The latest poster from the Chamomile Tea Party. Click on image for larger view. (Not only is this a remix of a World War II-era poster this is a remix of my first Chamomile Tea Party poster. And aside from the text, I've made some subtle changes in this new one. Can you see them?)

Pulling this country out of the Wall Street-induced recession has been glacial. To a great extent it's because the Republicans aren't that interested in solving America's problems as much as making sure that Barack Obama is a one-term president. This is Republican Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell's stated goal.

He's not alone. Recently, GOP Senator, Mike Lee, of Utah said he would obstruct all of President Obama's judicial and government agency nominees in the Senate, even though these nominees have bipartisan support.

This behavior is unconscionable. We must move forward to help Americans in need and to compete in the global economy. We need to elect people from both parties who will work together towards these ends. Extreme ideology and obstruction have no place in American government now. Vote out the obstructionists!

For further reading on the nature of polarization in American political discourse today, take a look at this review of two books in the Washington Post: Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics by Morris P. Fiorina and Samuel J. Abrams and The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy by Alan I. Abramowitz.

This poster has been produced in high resolution and is available for free download. Print it out and pass it around. If you like it, share it on Twitter and FB.

See all the posters from the Chamomile Tea Party! And join our Facebook group

Don't pigeonhole the American public. We've got a lot of opinions that aren't so easy to categorize. Click on images for a larger view.

Polarization of Congress, the electorate, and, most importantly, the issues that are important to Americans is destroying this country. Believing America can be so easily categorized into liberals and conservatives, blue and red, is hampering our progress. Solving our problems are more complicated than that. We should acknowledge shades of gray when debating the election of our President and Congresspeople. The issues are not simple and to make them so in debates and political ads is disingenuous. Okay, to be blunt, it's an out and out lie. (Newt Gingrich: your constantly calling out of the "liberal elite" is like the Emperor who's wearing no clothes.) If the politicians can't stop themselves from acting this way, we, the people, should.

These new posters from the Chamomile Tea Party have been produced in high resolution and are available for free download. Print them out and pass them around. And join our Facebook group.

A new poster from the Chamomile Tea Party.

In today's Washington Post, Jonathan Turley, Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University, discusses 10 reasons why the U.S. is no longer the land of the free. It's a sobering account of the slow and sometimes transparent erosion of American's rights after 9/11.

In addition, to our political rights, our economic wellbeing sits on a precipice. The disparity between the rich and the poor is one of the widest in the history of our country. Why aren't people protesting? Well, they are. Occupy Wall Street and others are pointing their collective fingers at a number of issues: corporate greed, the fallacy of trickle down economics (which states the top 1% are job creators), and the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission decision by the Supreme Court which stated, essentially, that corporations could be treated like individuals with no limits on the amount they could contribute to a political campaign.

Put simply, money is the most important issue in our country today. Money brings influence and political victories while it keeps the middle class and poor separate from that power.

In my guise as the Chamomile Tea Party, I've created a new poster that conveys this issue. It's free for the download in high resolution. Print it out, pass it around, and discuss within your communities.

The first time that happened to me was in November 2009 on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In anticipation of that momentous event I went searching my photo archives for a photograph I'd taken at the Wall in 1974. It was a family reunion with the Wall in between. In the decades since I snapped that picture and experienced that Cold War divide in such a personal way, the details of just where I took that photo were fuzzy. I remembered the event and I remembered what occurred during that visit but I couldn't quite remember where I took that picture. I thought it was at Checkpoint Charlie and posted the image on Flickr as such. But immediately, people from around the world began to question the location. A popup community looked for visual documentation that would place the image. And as we searched historical photographs my memory slowly began to come back. The picture was actually taken one block east of the checkpoint at Charlottenstrasse. Through crowdsourcing by a group of strangers another chapter was added to the photograph (be sure to read the comments under the Flickr photograph). Images showing the same corner now showed the transformation of a united Berlin in those intervening years. The story, written as comments and questions from strangers, added a new context to the image.

Last week this happened to me again. I got a voicemail at work from a stranger. She wanted to know if I was the Jeff Gates who had taken a photograph of a storefront in Baltimore in the mid 1980s. I returned her call.

"I had a hard time tracking you down," she said. "And I hope you don't think I'm stalking you. But did you take a photograph of a store called Nomenclatures?" I certainly had but that was decades ago. It had been a junk store and its name seemed out of character with its wares and its working class neighborhood. I was intrigued by that discrepancy and took the photograph. But, once again, my memory of the details surrounding the image was fuzzy.

This was the original version of this photograph from 1986.

"My father owned that store," she said. He died a few years ago but last week I was cleaning out some of his things and found a news clipping from the Baltimore Sun with your image in a drawer."

At the time I was doing a series of photographs with stories on them. Sometimes they were a paragraph; sometimes they were just a sentence; and sometimes there was a text within the image. I had been intrigued by how words could add to our interpretation and change the context of photographs. As she spoke I tried to remember the story I'd put to that image. When I got home I went back to my archives to look.

