I’d hammer in the evening, all over this land.

News flash: Millennials are more apt to end up in the ER from a DIY home improvement project. More than whom? More than baby boomers, of course.

According to a study done by SoFi (a finance company I’ve never heard of before), millennials are 23% more likely than boomers to end up in the ER due to a home improvement mishap. And two times more likely to require stitches. And twice as likely to be injured by power tools. You can find the full study here.

Here’s the kicker. The reason millennials suffer more injuries is down to overzealousness…they are just too eager to show off their latest project on social media. So really it’s all Facebook’s fault.

Boomers are 22% more likely to finish their DIY projects, but millennials are 65% more likely to finish ahead of schedule (and that may include time spent in the ER). It’s also telling that millennials are more than four times more likely to hire a professional for their next home improvement project.

Not surprisingly, millennials are twice as likely to post photos of their project on social media just to “show off.” Doing it for the ‘gram (that’s short for Instagram if you’ve been living under a rock) comes naturally to this cohort.

What happened to improving something in your home just for the comfort and satisfaction of a job well done? You might as well ask why we no longer have rotary phone dials.

I’m not making social media out to be the monster in the closet. It’s the go to destination for figuring out how to do literally thousands of DIY tasks. From replacing solenoids and brake shoes, to repairing toaster ovens and drying out smart phones that fell in the toilet, the internet (and specifically Youtube) has significantly boosted the success rate of DIY projects. Long gone are the days when you had to go to the library for a how-to book or struggled to figure the problem out on your own. Now there are thousands of “experts” posting DIY videos that take you step by step through the project and that has given many of us the confidence to tackle some tricky tasks.

Therein may be the difference between boomers and millennials. We use it as a tool, they use it as a megaphone. Vive la difference and stay out of the ER.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

My mother had a saying: “My get up and go has got up and gone.” It’s something I’ve lately come to understand all too well. After the past year with its ups, downs, and all arounds I’m finding it nearly impossible to motivate myself to do anything about anything for anything. Even getting it up to write this has taken a huge amount of mental effort over the past week.

I’m not fatigued, not tired, not depressed, I’m simply unmotivated. When I was younger, I mean up until 2008, I bounded out of bed the minute I opened my eyes.

I’ve done a lot of Googling the subject, but most of the articles are geared toward young people, who can’t seem to care about exercise or work. I only wish! I’d just like to do some yard work! I did find one article that explained that motivation naturally subsides as we get older, due to no fault of our own. That was in turns good news and bad. Good because I no longer have to berate myself or try to live up to the impossible standard I set when I was in my 20s and 30s, and bad because this may be my new normal. There’s been way too much adapting to new normals lately.

Some days it’s impossible for me to even get dressed, much less to trim the hedge under our windows so that the cat can more easily access his pet door. Most of the well-meaning advice comes down to just getting up and doing shite, but it’s not easy, is it. Not when natural aging is at the helm. Fortunately, I have great whopping loads of motivation where my brain is concerned. Puzzles, reading non-fiction and keeping up with current events keeps my mind young. It’s just the biological stuff, and all the motivational quotes in the world aren’t going to change anything, thank you very much.

I can’t say I have a firm understanding of all this—there just aren’t enough articles on the web about it for my age group. But now that Nettl is cancer-free and my knee is nearly back to normal, I have hope that some motivation will return. I’ll trim that hedge! I’ll clean out the flower beds! I’ll get back to cleaning the house every Friday! Just do it! will be my new mantra…

…when I find the motivation to chant it to myself.

SK Waller is an author and composer. Books One and Two (With A Dream and With A Bullet) of her rock and roll series, Beyond The Bridge, takes places in late 70s London. Read more at SK Waller SKWaller.com.

Men are wearing sportcoats, even suits, but with open-collared shirts. Old men, young men, middle-aged men — clear majorities of men in all age groups are tieless.

That’s particularly surprising in my little corner of the world. My Teeny Tiny Law Office is located in a building pretty much crawling with lawyers. There are lawyers everywhere around me, presumably, but very few of them are sporting ties.

Of course, I’m not wearing a tie today either. Truth to tell, I only wore a tie on Monday because I had to go to court. With the sole exception of one judge, since retired, I can’t imagine a male lawyer deliberately going to court without a tie.

Of course, accidents do happen. I came to work once, some years ago, wearing a flannel shirt — I think I was planning to move boxes or something — only to realize, upon arriving at the office, that I’d forgotten a court date. Desperate, I scrounged a jacket from a colleague — he was shorter than me, and thinner, so the jacket had no chance of buttoning and the sleeves came only about three quarters of the way down my arm — but at least I didn’t feel completely naked when I approached the bench. The judge — with whom I’d been friendly when she was a privatus like me (we’d had some cases together) — regarded me with exasperation: “Really, Curmudgeon? Flannel?”

