One More Once

“Let’s try it one more once…”
— Count Basie

A long time ago, I had a blog under my own name. And look at that, will ya?! You’re actually seeing that blog right now. But where at one time this blog was filled with all sorts of posts by yours truly, in the past few years those words of wisdom (cough, cough) were nowhere to be seen. Why, you ask?

Welp, at the time I was looking for a new job and, at the suggestion of a friend (a suggestion I still believe was the right call), having my wild and crazy observations, opinions and bloviations visible for all–including HR people who do Google searches for a candidate’s digital footprint–to see was probably not going to help me achieve my employment goals…especially when those goals were in content and digital content. Not that it should have mattered; I’ve been a professional journalist since I was laying out newspaper pages using X-Acto knives and wax, and I regard the vocation as sacred and having a very strict code of conduct. That code used to be able to be summed up by the phrase that has been co-opted by Rupert Murdoch’s hypocritical and treasonous (yeah, I said it) minions. But you get the idea: I was always able to keep my personal opinions out of the work I was writing, editing, publishing and broadcasting.

But appearances matter, so purging my blog of those personal opinions was a necessary step in my efforts to find gainful employment. Not that it mattered, apparently, because there was another appearance that mattered more but I was unable to keep hidden: my age. I put in for many open positions and got to the interview stage for many of them. Included among those positions were some for which I was an almost perfect fit. There were also a couple that were not only spot-on matches for my professional experience, they were seeking experience that could only have been found in a very small number of human beings–a number that includes me. Alas, all to no avail. I was particularly crushed when the environmental organization in my homeland of New England decided I wasn’t a fit for the director of digital strategy position.

Sidebar: Particularly aggravating in all of the job-searching process was the rude and careless behavior exhibited by hiring entities these days. Is it really so hard to send out a boilerplate “thanks, but no thanks” email after you’ve gone through one (or more) interviews? Where’s the courtesy?

Anyway, in light of the frustration I was feeling and the additional angst prompted by the impacts of Fat Nixon’s tariff stupidity on my retirement fund, steady income and benefits seemed like a good idea. To that end, I am now in my second month of employment at West Marine, a national retailer in the boating industry. I’m working in the rigging department, helping boaters and sailors with their rope and cable needs. I’m learning various methods of splicing lines and connecting wires so that masts and sails and other boating accoutrements work properly. It’s a skill set that I can put to use in my own sailing endeavors and it might even facilitate a future move with this same company back to New England (fingers crossed). Most importantly, I’m enjoying the work, the routine and my coworkers.

That’s where I’m at now, professionally speaking. But I have not been writing one bit, much to the chagrin of several very supportive friends. Thus, I have resurrected this blog as a canvas on which to slap a bit of paint, so to speak, in an attempt to regain my writing chops. And part of that process is putting my previous writing–good, bad and awful–out there for all to see.

So for the time being I remain here in Annapolis, Maryland. I’m living on board Further at the marina where we’ve been located since we got back from the Bahamas in May 2024. A lot has happened in the intervening year-plus, and a lot has stayed the same. Nowadays, I work, I sleep, I cook dinner. I play hockey weekly with the same great group of guys I’ve been skating with for several years now, and for another two or three games, I watch the Stanley Cup finals on select evenings. I’ll use this space to catch y’all up on some of those changes, and then, as mentioned above, I’m gonna get back to writing a bit. I hope.

I hope you’ll stay tuned. And please…feel free to say hi and let me know your thoughts on, well, anything contained herein.

Welcome

Hello, and welcome to LukeHSmith.com, the very low-tech, low-maintenance website for, you guessed it, Luke Smith. Here you can find my current resume, work samples from both my day jobs and my freelance efforts, and some photos I shot over the years in support of said work. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at the name of this website (lukehsmith) at Google’s mail domain (that ought to thwart at least some of the spambots).

Thanks for stopping by and…have a great day!

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Well, this Wednesday morning is dawning better than expected. The feared Republican wave in yesterday’s election hasn’t materialized, and while that party may yet take control of Congress, it is by no means assured.

But I started this post with the title in my head Monday evening after being part of an event that made me realize just how truly fucked we are here in this country.

I was aboard the boat I live on in the marina where we tie up and was chatting with a friend who was aboard his boat in the slip next door. A guy was departing the other boat beside mine after having worked on that boat. A lovely full moon was visible as it rose out over Chesapeake Bay and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

My neighbor pointed out the moon to the guy who remarked that a lunar eclipse was to take place during the overnight hours and that it was the last such eclipse visible from this area until 2025. I knew that but was pleased to see that somebody else was aware of celestial events — that was one of the things I loved about Alaska: even the biggest redneck meathead knew when the solstice took place and was aware of the increase or decrease in sunlight each day (a very noticeable change that far north). To see similar awareness here in the populated Mid-Atlantic Region was a pleasant surprise.

But…

Then the guy started in on politics, the following day being Election Day. He proceeded into a tirade about the Democrats and how they’d spoiled everything, how they’d ruined San Francisco (a city he knew well from having grown up in Monterey) and were at fault for pretty much everything else wrong with the country. He concluded his tirade by saying, with a straight face, that he could never, ever vote for a Democrat again because, and I quote, “they were more concerned with allowing trannies to follow a six-year-old girl into the bathroom than with anything else.” And he was serious.

I fell into a despair that evening, reasoning that if a guy as aware of the natural order of the moon and stars as this guy was could be so duped into believing such an obvious fallacy, then how the hell could you ever get through to him about, oh, I don’t know, the threat to our very republic and democracy as a whole posed by the currently insane Republican Party?

The answer is: you can’t. There’s no amount of facts or logic or reason that can get through a delusion that thick.

Monday evening was in stark contrast to the genuine joy I felt on that November Tuesday in 2008 when Barack Obama was declared the winner of that presidential election. The fact that hope and change — yes, the keywords straight off the campaign poster — might actually be possible induced a euphoria I’d never felt before when it came to politics. That Obama was stymied at every turn by an opposition party more interested in blocking anything from getting done rather than governing was the first bummer. The second, bigger bummer was when the reaction by white Americans against having had a Black man as a two-term president led to the ascension of a lying, grifting con man and the degradation of American politics, well, that drove my cynicism even higher than it had already been.

(And don’t come at me, you friends of mine who actually voted for that cheeto-faced buffoon, and say that it wasn’t racism that prompted your vote. That’s EXACTLY why he won and you know it. You can rationalize your dislike of Hillary Clinton as much as you want — hell, I didn’t care for her either — but there’s no way in hell any rational being votes for Tangerine Mussolini unless they’re voting based on skin color. The guy was and still is too dangerously unhinged, woefully ill-equipped and mind-blowingly narcissistic to ever be worthy of the job of president. Period. End of story.)

So while this was originally conceived as a lament about the state of American politics, the results from last night actually have me moderately hopeful. Again, still some other races whose outcomes are yet to be determined. And the larger problem that seemingly intelligent people will allow themselves to buy into moronic conspiracy theories is not going away anytime soon.

But the fact that maybe we’ve staved off the destruction of our nation for a little bit longer is a good thing. As is the demographic information coming in: that young voters (those 18-35) voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party. We just might make it after all.