About a year after taking the initial photograph I had passed the store again and saw it was going out of business. So I took a final photograph. Soon the store and its hand-stenciled sign would no longer exist. I used both the earlier and the later pictures to make a triptych about the value of a photograph over time. Since the place would soon no longer be there the monetary value of my photograph, I thought, should increase. The three photographs indicated each's place in time. And over time the market value of the image increased. The pure artist in me was making commentary on the entirely different world of the art market.

The passage of time is the very thing that makes the most mundane historical images more valuable, on a personal as well as a market level. These images represent people, places, and events that no longer are there. And, as such, their meaning changes. They may originally have been made to document a family event or home but to us in the future, it becomes a slice of time no longer available to us. People are gone and places have been demolished. As we hold these artifacts of memory dear to us their value increase. Because the period in which these images is long gone and we can't take any more pictures of these scenes, the market treats them as valuable commodities. I was commenting on monetary value but the photo I had taken was a reminder to this woman of her father and his life. I created a digital version of the triptych and sent it to her.

She wrote back her thanks but, she told me, the text on these images wasn't the same as the one in the newspaper. "When you took the newspaper image my brother was working at the store and came out to see what you were doing. The text on the photograph was a conversation between both of you. 'Where'd you get the name?' you had asked. My brother replied 'Oh that. My sister named it. She went to college.'"

"I was the sister who went to college," she continued. "My boyfriend and I painted that sign. My father hated my boyfriend and, of course, I married him. We later got divorced but it was the two of us who named the store and made the sign." She sent me a copy of the newspaper article and it all came back to me. I had actually done an initial version of this piece with the dialogue between her brother and me. But I had only shown this early rendition one time and that article in her her father's drawer was for the show it had been in.

Once again, a stranger had added a new chapter to my work. The image takes on greater meaning to me now. Yes, in part because it was part of my history. But more importantly, I now knew it was someone else's history too. I remade the digital image with the original text and sent it to her.

She wrote back thanking me and added "We talked about you at Thanksgiving." My ears were burning. All of this because of a store she named and the photograph I took of it. Twenty-five years later I wanted to know the rest of her story.

It wasn't this bad but it felt like it was.

Last Sunday at 11 a.m. I was attacked by a swarm of wasps. More on that in a minute. But first, what good is a trauma like this if you can't come out of it with a good story. A good story is the souvenir of traumas --providing you recover.

Two decades ago I was visiting my friends Bob and Ellen in San Francisco when we decided to go camping in Yosemite. I'm a California native but had never been to this national park. Bob and Ellen found this odd, but mostly sad, and they took it upon themselves to fix this. So we traveled from sea level to 11,000 feet in one glorious day. Except, by the time we got to Tuolumne Meadows to begin our hike it was nearing dusk and I was starting to feel a bit queasy. Sunset turned into night. Queasy turned into altitude sickness and we were all so tired we just slung our food over a low branch, rather than follow the strict guidelines for keeping bears at bay.

In the middle of the night we were attacked by said bear. The details of this encounter have become legendary and, much to the chagrin of our friends, have been told and retold a thousand times. Over the years, the details of our attack have diverged. Bob, Ellen, and I all now tell very different stories (the bear was light brown, no, black, no, dark brown). Most importantly, our relationship was forever cemented by this event. But if it wasn't for me, there wouldn't have been a story.

The next day, tired and traumatized, we had to move to a new campsite at 6,000 feet so I could recover from the high altitude. There we happened upon friends of Bob's and Ellen's. Still in shock, they started to retell their tale: "Guess what? Last night a bear came in to our campsite." They waited for the expected reaction of horror and sympathy. Yet, there was none. "Oh yeah, that happened to us a while back," their friends replied. Bob and Ellen were crestfallen. It was time to step in. "Friends," I said, "you need to know how to tell a good story. You don't say 'a bear came into our campsite.' You say 'Guess what? We were attacked by a bear!'"

And so, I was attacked by a swarm of wasps. Only this time I really was ATTACKED. Relentlessly.

A couple months ago we reseeded our lawn and after nurturing the new grass it was finally time to mow. It was hot and muggy and I constantly had to wave the gnats away from my face. We never had gnats before. Suddenly, the "gnats" started stinging. As I look back now, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. I remember my surprise at this sudden gnat aggressiveness until it dawned on me. These were no longer small harmless bugs. I didn't actually see the wasps. Not yet. But I instinctively tried to protect myself as I ran to the front door. Which was locked. I pounded and heard someone scream. Me. Simultaneously, I was both being attacked and completely disembodied.

My youngest daughter sauntered to the door. She had no idea what was happening. As always, her timing could best be described as "teenage leisurely." But my oldest yelled out to my wife that it sounded like Dad was being mugged. I ran into the house and the wasps came with me. Then I came face-to-face with my savior. My wife had just gotten out of the shower and as I ran screaming into the bathroom she pushed me into the tub and turned on the water. Again, I was operating in two entirely different worlds. I was still being stung but I had the wherewith all to remove my iPhone and wallet before being drenched fully clothed. I told my wife I couldn't breathe but told her it was because I was just out of breath, not because I was in anaphylactic shock. The adrenaline rush was huge. She got me a kitchen chair so I could sit down in the tub. As she removed my clothes I watched the mound of drowned wasps grow by the drain. She placed my soaked jeans in the sink.

