Boomer Down: From Fast Lane to Crashed Lane

By Steven M. Meltzer

The good life didn’t come to a screeching halt.

It came to a grinding, slow-motion, train wreck halt.

Quintessential Boomer Steve Meltzer was living the limo-licious life of a Mad Men-style ad agency Creative Director and Internet guru in Hong Kong. Great money at $250,000/year. Eye-popping, soul-enlightening travel—a regular business-class client circuit, Hong Kong-Bangkok-Tokyo-Beijing-Hong Kong, and far-flung tourism—China, Tibet, India, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines.

It was rosewood- and teak-paneled suites, top-shelf martinis and big-time clients all the way. It was a regular column in Asia’s leading marketing magazine, speaking gigs in Singapore, Taiwan, Manila, New Zealand.

At his peak, he was Vice President, Brand-Building Partner, for marchFIRST (sic) Greater China, a rocket-hot, NASDAQ-dandy Internet professional services firm. His promised fast-lane next move—to London as Creative Director for Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

When the firm’s U.S. network succumbed to self-inflicted hubris wounds, taking the thriving Asia network with it, Meltzer returned, jobless but with irons in the fire, to his D.C. hometown with wife and two kids, healthy savings, jobless but with irons in the fire and the requisite Boomer optimism.

The optimism didn’t pan out.

The fire with the irons in it burned out.

And the money ran out.

Meltzer tells his before, during and after story with wit, candor, brutal honesty and emails documenting his futile efforts to get back on the road, even if only in the slow lane.

He ends up condemning The Way of the Boomer, capitalism and himself in equal measure.

What happens when every family in your posh neighborhood (except yours) is going to ski in the Alps over Christmas, and then going to soak up some Caribbean sun?

See the piece called Nevis Envy.

What happens when a disappointed wife finally has had enough?

Not My Scotch That’s on the Rocks looks into that.

With email-bites, demographic data, essays, press clips, and guts-on-the-table soul searching, Meltzer gives us life in the crashed lane.

Millions of Boomers are having to get used to it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven M. Meltzer
• Release date: Jun 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301867097

Steven M. Meltzer

Steve is a multifaceted communicator with extensive US and international experience guiding and creating compelling messaging in all media. His recent client engagements range from marketing communications campaigns for Fortune 100 companies to editorial and creative consultation for major World Bank, USAID, UNDP and other development initiatives. Throughout the 1990s, Steve held Regional Creative Director positions in Hong Kong and Australia with Rapp Collins, J. Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett, and was a driving force in launching integrated and interactive marketing practices throughout the agencies’ Asia-Pacific networks. In 2000, he was recruited to help launch the Greater China headquarters of the $2.5 billion professional services firm, marchFIRST (sic), as Vice President, Brand Building Partner, where he managed teams responsible for branding, integrated media support, marketing strategy and all user experience elements for complex transactional web sites for clients, including the People‘s Republic of China Ministry of Rail, United Broadcasting Company (Thailand), Dentsu Communications (Tokyo), eNETVision (Hong Kong), and Morgan Stanley Asia. Working independently in the US after returning from Asia in 2001, Steve's client engagements have included The Center for American Progress (research for and formulation of new brand platform); MAP International (branding and online content for provider of financial services to off-grid rural communities in Africa); the American Nurses Association (synthesis of two-day roundtable discussion on economics of nursing); OHSA (Practice Framework for Occupational Therapy); Centers for Disease Control (various editorial); Boscobel Communications (white papers "Stakeholder Communications in Merger & Acquisition Environments" "Building a Reporter-Friendly Web Site"); Management Systems International (Government of Iraq Five-Year Development Plan); White and Partners (communications strategy for Military OneSource, Dept. of Defense unified family services provider) and scores more. Steve lives in downtown Washington, DC. with his partner, Mary Ellen (Mellen) and makes a beloved North Carolina-style barbecue.

Book preview

Boomer Down

From Fast Lane to Crashed Lane

Steve Meltzer

Portions heard on NPR Morning Edition

and seen in Creative Living

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Steve Meltzer

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design & Production: Steve Meltzer

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author' work.

Dedication

To my soulmate, Mellen, for hauling me out of the slough of despond and for years of love and laughter, and to my son and daughter, Logan and Rachel, for their understanding, forgiveness and all-around lovableness.

Table of Contents

Apology

From Expat Road Warrior to Beltway Road Kill

Boomers' Bummers

Affluent to Effluent

The Way of the Boomer

Limos and Live-in Help ... What Could Possibly...

Oops—Cool Your Boomer Jets

Morning After, Rubber Boots

Plans B and C

Cambodian Relief

Home Sweet Where?

Fifty Ways to Get You Nowhere

I Won't Feel This Good For Long

Buy This House How? And ... Why?

The Man Without a History

Welcome Wagon From Hell

Spy Gets Limo For Dog

They Eat My Liver

Subsistence Farming in Paradise

Sorry, All We Have Is Water

In Chevy Chase, No One Can Hear You Scream

Not All Bad, Just Mostly

Get The Tranquilizer Gun, Dad's Losing It

Nevis Envy

Not My Scotch That's on the Rocks

Love in the Ashes

To LLD or Not to LLD

Outsmarting the Waffle

The Road Taken—Dead End?

Someone Owes Me Eight More Minutes of Fame

The Information is No. Never.

