and have corporate jobs and their wives fill in all the gaps. But they do seem atypical. Even if dads aren't being better dads they wish they could. That is stressful enough.

Rocket Man...being a father shouldn't be this hard
www.billhazelgrove.com


 

Talking About Age

Some people just cant get over that they have gotten older. You know who they are. The same people who went into a bar when they were thirty five and complained everyone was younger. No shit. Gee I guess people do age don't they. Hope I die before I get old has not worked out for the boomers. Now they are being chased down by commercials galore for getting it up to wearing diapers and not shitting themselves in public. The whole youth culture thing has gotten really nasty now that the whole country has gotten old.

Since we quit accepting that people become adults somewhere back in the fifties when Elvis started gyrating we now are a people at sea. We have committed the ultimate sin by aging. In America no one ages or haven't you heard? Except for Judy Dench or Maggie Green or Helen Mirrah. They have aged and done it magnificently but for the rest of us it is a dirty sin. And the whining is disgusting. I now have to listen to people say...WE"RE OLD. Gotta love the way they include you in their sweeping declaration.

But it happens all the time. People who feel old figure everyone must feel the same. And it is simply not true. But our culture shames people when they age. They have betrayed our culture and have passed from youth into something dirty and unspeakable. An adult. Whoa. Stand back Jack. Once  upon a time people were allowed to be adults. But since Roger Daltry said he hoped he died before he got old we are all screwed. By the way Rodger did not die. He sang at the Super Bowl. But we are left now with the whiners.

And it is pathetic. People age. People don't stay young forever. People die. Get over it and enjoy the ride.

www.billhazelgrove.com
 

Shoveling Snow

 There is something about shoveling snow that makes men into boys again. Maybe it is the eerie quiet of a muffled world that takes on back to a simpler time. Maybe it is just the fact you are doing something you did as a kid. But really there is more to it than that. Shoveling snow is innocence unleashed. Shoveling snow is very American  .Powdery heaping pearls of white stuff that you throw over your shoulder. The snow makes the world into a winter wonderland and you cannot help but go back to a time when you believed in everything.

For me it is coming to the Midwest for the first time and seeing all that snow heaped against our house and drifting in from the plains. The Chicago winters were different from the Baltimorean winters I was used too. We had snow but never in the amounts the Midwest generated and we did not have that other worldly cold. And so I was sent out in the early morning or the afternoon to shovel the snow in the great silence

And there is something Godlike about the snow. You stand in it and pause and stare off across the land. I can see a farmers silo in the distance and a neighbors house that looks like something out of Hansel and Gretel. And still there is something else. Maybe it is laboring in the clear cold air that makes one feel very young again. Maybe it is that connection of snow and Christmas. Maybe it is just that for a moment you can hear the world sigh when you stop with that blood coursing through your veins and the wind waters your eyes and you stare across the frozen white land and you mutter to yourself....

God, I love this.

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the American Dream Upside Down
 

Age Attacks

Just had my first age attack. Went to a dinner and the man having it demanded to know my age. I told him. He didn't believe me. Come on now you are older than that. No. I am not I told him. He said. Now I know you are older than that because I know I am a lot younger than you. Nope. That is my age. Still he would not give it  up and muttered, well you look older. And he was not done yet. Dinner was  enjoyable and by the end all seemed well. But as I was walking out the door he said, now, come on...how old are you really? 

In the car driving home I realized I had just suffered my first age attack. But really, it was my second.  I was at another friends for dinner when a man started commenting on my shoes. Nun Bush I told him when he asked what kind they were. In fact I had just bought them and they were basically Doc Martin ripoffs. What kind of soles do they have? Are they soft soles? He demanded. I had no idea I said, but I offered up my soles and he  nodded. I thought so. Later,  I realized what he had been saying...old people have to wear soft soled shoes.

Lets face it the youth culture has done no one any favors. "Hope I die before I get old." Boomers invented it and now they are stuck with it. And you may think well what is the big deal in these situations. In a way they are small potatoes but the truth is people of a certain age want to make damn sure you are aging right there with them. Worse, they want to find your Achilles heel. Chronology is not age. Age is a matter of how you are decaying and at what rate. Some of us decay more slowly than others. Some of us decay at an accelerated rate. But people sniff something if you do not seem to be showing the outward signs of age.

But there are people who are obsessed and who feel old and demand you feel old too. It is sad and this is just the beginning. But I really do believe you are as old as you feel. If you feel old then you probably are. But does it really matter? Really? There is some of "you see you are just like us in the end."  But the truth is the old people were old when they were young and young people will stay young until they croak.

No matter what kind of shoes you wear.

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the American Dream Upside Down
 

The Power Band in America

David Brooks of the NY Times just wrote an interesting piece on the power band, although he didn't call it that. He is fond of the term meritocracy and what it means today. Basically it is Brooks contention that the power band has narrowed so far that only a few colleges can promise a stellar career for graduates. The Ivy League of course. After that it is every marketing major for himself. It is what is behind the glut of twenty somethings living at home now after going fabulously in debt. It is what is behind our current economic slugfest.

But back to the power band. The power band snakes up through the east coast and runs through New York, Boston, Washington. It is where the players are. It is no accident that many of our Presidents, Senators, actors, major Wall Street shakers and movers all came up through this power band. Prep schools on to Ivy League. It is a trail of the few who will get all the benefits and most of the money. For everyone else it is the life of the salesman.