People in shock usually don't know their in shock. It's simply their reality at the moment. As I retell this tale it's pretty clear I was in shock. As I sat in bed, I realized my head was really hurting. The wasps' stingers had mercilessly banged at my skull. Ice pack in hand, my wife tried to figure out the right dosage of children's Benadryl we had on hand. I'd never had a systemic reaction to bee stings before but I'd never had so many stings at one time. She calculated six teaspoons. But when I talked to the on call nurse, she thought that probably was an overdose. I survived. With ice pack in one hand, I posted my status to Facebook with the other. I was coming out of shock.

Later I found at least eleven stings but also found out that, unlike bees which sting once and die, wasps can continually pump venom into you over and over. They were angry and vicious. Apparently, the sound of the lawn mower going over their nest in the hole in the ground set them off.

The nurse told me what the next few days would be like. The stings didn't itch yet but they would start the next day. That would last about 48 hours and then it would start to subside. Luckily, I had time to recover from the actual attack before the untenable itching commenced. It was unbearable. I couldn't sleep. My only saving grace was that each sting seemed to take its turn at being insufferable. Itching can literally drive you mad. I tried digging my nails into my fingers to offset the itch. It didn't work. In the relative calm of the middle of the night I contemplated my insanity. The next night I slept with boo boo bunnies we had saved from our children's childhoods (little plastic ice cubes wrapped up in a plush little rabbit). Ice saved my sanity. And, just as the nurse had predicted, by the third day the itching started to go away.

My wife counted over thirty wasps in the tub but was shocked to find 22 more (some still alive) in my jeans. I was very lucky.

I usually am good to insects. Live and let live, I say. But we had an exterminator to the house on Friday. Those insects met their match. And they paid dearly for their innate aggressiveness. I made him go over the entire lawn, inch by inch. But it may take me a while to get back to mowing. A trauma is a trauma. I was attacked by wasps. I've lived to tell this tale. And this is my souvenir.

Two new posters from the Chamomile Tea Party. Click on each of them for a close-up view.

It's been pretty steamy here in Washington. But I'm not talking about the weather. Here in DC, we seem to live and breathe politics. It's not always our choice. Sometimes our jobs literally depend on what's going on on Capitol Hill. And, the rancor you might pick up out there is magnified over here.

Political wrangling and rhetoric is pretty high right now as the Republicans and Democrats are jockeying for position. But it seems like they're jockeying more for the 2012 election than anything else.

This has been a boon to my creative energy. Finding my voice amongst the flotsam and jetsam of American politics these days is empowering. And this week I've come out with two new posters for the Chamomile Tea Party. As always, feel free to "Like" this post on your Facebook page, leave a comment here, or just peruse all the posters I've worked on in the last year.

Wally Shawn photographed for Time magazine.

This has got to be the worst photograph of Wallace Shawn I have ever seen. What were the editors of Time magazine thinking when they decided to use Peter Hapak's image for their summer reading feature in last week's edition? What? You don't know who Wally Shawn is? I know Wally and this is NOT him. Well, I actually don't know Wally personally, but I once saw him at a phone booth on the street next to the Whitney Museum, which is the same thing.

You do remember The Princess Bride, don't you (he played criminal boss Vizzini who kidnaps the soon-to-be princess)? Or, more cerebrally, My Dinner with Andre. THAT was a movie's worth of the real Wally Shawn.

He is also a playwright, comedian, and, my favorite, an intellectual with an appreciation for popular culture. Look, he played Grand Nagus Zek on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. How much more popular can you get? (Yes, I know Deep Space Nine wasn't the best in the franchise.)

What will you be reading this summer?

Well, that's really not anybody's business, is it? It's very personal. It's too personal.

Look at those bags under his eyes and that scowl. Pair that body language with his answer to Time's first question and his portrait seems quite accurate. But, I can't believe that's true. Not my Wally.

When asked to recommend a book for the summer he replies "It's hard to recommend a book if you don't know who you're recommending it to. I could recommend a book to someone who's quite a bit like me..." Of course! How can you suggest a book or advice if you don't know who you're talking with? Popular culture has eliminated that barrier. We're all close friends, aren't we? Well, except for Mr. Shawn. He knows the truth and his portrait conveys just that: he's not my friend and he has no idea why he was asked to be a part of this Time article. He is the token literary curmudgeon of this group.

But just in case I'm right, I think I'll buy his recommendation, The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant. I may not be his friend now but perhaps there's hope. Then the next time I see him on a street corner I'll be able to intelligently engage him rather than gush and stammer like that time at the Whitney. "You're my favorite pop culture intellectual!" will hopefully be replaced with something, um, more substantial. As long as I can recognize him from his photo.

Today marks the first anniversary of an idea. One year ago today, as I was walking home from work, my brain gave birth to the Chamomile Tea Party. More specifically, I decided to take World War II-era propaganda posters and remix their words with commentary about the caustic state of contemporary American discourse.