But those kinds of accidents don’t happen if one comes to work dressed in the uniform of the profession — that is, wearing a jacket and tie. And it really was unusual for me to come downtown without both.

But that was then.

If this tieless look among professional men is a trend, and I think it is, what accounts for it? A few years back, I noticed that President Obama didn’t always wear a tie, even while giving speeches. In the 2016 presidential primaries, it occurred to me that a lot of candidates were campaigning without neckties. I guess the idea was to appear more a ‘Man of the People.’

Donald Trump, on the other hand, always seems to be wearing a necktie. Tied too long, but always on.

Oh, Lord, this can’t be a political thing can it?

Please tell me that the disappearing necktie is an American phenomenon — not just a Blue State thing.

Curmudgeon is a self-described dinosaur — an Ozzie and Harriet person living in an Ozzy and Sharon world. And sometimes it confuses the heck out of him. He writes a very amusing blog at Second Effort.

How did it come to this? The term “baby boomer” is considered by some, if not many, to be a toxic phrase. Are we really synonymous with greed and selfishness? When did our cohort go from being groundbreakers to saboteurs? Anthropologist Helen Fisher describes the postwar baby boom, or bulge if you will, as “like a pig moving through a python.”

Yikes! That does not sound good, nor does it reflect well on us as a generation. For a long time being a boomer felt like it was a badge of honor. We were part of this unprecedentedly large generation that made its mark on culture, from music and entertainment to literature and language. We were a potent force in changing the way our society looked at war, sex and civil rights. It almost makes you want to hum Let the Sunshine In from the musical Hair.

Then somewhere around the time of the last economic downturn there began to emerge a chorus of naysayers who pointed the finger at boomers. “Look what you’ve done! You really have effed things up royally!” Really? They want to blame an entire generation for the failures of our governments and our leaders. I guess the flipside of taking credit for much of the cultural innovation of our era is that we also get saddled with the blame. It makes you want to go down the road of revisionist history. Were the generations that preceded us really that exemplary or did they have some serious faults as well. Our parents were part of the so called “greatest generation” because they met and beat back the bad guys in World War II. Should they get all the credit for the postwar boom that lit the fuse for an age of American prosperity? They also gave us the cold war, McCarthyism and a horrible record on civil rights.

The bad rap on baby boomers is just as much a generalization as the rap on millennials. They are not all selfie-taking, soft-in-the-middle, whiners still living with their parents. Like generations before them, they are a product of their place in time. In their case, that’s a post-9/11 America that seems to be at war all the time and ignoring climate change.

Let’s hope that the generations can move beyond the stereotyping, because one way or another we are going to be very dependent upon each other and it will benefit us all to give up this senseless blame game.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

My son bought tickets for my wife and me to see Tony Bennett. Listening to the 90 year old icon sing and watching him drift effortlessly across the stage that night made me think of the ice house.

Growing up in the 1950’s, I remember how these antiquated structures were on the verge of extinction, but still eking out a living, even if households no longer relied on a block of ice to keep their food from spoiling.

My great uncles owned an ice house on Telford Street in Newark, New Jersey. I remember people pulling up to the yard on a hot summer day on their way to a picnic or similar event, then retrieving an ice chest or tub from the trunk of their car. They would haul it up on the platform. A worker would retrieve a six foot high, rectangular piece of ice and, turning it on its side, chip off a quarter or so breaking it into chunks into the open containers.

A hot summer day usually found my cousins and me looking to snag ice cubes that missed their mark from a large machine next to the platform. It was the perfect way to cool off after a sand lot baseball game or a few rounds of Kick the Can.

As I look back on it now, this procession in and out of the ice house represented a significant transition taking place in our country from the stabilizing role the ice house had played in our lives to a future without it. The people I observed, while enjoying my melting ice cube, were struggling to find a place in this new order. The soundtrack of this struggle was provided by Tony Bennett. That’s what I heard that night as Tony exhorted us to go from rags to riches, pursue the good life we deserved and find love in the shadow of a smile.

All these years later, I know it didn’t go as smoothly or as optimistically as Tony’s music made it sound that night. But what struck me were his unifying themes of love and hope and how each generation is about rallying together to pick up the pieces and move on.

I can still hear their car tires rumbling on the uneven Belgian block parking lot and see their arms wrapped around the chunks piled high in their containers, the ice as solid as a past they thought would never change. Yet destined to disappear before the day ended.

Joe Cappello writes essays, short stories and plays about the workplace and families from his retirement home in Galisteo, New Mexico.