The Spoke and Word

© Roy Cohen

Roy Cohen is an athletic trainer, writer, music aficionado and a great photographer. In fact, truth be told, he is the best cell phone photographer I have ever met, by far.

He has had a blog in one form or another as long if not longer than I have and he is almost as prolific, if not more so. He can often be found riding his bike around town. It was his only transportation for a fair amount of time, by choice. 

When he found himself more responsible for his aging mother he started driving again because it was the responsible thing to do.

The man was my trainer for a period of time many years ago when I was working out regularly and he is excellent. He preaches the concept of functional strength. High reps, relatively low weight to burnout.

Roy's blog is called The Spoke and Word. Roy is a very ethical and moral guy and he frets about things a bit more than I do. I would find it personally very difficult to live up to the standards he sets for himself. But I am glad that somebody is trying to.

He wrote a piece yesterday on "wokism" that I found interesting, the word getting bandied around so much these days.

He has a small cadre of regular commenters so it is a pretty intimate conversation around friends. One of his regs, Dr. J., I think hails from Florida.

You can read the comments if you click on the post. Anyhow the subject was the schism between the young woke and the old guard and he had this to say:

Very thoughtful essay, Roy! In many ways, I don’t see real progress, just an extreme pendulum swinging back and forth. but jumping over the middle. We have the 50s extreme and the 60s extreme with no large middle ground.

I found this interesting in this sense;  He, quite correctly I think, posits the chasm as a fight between the fifties paradigm and the sixties paradigm. Sixty or seventy years have passed and could it be that we are still fighting the same cultural and philosophical war between two distant decades? 

If true, it is truly astounding if you think about it. Shows you how cataclysmic the psychedelic revolution was and also how vapid things have been ever since. Well, we have had disco, jazzercise, kambucha, facial tattoos, the war against gluten as well as plenty of new repetitive stress injuries in the interim but really, what else? Emo? The Talking Heads for sure. But seriously, mostly we have been living in a cultural wasteland and a time of complete political opposition and stalemate.

The Battle continues...

Eat those mushrooms kids, you are going to need them.