I remember exactly how it happened and exactly where I was when the idea hit me. I was let out of work early for the July 4th weekend. I took the Metro home and was walking the last mile to my house. Listening to NPR's All Things Considered, Melissa Bloch was discussing the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan with Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne and David Brooks from the New York Times. Just as I got right here the idea just happened.

Here's the story I've told of that moment for the last year:

As I was walking home from work, listening to NPR, they were reporting that every Republican was going to vote the Party line against Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court and it was like the straw that broke the camel's back. I was so incensed that party politics would trump what I thought was the good of the country I came up with the idea to take propaganda posters from World War II to comment on today's political rancor.

But memory is a funny thing. Yesterday, as I walked that exact path home I stopped to take a picture of where I was at that moment and to reflect on what the commentators had said. When I got home I went to the NPR archives to look for a transcript of that report. And much to my chagrin I found out they didn't say that at all. Yes, they discussed Kagan and her nomination but there is no mention of the Republican voting party lines. But I was sure they had. Funny how your mind works.

Ideas don't just happen. They aren't pulled out of a magic hat. Often disparate interests sit someplace in our brains just waiting to be put together to create something new. I'd always been interested in propaganda posters from the 1940s. I liked their stylized illustrations paired with often sparse but efficient calls to action. Both were hallmarks of great graphic design. In addition, despite many Americans notions that we enjoy the greatest freedoms of any nation in the world, is that really true? Is our government free of subterfuge? Are we really an open society where new ideas are openly embraced? And, finally, I'd been stewing for many months over the hubris politicians and candidates spouted as they calculated the huge payoff from their niche bases. The whole process disgusted me. It seems all of these thoughts were percolating when they decided to band together for the greater good one year ago today.

Angry, I replied in the best way I could. These separate pieces "suddenly" came together. Using my skills as a designer and my opinion as a citizen, I spent the 4th of July weekend creating the first six posters from the Chamomile Tea Party. I did six more the next weekend. Once my brain completed the connections I was possessed. The Chamomile Tea Party moniker had come to me about six months before all of this --such a wonderful play on words with the Tea Party's "take no prisoners" attitude. At the time, I didn't know exactly what I'd do with the name but like a good netizen I registered the domain right away. These posters would be my perfect foil.

The series continues to be a work-in-progress. I've done 19 posters in the last year and I'm working on new ones (I've got one about financial reform I'm mulling over now). It's not easy finding just the right twist to go with each original image. The more I do the easier it is to go off on tangents. The process of coming up with the right phrases is not easy. Culling a complicated idea into its most efficient form is an art. From the beginning I've had a group of friends debating my initial concepts. I love the input and the work is much better for it. This is part of the fun and the challenge of this project.

I've gotten some great publicity along the way. BoingBoing did two pieces and the Huffington Post did an article in their Politics section. Over 750 people commented! These discussions and debates also informed my work. They helped me fine tune my message. It's a constant learning process. And I've connected with others who feel as I do. I've connected with the Coffee Party, a large grassroots organization who are working towards the same goal: cut the political posturing to work together to get our country back on the right track.

Most importantly, I want these posters to be used by others who are interested in these ideas. I've encouraged people to download the high res versions I've put online. And, at the Rally for Sanity last October on the National Mall, others actually printed them large to voice their own opinions. Good work, we the people!

My reservations for the moon were set and this card proved it. Click image for larger view.

For all the dystopian commentary on mankind's distant future the 1968 film 2001 projected, it also allowed us to place ourselves in an optimistic and limitless near future as we neared the apex of America's space program: the moon landing. This was one of the first films to feature low key product placement like the American Express credit card and the iconic scenes of Pan Am's Space Clipper ferrying people to the a near orbit docking station on their way to the moon. If it was hard to visualize humanity evolving into that obelisk's future, it was easy to imagine ourselves participating in the more consumer-friendly one.

Soon after Apollo 8's orbit of the moon in December 1968 Pan Am began taking reservations for its first commercial flights to the moon. And, as it turned out, I was the 1043rd person to do so.

I remember calling Pan Am reservations. "I'd like to make a round-trip reservation to the moon," I told the woman on the other end of the phone. And, without skipping a beat, she replied, "For how many passengers, please?" Using their traditional call center and an identical script added to the reality of what I was doing. I was making a reservation for a real future.

"Two," I said. "For my wife and me." I gave her my name and when she asked for my wife's name I told her "I don't know yet. I'm not married. But I will be when it's time to go." I was adventurous at 20 but had no desire to share this momentous event with strangers. I was planning ahead on multiple fronts.

At first she wouldn't accept my reservation for my wife-to-be but I finally convinced her of my sincerity. She didn't really have to follow every detail of her script and she finally relented. "Will that be coach or first class?"

