The Liminal Man

Writings of a man born between worlds

limen, -inis. n.

1. The threshold, verge

My father was born in 1924. When he came into the world, the Golden Gate Bridge did not exist, jet lag had never been experienced, air conditioning and plastic were basically unknown, and digital computers hadn’t been invented. The lives of most humans alive at the moment he was born were not so dissimilar from the lives of the hundred previous generations.

My youngest child was born in 2009. She lives in a world of self-driving cars, country-sized swirls of plastic garbage in the ocean, international video calling, social media, and artificial intelligence. The world of 1924 is as foreign to her as the world of 1524.

I was born in the middle—at the moment of transition between old and new. My father’s generation was the last of the pre-digital old world. My children’s generation is the first purely of the fully online, digital new world. My generation stands with a foot in each.

This blog is the place I put my thoughts as I wrestle for truth and explore both the beauty and the ugliness of our changing world.

About the Content Here:

I have been thinking and writing most of my life. I created this site first and foremost as a resource for myself to maintain a record of my intellectual and writing history. As a result, I have put into practice here a couple of conventions it would be helpful for a reader to keep in mind:

1. Content is dated for when it was written, not when it was posted.

After many blogging false starts, I established a blog in earnest in early September 2021 on a hosted WordPress site. In September 2025, I migrated to a self-hosted, hand-coded static site written in the HTML standards of the mid-90s web I knew and loved as a teen. All content is posted with the date of original authorship or publication.

2. Content is posted as it was written, even if I no longer agree with it.

Part of my commitment to myself is to be honest about my own intellectual history. The world has changed much in my lifetime, and I—like most of us—have as well. My intellectual journey has been long, at times painful, and still continues. I have not censored my past self. Where I have felt the need, I have added editorial comment on my past writings and dated those comments with the date they were written.

3. Content is all original and comes from a variety of contexts.

Over more than three decades or writing, I have written in many contexts for a variety of purposes: letters, reports, Facebook posts or comments, school papers, and poems are a few examples. My objective here is to collect the best, most interesting, or most representative material, primarily as a record for myself that I control, but also as a means to share it with others on the chance that my perspective and experience—formed as it has been through a unique moment in history—may bring benefit or enjoyment.

4. The presentation of content is intentionally anachronistic.

I first began to browse and contribute to the Internet in 1995 when I was 17. It was a time when the Internet was exhilarating in its newness, reach, and freedom. Web coding standards were in their infancy, search engines were weak and stupid, and homebrewed user-made pages outweighed corporate sites in their footprint and attraction. Web applications and ‘real business’ web-based services as we know them today in all their many-tentacled invasiveness did not exist. Many people—most people even—were still just hearing about the Internet. I miss those days of undirected, unmonetized, freedom and creativity, and I am recreating them here for you—and for myself. This little intellectual hidey-hole on the web is my representation of what I wish the Internet, and the world, were more like—personally creative, intellectually honest, and freely shared. All pages are encoded in Mac OS Roman and best viewed on an Apple device.