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The character Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk is based on a real life big city boss named Enos "Nucky" Johnson who was a powerful figure in Atlantic City back during the 20s and 30s. The gangsters portrayed were also real people whose real names are used, including the latest addition Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK. whose sideline that made him a fortune in the shady liquor business is well known. I've decided that the things about this series that are so familiar to me are embedded memories. Old pictures of my parents show them dressed in the styles represented in Boardwalk and I was around during the time the photos were taken. The furniture and lamps and rugs and wall paper were the same decor as the house where I grew up. I recognize the songs and even know the words to them because they were played on the radio back then. Now they've become the old standards that can still be heard today in certain nostalgic venues on cable music channels which I frequent often. Not only that, you can see the authentic representations of this era in old movies on TCM cable, movies that I saw as new because as a youngster my mother would take me with her at a theater where she worked and I got to watch these pictures for free when I was 5 and 6 years old. There is something very unique about the 1930s zeitgeist. It reflected a nation just emerging from the zaniness of the "Roarin 20s", tightening its belt with the onset of The Great Depression from which emerged a kind of of cross section between shabbiness and elegance, and a wryness of attitude that was sophisitication and wise cracking. I think all these things exerted an influence on my persona somewhat. It was also during this time that the film noir genre originated in Hollywood. Back to the subject of hallucinating. I had bypass heart surgery in 2008. I never figured out why. I saw an emergency room doctor because of dizzy spells and upon noticing my good insurance coverage, it was decided that I'd be a good candidate for heart surgery altho I never had chest pains or a heartattack. During this extremely invasive surgery, my rib cage was sawed apart and splayed wide open in order to remove my heart and put it on a heart machine while they repaired my valves. I won't go into further details, but my post operative medication included a laudry list of pills. Soon thereafter I started experiencing hallucinations during the "REM" period when I was emerging from sleep. All kinds of people would appear, just there, standing in front of me. One was even a beautiful red bug with a human face. The room would also be aglow with "fairy dust" from time to time. And I had x-ray vision. I would look down at my feet and they would be skelectic. All this was going on with my eyes open but my eyelids were down. Once I raised my lids, the "hallucinations would disappear. During my waking hours there were always dark figures lurking in my peripheral vision. Also if I stared at objects long enough, they would begin to move and spring up at me. None of this was frightening to me; just curious. After I stopped taking many of these meds, all these people I decided I had encoutered when I was "clinically" dead stopped coming to visit me. But I occasionally have flashbacks. Bottom line. My hallucinations were real; just not 3-dimensional.

There is a difference between being dumb and being uninformed. Not having a broad scope of knowledge is what characterizes the Millenials. Being uninformed is no sin, but having an attitude that anything that doesn't engage you is "useless information" or that anything which happened before you were born is not relevant, is what makes this generation appear dumb to others. And why they appear even dumber than the preceding generation is because those who came before them had to find out things for themselves in order to do what the present generation relies on electronic devices to do. Experience is a great teacher but when substituting texting for conversation while avatars become cyber alter egos, what is experienced is shallow. Shallow people can make good fodder for exploitation. This contributes to a stratified population made up of the users and the used. So you literally have to get in where you fit in and figure out a way to sell yourself. You win some, you lose some. It is and always has been a dog eat dog world. ruff-ruff.

I do realize that people are getting dumber, but I also see a lot of creativity in a lot of kids now that wasn't there. I guess I'm looking at the total picture in relation to me, as I said, and I'm witnessing a lot of people who are accomplishing some pretty cool things. Now granted a lot of it is in fashion and design, but nonetheless things are happening. I can give examples. I had a student who helped me shoot a movie when I was teaching high school. All of the teachers there were saying the same things that you are saying in regard to social media and kids being dumber. I tend to think the kids and adults are waiting on better instructors. This kid with his classmates, wrote a script, then using editing tools they created a short film which is something I don't think our generation could have done or even would have attempted to do. Are they dumber possibly, but stats never tell the full story. Are the teachers worse? In my head yes. I'm not special or gifted, but I'm connected (was connected as an educator) so I was able to pull things out of my students that other teachers couldn't. But that's not the fault of social media. I've talked before about digital chunks in writing and that students now can't write without checking Facebook. This is not going to change. It is the evolution of our society, but I don't blame social media, I adjust and teach in a way that models the choppiness they are used to, and then I can create longer blocks of attention over time. Where you see stupidity is where I see a kid like Nick Conyers who parlayed social media into a viable source of income shooting video for people here in Memphis. While it is true that those platforms would have existed without social media, we all would have had to pay to play in some form to get people to our places of choice so that they could find us. The only thing different now is that social media outlets are garnering all of our money, but honestly some people are better off and some people aren't. Overall, I've never really had a lot of success as a writer, but I never, never really gave it the time it deserved and that's on me. I've already started planning out a strategy and we will definitely be able to tell if social media works in regard to books. I wrote some really strong articles about Facebook and it's ability to really garner business for small business people, but I recently wrote another report that almost contradicted everything I said negative about it. That's the way these things are. We see a rise in the amount of dumb things people promote because that's what is placed in front of us. It has always taken people going beyond to find information. We just have to take the time and go beyond a lot more now. In regard to the lending crisis, that had zero to do with social media. That had everything to do with greed and lack of knowledge by first generation homeowners. The system used ignorance to capitalize. The system has always done this. Our job as parents/educators is to tell the next generation how to be smarter and better and I have to be honest, we are not doing a very good job of educating the next generation and that's on us. You can't dumb down people when people actually take the time to share information as opposed to not sharing. I can only use a variety of examples to explain what I'm saying based on my experiences. We both know this is not a simple thing. But Black people have to learn how to share and support and that is something we have never been very good at.