Our present future is a bit different. Pan Am is no longer and airplane trips are as romantic as bus trips; I finally got an American Express card but leave home without all the time; and commercial lunar trips are still science fiction. Back on Earth and finally married (18 years today) my wife and I are firmly planted in the stratosphere that is our attic, downsizing and getting rid of the more extraneous parts of our past. But as I went through my first box of very important memories I spied this card--proof of my membership in Pan Am's First Moon Trip Club and proof that, at one time decades ago, I was ready to leave home and this planet on the first commercial spaceship outta here. (Oh, this process is sure to be glacial if I keep unearthing important documents like this.)

Now that I have my wife firmly in hand I'm ready for our flight. If I could only give that reservation clerk Susie's name.

I thought the facts made me right. Image by spelio

As I stood in a long line at the ATM outside my bank I smelled smoke. It came and went and, after a while I started to look around for the smoker. At first, I couldn't spot him but finally noticed the man right in front of me was holding a cigarette behind his back as he conversed with the woman in front of him. When I was young I had a severe form of asthma with no help, I'm sure, from my parents' 1950s smoking habits. Luckily, I grew out of the disease. But to this day, I relive those years whenever as much as a simple chest cold impedes my breathing. So you can see why I don't like inhaling secondhand smoke. Rather than passively accepting my fate, I've started to be a little more proactive when it comes to this part of my health. I watched him for a while, assessing his approachability, but decided not to pursue it.

Yet, I really didn't want that smoke wafting in my face. I felt I was being held hostage in line. The next nearest bank branch was a few miles away and my lunchtime was almost up. And, yes, he was shorter than me and dressed in a business suit with no visible tattoos but you never know with smokers (okay, to be fair, you never know with anybody). I took a few steps back to catch my breath and consider my options. "Please don't say anything," I told myself. "Remember when you nicely asked a woman smoking just inches from a restaurant door to please move away? Don't do it." Suddenly I heard myself saying, "Excuse me, would you mind not smoking in line?" And with that I stepped over to the other side.

Time began to move on two very different trajectories. Inside I was operating in slow motion. It seemed to take forever to sense his defensiveness and when I finally did I reacted with an academic's penchant for studious and distanced observation, bogging me down even more. While outside I was trying to quickly manage both my feelings and his. His diatribe escalated. "Who the hell do you think you are? DO YOU SEE A SIGN HERE?!" I looked to others in line for support and solace (a knowing nod of exasperation would have been enough). But there was no eye contact. Nothing. They had already decided not to fight this fight.

I tried one more attempt at reconciliation but it was a lost cause. It was only then I successfully shut myself up. I was seething. And so was he. As I walked away from the ATM, money in hand, time and fresh air allowed me to clear my head.

Control was the primary objective for both of us. Most smokers know smoking is a nasty and unhealthy habit. And there is a long line of loved ones and doctors telling them to stop. But we know how difficult it is to quit. I wanted him to stop smoking; he wanted me to stop reminding him how difficult it was for him to do so. But instead of that realization he got pissed at me for impinging on his "rights." I was tired of feeling trapped in open air by smokers passing me by on the street; he was tired of society's allowable, but slowly shrinking space in which to pursue his habit. In our own way we both felt trapped. And we were both pretty angry about it.

Was I wrong to engage him? Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, calls this error blindness. In her recent TED talk she said: "Most of the time, we don't have any kind of internal cue to let us know that we're wrong about something, until it's too late." It was too late for me when I realized I might be wrong --not wrong to want a smoke-free environment. I was wrong to think I could tell this man how I felt without consequences, or, from his point of view, how to run his life. I anticipated the possibility, but my sense of righteousness propelled me forward anyway. "...Trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous," Schulz continues.

This is a male, "power meets power" thing. And none of it is very pretty. At the very root, I felt humiliated. This is what men feel when they've lost control. No one talks about it much. It's an intense emotion with no outlet other than venting (unless you learn to talk or write a story about it). Angry men are often humiliated men. And it takes a huge amount of effort to come down from that precipice. When I made that very conscious decision to shut up (after my second attempt) it took a gargantuan amount of energy to do so--to take a step back.

Schulz:

Think for a moment about what it means to feel right. It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. And when you feel that way, you've got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you? It turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions. The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they're ignorant. They don't have access to the same information that we do, and when we generously share that information with them, they're going to see the light and come on over to our team. When that doesn't work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption, which is that they're idiots.

It would be so easy for me to say that guy was an idiot and be done with it. "Piss on you!" I could say to myself and walk on. (Or, knowing I have little self-control I might say it out loud and run.) But, that's just it. I have an inner voice. Without it I'd only have my anger. Schulz says "We love things like plot twists and red herrings and surprise endings. When it comes to our stories, we love being wrong." So, why not in real life?

Maybe I was wrong to engage this guy. If I wait just a few more years perhaps I won't have to ever do it again. New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg has signed into law a smoking ban in parks, beaches, public plazas, and boardwalks. And, if I want an even better ending to this story I'll imagine that maybe, just maybe, that guy with the cigarette wrote a story about our encounter too. Perhaps he also entertained the notion that he was wrong. Oh, hell, who am I kidding.

Jim Anderson surrounded by his adoring family. Umm, not quite me.