But of course we believe in meritocracy. Everyone should be allowed to move up on merit. The problem is that is not the reality. Brooks points out who is hired and from what schools and the depressing statistics is that unless you are coming out of one of these elite schools then you are on your own. So the narrowing of opportunity is coming down to the select few who know about the power band and are able to exploit it.

Or are born into it. For the rest of us it is Tom Cruises famous line in Risky Business....
UOI here I come!

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the American Dream in reverse

Why People Are So Mad

I was listening to a man talking about how the middle class has no one to blame but themselves. He pointed out that people should have saved and foregone luxuries and reaped the benefits of their frugality in retirement. It is a common charge. That the people who bought too much house and too much car and too much of everything have no one to blame but themselves for losing their homes, their jobs, their savings, and having no retirement. Basically they screwed themselves out of the American Dream.

But the reality is different. Marginalized by globalization, tech, downsizing, outsourcing, a devastating recession, a derivatives crash and a bank bailout...the people who did everything right also got screwed and this is the source of anger that manifests itself in anti government rants and basic disenchantment with anything smacking of the American Dream. The meritocracy we like to paint is in fact an oligarchy where the pie was stolen and not even a slice left behind. And so we have a huge segment of the population left at the alter.

And yet we persist in finger pointing as if we could have avoided all of this. I know lots of people who have  lost their homes. I know people who have moved back with their families. I know twenty somethings who cannot get going. And I know people literally teetering on their feet because they are exhausted after twenty years of unrelenting hard work. They did nothing wrong except belive in the precept that hard work will produce a benefit. But they are not reaping the benefits. A lot of them will die before they retire.

And people know it. They know that they have used up the best years of their lives and now have little to show. The I did everything right crowd is especially pumped with righteous anger. They feel like the bargain was violated and in a sense they are right. The rich has taken too large a bite and they were played by derivative traders that left them with devalued homes. And there is little anyone could do. The fact of the matter is the rich will get richer.

And the middle class will be played right up to the day they die.

www.billhazelgrove.com



http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Man-William-Elliott-Hazelgrove/dp/1938467582/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358702258&sr=1-2&keywords=william+hazelgrove+rocket+man

 

Not Enough Pie to Go Around

You have to wonder if there is simply just not enough pie to go around. All our worldwide convolutions seem to have a common threat and it is that the promises made in the last century cannot be kept in this century. There is simply not enough resources, money, land, water to deliver on the promises made. Social Darwinism is rearing it's ugly head and without a war the general message seems to be that some of us will make it and a lot of us wont. Such is the world we  now live in.

It would seem the optimism that started with the Wright Brothers in Kitty Hawk and dampened by the sinking of the Titanic then buoyed with our triumph over evil in two World Wars then reinforced with the American Centuries Gottermerung of Capitalism, has ended not with a bang but a whimper. We promised the world during those high flying years and the world cannot understand why we wont deliver. From the Arabs to those protectected by our vast Social Safety Nets, we cannot pay on the checks our higher nature is writing.

We have always believed that everyone could have a shot at the American Dream. But of course we never talked about all the people who didn't get it. They mostly died or starved or just went silently into the American night. But now we are really faced with the reality that most people will not find this mythical Leave it To Beaver land of milk, two cars, and a home. We simply don't have the cash and it seems nobody else does either.

Nothing new under the sun. We staved off the laws of survival of the fittest for maybe fifty or sixty years while we ruled the world, but the sun has set and we now no longer have the dineros to help those who cannot help themselves. Like those poor souls who drowned in the icy Atlantic with lifeboats nearby, it is truly every man, woman, and child for himself. At least with the Titanic, woman and children were spared. First class that is.

Rocket Man Kindle Downlaod

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

"Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." - James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

The funniest serious novel since Richard Russo’s Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike." - Chicago Sun Time




Writer in Residence for the Ernest Hemingway Foundation William Hazelgrove's third novel is "a charming tale of fatherhood, family, and the American Dream." (Midwest Book Review).

Is our Literary American Dream Dead?

Maybe the President should stop the town hall meetings. It looked pretty bad when the African American woman said she was about to start eating hot dogs and beans. The President smiled, looked really prosperous, then spun into his answer. Or the guy who asked him point blank...tell me, is the American Dream Dead? He was sincere. And the President had no answer. I guess you have to decide what the American Dream really is.

Horatio Alger is our first stop on the trail of the American Dream; these books published in the late nineteenth early twentieth century were the poor boy who raises up to take over the company and become rich. Very much part of our culture. Anyone can become rich. Anyone can become President. We see this played out in our movies and books constantly. We constantly hold up the lowly outsider who rises to fame and fortune and achieves greatness.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby is the classic questioning of this economic nirvana. The price is just too high for Gatsby's dream and Nick Caraway returns to the Midwest looking for salvation in old traditional values in a world vanishing from twentieth century America. Then our dream was updated through television and questioned in novels such as Revolutionary Road. Our modern American dream is not so much the self made man, but the man or woman who plugs into a corporation and gets security and a job and a house that appreciates along with a 401K. That is the American dream that was destroyed in the crash.

So we still spin this question around. The classic economic model of the American Dream seems to be dead. Our happiness came from our gratification in the land of plenty. Maybe the American Dream needs to be revised. Maybe the American Dream will have to fall back to this is enough, because there might not be anymore for a long time to come.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man. A story of the American dream in reverse
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/