I walked down the hall as I'd done thousands of times before. As always I'm on a mission. Most of them are trivial: take the trash to the kitchen, transpose a novel from my backpack to my nightstand, or talk to my wife about something or other. This time as I walked out our bedroom door I turned my head, just for a second, to glance at my older daughter's bedroom. And in that moment I felt the culmination of my life to that point. These fleeting events can never be predicted. If we're lucky we're open to them when they hit us. How many have I missed?

Her room was clean (clean!) but empty. She'd spent the night at a friend's house --a sleepover that was sure to transform my happy, laughing daughter into a sleepless zombie later that day. But for now it was quiet and I was safe. In that second, as I turned my head from her bedroom back to the hall, I realized I had a family and I was the Dad. I heard a pileated woodpecker's ratta-tat-tat on a tree just outside her window.

It was a funny realization. I knew all of this already but somehow it hit me anyway. Strange as it sounds, I felt fulfilled. Me, fulfilled? I'd spent most of my life looking forward with expectations and aspirations and suddenly here I was.

Sometimes I feel like I live in a sitcom. I grew up wanting to be a Father Knows Best sort of dad but I've ended up more of a Modern Family type of patriarch. That is, I was far from the benevolent CEO of my family. Instead, I'd turned into a quirky guy who's happy to be surrounded by his quirky outside-the-box kids. And like a sitcom, zany moments quickly follow calm, contemplative ones like these. Just now my youngest started screaming. She's gotten a sliver in her finger. She wants it out NOW but is afraid it will hurt when I attempt to remove it. She's shaking so hard with anticipation her fear is sure to become a reality. What's a father to do? With one fell swoop I take the tweezers and pull the entire sliver out. Yeah, just like that. Just like the 1950s iconic father Jim Anderson would do.

Yes, I thought in that second, I've got the family I deserved. I turned my head and returned to my latest mission. But this time I didn't forget what really led me down that hall.

But being comfortable isn't my only goal come January. Oh, sometimes I aspire to be a Father Knows Best sort of dad, but, if you must know, I'm really more of a Modern Family sort of one. I may be getting older but I'm working on a strategy for not getting old.

Betty White mixing it up with a friend on Saturday Night Live.

The successful campaign to get White a hosting gig on Saturday Night Live by Gen Xers and Millennials is a surprising turn on how we look at age. To what does Betty (may I call you Betty, Ms. White?) owe this adoration amongst young people? She's 88! But she doesn't act like anyone's grandmother. So, what makes a person get old? And why is Betty so young?

As I get closer to geezerhood, I've been taking a good hard look at myself. I can't stop my birthdays (as my father used to say, "Consider the alternative!"). But I can fine tune how I look at the world, and my outlook has little to do with my real age. My neighbor, in his early 50s, is afraid of the future and has said he'd like to go back to the 1960s (as if any point in that decade was a banner year for safety).

My father, an engineer for Lockheed in the early 1960s, traveled the world teaching other engineers how to move from their slide rules to computers. Despite his ability to embrace and evangelize the new, as he got older he lost that edge. Somewhere over the decades he seemed to lose his interest in fresh ideas. His younger self morphed into his older self, afraid of what was coming next. And, like my neighbor, it scared him.

The Bettys of the world don't seem to work that way. Oh, as White said in her SNL opening monologue, when she first heard about the Facebook campaign to get her to host the show, she had no idea what Facebook was and, in fact, now that she knew, she thought it was a big waste of time. The audience laughed and understood it's not whether they are technology savvy that makes people like Betty so attractive.

So what makes some stay young while others slowly grow old? Aside from staying buff (okay, it's an uphill battle), here are a few things I'm doing to stave off old fogeyhood:

1. Be alert and stay connected. I am constantly observing people and how they work. Last week it suddenly occurred to me that every time I walk out of my office building I come in contact with people I've never seen before. So there's a constant influx of new material and interactions happening right in front of me. Simply by doing things like commuting or walking down the street I'm injecting myself in that daily mix. This allows me to stay connected. Sometimes I merely observe but at other times I interact—sometimes with total strangers.

   
   

   I'm what Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, calls an infovore (PDF). "The more information the infovore consumes, the more order he brings to his world." What a perfect word. (Too bad he's too young to be an old fogey.) Order in my world includes and embraces the often-chaotic nature of daily life. But if an abundance of information gives you headache and sweaty palms, you're probably not an infovore. Still, the advantage the New Old Fogeys have is we can take decades of our past experiences and fold them into this novel mix.

   
   

   Using Facebook and Twitter, all of technology for that matter, isn't the goal. They're just tools which allow me to...

2. Explore new ideas. But that doesn't mean I embrace every new idea I come in contact with. The more I explore, the more discerning I become (and the more I discover about myself). But I'm looking for people who share this inquisitiveness.

   
   

   Three years ago my oldest daughter, then 10, gave me an impromptu report card on my aging. One day while in the car, I suddenly heard from the backseat: "Dad, you're really cool. You like cool clothes, you like cool music, and you like technology." What a gift! I took it to heart and was encouraged to keep up the good work. Two years later I thought I'd better check in with her to see how I was doing. "Well," she hesitated, "you're not so good in the music department any more." (She had just finished a class in the history of rock and roll and thought she knew it all.) I immediately countered: "Do you know who Adele is?" She didn't. "I predict she will win the Grammy for the best new artist this year!" On the night of the awards, my daughter and I sat together as Adele was named the winner. My reputation was salvaged for at least the next six months—okay, maybe two weeks.

   
   

   My ideas are constantly changing and being challenged. And I'll accept that challenge from anywhere and anyone. This exploration and mixing of ideas allows me to...

3. Play. The New Old Fogey isn't just a consumer of new ideas, we seem to inhale, mix them up, and play around with them. The result: newer, perhaps quite idiosyncratic thoughts. Unlike my father and neighbor, we're willing to take risks. The most engaged senior citizens aren't just guarding what we've acquired over the years; we're growing and giving it back by interacting with the people around us. Betty White's willingness to immerse herself in other people's ideas and inject her own take on them keeps her mind active and engaged. And it's clear she's really enjoying what she's doing. That's play.

At age 61 I've decided to look for a mentor. I don't care how old he or she is. But as I begin to think about the next phase of my life, I'm looking for guidance and people who are as interested in these things as I am. My father used to say: "Youth is wasted on the young." He believed that by the time you got old and hopefully wiser, you no longer had any energy or desire to explore. I don't believe that for one minute. And neither does Betty.

What's your strategy for becoming a new old fogey?

John Boehner on the cover of Time. Click image for detail.

When the mailman handed me this week's Time magazine I was immediately drawn to the cover photograph of John Boehner, the presumptive Speaker of the House. But I couldn't figure out why. There is something very odd about it (see detail). It's not an attractive portrait. The shallow depth-of-field forces us to confront his face. His eyes are bloodshot and his expression is inscrutable, like Da Vinci's portrait of Mona Lisa. Boehner looks a little goofy. Is his grin comical, magnified by the soft shadow of his Perot moustache-shaped philtrum? Or are his lips simply pursed. Everyone has had informal pictures like this taken, catching us at particularly odd points in time. Usually, we toss these. So why did Time decide to run this on its cover?

Boehner's photo in the opening spread of the article seems much more cover-worthy. The Congressman in this image seems more in control, contemplating the opportunities that await him and the GOP. These two images are a study in contrasts.

The accompanying article reinforces Boehner's extremes: the bar-loving, "dandy" on Capitol Hill who "can't resist making fun of just about anyone with a bad haircut or too-short tie" (I can see that in his cover persona) verses the astute politician. Throw in the unknown power of the Tea Party on his right I start to feel nervous, wondering just how he'll handle the next two years. Progress or more gridlock?

A lot of hopes, both from the Left and Right, are pinned to John Boehner. But politics is no longer usual. We don't feel in control and there is a jittery edge across the political spectrum. How will this play out? Will this be another two years of political games? The people aren't sure and the Congressman on Time's cover doesn't seem quite sure himself. It seems like a big gamble. Perhaps that's why this photo got top billing.

Related Article: Do You Trust This Man? Look at the Details.

• [ John Boehner, Time Magazine, Politics, Tea Party, GOP, Photography ]

I positioned us at the Rally for a good photo op of the Capitol.

At the last minute I decided to bring one of my Chamomile Tea Party posters to the Rally for Sanity here on the National Mall yesterday. So Friday afternoon I got it printed BIG. You might wonder why this wasn't on my radar weeks ago. After all, procrastination is not my usual style. Let's see, there's work, soccer games, work, grocery shopping, exhaustion, and work --well, you get the picture. The Chamomile Tea Party is my "side" biz. Promotion is key to any success but my methodology doesn't normally include rallies. And my volunteer base is, shall we say, minimal. All I needed, though, was a kick in the pants. And that came from a coworker.

On Friday she said "favorited" my latest poster on Flickr. And when I wrote to thank her she said "You're bringing it to the rally, right?" And, suddenly, my über promotional skills kicked in (I knew they were in there somewhere). I downloaded the poster from my own Flickr stream, had someone print it 30" x 40", rolled it up and brought it home. When I arrived at the house my chief volunteer (my wife) greeted me at the door with a huge piece of Foam Core and double-sided tape. Team Chamomile mounted it to the board and I was set.

As a rally veteran of the National Mall (you might remember my sojourn to the Inauguration) I like to have a plan. I survey the details of the event and then decide which stop on the Metro to exit and just where to find the choicest place to stand. But I have to balance that with realities: did I want to get up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday to rouse my 14 year old (she's a veteran too but needs her sleep)? A balanced approach is key. Staking out a spot in the front row is usually not part of my strategy.

The Rally began at noon but we got there at 10. My sign was a bit unwieldy but light. My first reaction to the poster came as we sat down in the subway car. A smile and then "Great poster!" from the family sitting across from us. The day was beginning just right. As we exited the Metro I headed towards a meet up with The Coffee Party, a large group whose "dial-it-down" philosophy matches my own. Along the way, I wanted to stop off at the meeting area for GovLoop, a social media site for local, state, and federal government workers I've contributed to. As I walked down the street, I held my sign facing forward and the poster love really commenced. Knowing smiles and pointing as we passed. I felt like I was on stage. No longer the behind-the-scenes creative I was walking my walk.

When my daughter and I got to the Coffee Party meet up point no one was to be found. And, suddenly, I could see why. There were people who DID get up at 5 a.m. to get to the Mall. Thousands of them. And if we didn't get our place soon, we would be pushed to the hinterlands. The Coffee Party must have staked out their spot and we needed to do the same. So we got as close to the stage as we could and I positioned us as close to the middle of the Mall to get the Capitol centered in any pic I took (what I lack in organizational skills I make up for in photographic composition). Yet, I realized as we watched the large video screens on the sides that the organizers had roving cameras looking for interesting signs and costumes and we were too far away for any of that free publicity.

And this brings me to the root of my dilemma. I think hard and I work hard --even on these posters. I love getting my work out there. But there was part of me that just wanted to enjoy the day with my daughter and the hundreds of thousands of others who were tired of the political positioning, the elections, and the dogma. Promotion of my posters --yes I did some of that. People all around me wanted to take a photo of it. And I always "pressed the flesh" with my signature "You can download them yourself at chamomileteaparty.com." During the rally, I would often hold it up high and make a 360. And when the rally was over, I held it above my head on the slow trek out of the area. But I didn't want to forget why we were there in the first place.

Others had brought their Chamomile Tea Party posters to the Rally! Click on image for larger view.

This morning, as I surveyed the online world, I suddenly discovered that I had more volunteers at the Rally than I thought. This photo of some of my other posters made it to the front page of the Huffington Post! I'd been promoting my "download and bring to the rally" approach for weeks. And some good people actually did it. It's gratifying to see others take up your efforts and turn it into their own.

The best part of the day? On a packed subway ride home, my daughter and I finally got a seat near the end of the line. It was the first time we had sat down all day. I put my arm around her and said "What'cha think?" "I liked it," she said, "but I didn't understand all the words they used." "Like what?" I asked. "Like liberal. I know I should know that but I don't." "Well, you see," I replied, "there are liberals and conservatives. Sort of like Democrats and Republicans but a bit different..."

The latest poster by the Chamomile Tea Party (click image for larger view).

Posters distill the essence of ideas or messages to their most economical form. You glance at a poster as you walk by the wood barricades of a construction site or, these days, as you peruse the walls of the Internet. When remixing someone else's poster as I've been doing with World War II-era propaganda posters for the Chamomile Tea Party, I'm initially attracted to the design and then to its message. Simple and direct is best. Then the real thinking begins.

What do I want to say? What's my message? In order to recontextualize the image I need to break the poster down and look at each element to see how it functions. In the original 1944 poster by Stevan Dohanos, there is the award --the medal, what this medal was being given for (Careless Talk) and why. And, finally, who was awarding this "honor" (in Dohanos' design it was the Nazis as evidenced by the ring on the hand of the person holding the medal). I would have to consider each of these parts in order to rework the image and its message.

The keystone in this poster was "For Careless Talk." That drew me in. While the original poster referred to divulging sensitive data on troop movements and other war efforts, I immediately connected it to the rhetoric we were hearing in contemporary political discourse today. Healthy and respectable debate is good but it's clear the "talk" has gone way beyond that. Inciting spin has taken precedence over insightful information and discussion. So who deserved to be given a medal for this most egregious tactic and who would this honor come from?

My initial thought was the American people should award this medal to Fox News. The ring would sport an American flag and in an early version of the poster the medallion was the Fox News logo. "For Careless Talk" would remain and underneath I listed all of the issues I felt Fox News was guilty of skewing. But after some vigorous discussion with friends I realized those who believed in Fox would be more than honored to receive that award. And that wasn't my intent at all. I returned to the drawing board.

I changed the list of issues to a group of Fox commentators who should rightfully be awarded this medal. And I tried on a few different medallions to replace the Fox logo. The most interesting was a picture of a wind-up toy of chattering false teeth. I was getting closer (the medal was becoming a source of biting commentary) but it still wasn't quite right. I created a drop shadow underneath "For Careless Talk" that was an amorphous "Fair and Balanced," the tagline for Fox News. Underneath that notion of irresponsibility was the idea that the deeds of these commentators were being touted in just the opposite fashion.

It took me a while but I finally made the connection to the Tea Party and placed a tea bag in the role of the medallion. But it still came across as an award Glenn Beck and company would be proud to wear. The original tea bag image I used had a big drip at the bottom. And that led me on the right path: turn the tea bag symbol "upside down" by making it a sopping wet mess. I made a bigger drip in Photoshop and then showed its effects on the commentators' names below. Stains and drips turned the tea bag and all it's come to stand for into a symbol of something gone awry. My commentary was complete.

Related: See all the posters from the Chamomile Tea Party and friend us on Facebook.

• [ Chamomile Tea Party, Posters, Political Commentary, Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly, Karl Rove, Fox News ]