Drink, Smoke, Fall

Dubya and Me

Long Green, Short Green

Boomers Busted—Suicide Watch

Loose Threads

Apology

The U.S. Department of Labor says if you’ve been out of work for more than six months, you’re long-term unemployed.

That makes me long-term off the charts.

OK, I’m not unemployed, but I sure am underemployed. Haven’t had a steady job since 2001. Given my prior status—a romping road warrior living the expat high life in Asia—this is what I call subsistence farming in paradise, scratching out a living on small projects.

Granted, making some $40,000/year is no small change, unless you compare it to $250,000-plus back in my Asia heyday, traveling a limo-licious circuit of five-star hotels and heady projects in Hong Kong, Beijing, Bangkok and Tokyo.

Be assured that I’m grateful for every dollar of that $40K, and not a word of what follows is a complaint. I’m one lucky, happy man. My life is a crème fraiche rhapsody compared to what huge swaths of humanity face. I get it—I’ve spent plenty of time beyond yonder, in Tibet, the Philippines, China, Cambodia. I’ve seen how the other swath lives.

In this recounting, there is no extreme poverty, no illness, no death of a child, no ethnic cleansing (though the notion of socioeconomic cleansing comes to mind). I’ve had a roof over my head and all the comforts—except the comfort of knowing I’d keep them. Which I didn’t.

Yes, my forehead is bruised from beating it against walls. My knees are an inch deep in callouses from crawling the cruel corridors of power in my D.C. hometown. My teeth are nicked up from biting the bullet, I have ass-marks on my lips from kissing quivering acres of undeserving flesh, and I’m on intimate terms with gut-knotting anger, heart-palpitating worry, soul-searing self-doubt, heavy drinking and a marriage that scampered hither, thither, yon and straight to hell.

But there is much here that was good! No one doing the daily caffeine commute gets to spend as much time with the kids as I did. No drive-thru bagel-grabber gets to cook up whatever strikes a fusion fancy at any hour of the day—I’ll see your desktop food artifact and raise you my baked egg with miso, tarragon and sun-dried tomatoes.

Finally, though the wealth-tethered professionals in my hyper-privileged suburban ‘hood might get the blues now and then, it ain’t the blues like the Boomer Down blues. Not with those billable hours and billowing bonuses, always visible on the horizon, whispering come and get me, come …

So whatever challenges my neighbors face are not like those of the Boomer downed. They cannot comprehend the kind of self-lacerating emotional mayhem available only to the untethered in free-fall. The ideal outcome is realization that there is, in fact, a redemptive message in all of this turmoil and travail, and you sure as fuck better go find it.

I think I have found it. These years have been as rich as all the others in my life. (Remember this when you get to the where Satan is referenced, and take the Prince of Darkness’s cameo as a metaphor.) If some of the rooms we’ll visit have blood-stained walls and tear-stained sheets, I aim only to describe what life is like when you’re up the arroyo without an SUV, when white-collar Boomer expectations turn into debt-collared bummer realities.

This is about moments that I and scores of thousands of my Boomer bro’s and sistah’s have had to confront, back in the day and today.

Here’s to our resilience.

From Expat Road Warrior to Beltway Road Kill

I started writing these pieces during a long (and ongoing) stretch of un- and under employment (mostly un-) in 2002. I had just returned to the U.S. from 14 years of high-profile road-warrioring in Asia and Australia.

That was a brilliant ride!

A $250,000/year package as an ad agency creative director/branding guru and consultant! A Chinese government ministry and blue-chip multinationals as clients—Citibank, Mercedes-Benz, IBM, Morgan Stanley—all hungry for market share in China! Multi-million dollar projects, teak-and rosewood-paneled suites and top-shelf martinis around every corner! My own regular column in Asian Advertising & Marketing and lots of invitations to speak and run workshops!

Great while it lasted.

When my last, best job disappeared—the U.S. head office of marchFIRST (sic) died of self-inflicted hubris wounds—I returned to my D.C. home town with wife and two kids. I was 51 and a quintessential Boomer. I was without a job, but had a pile (for me) of savings, had a well-paid project underway in Bangkok and onward full-time job possibilities—one London-based, with Europe, the Middle East and Africa my turf, another with AOL that would have me commuting D.C. - China to do branding work on the groundbreaking joint venture AOL created with Legend, China’s dominant PC manufacturer (later to become Lenovo).

Yes! Road warrior redux! How clever of me to engineer a soft landing in a rock-hard, post-Internet bubble landscape. I went ahead and bought a house in a swanky neighborhood and put my two kids in private schools.

Well … then … holy hell … no job. No soft landing. No income. Just a painfully extended Wile E. Coyote moment—legs spinning furiously in midair for traction of any kind, and a long way down. An ample financial cushion deflating from fat black to debt-blood-red. Boomer optimism fading from sunshiney yellow to moderately overcast to really long, dark nights.

It wasn’t cold weather that had me shaking.

Writing about it helped me grapple with it, if not get a grip on it. I figured that with so many Boomers in the same becalmed, even sinking, boat, I might find an audience, and the audience might enjoy having company and then give me money.

I also thought the contrast between Asia-region superstar and U.S. road kill might interest folks who haven’t tasted the trials and treats of expat executive life, from sterling and cut crystal in business class to altitude sickness in Tibet.

I had no structure in mind—was just keeping a journal, a bunch of what-happened and why felt recollections and musings. So this book weaves various threads together: life before the crash and after. Some pieces recount events, some relive them in real time, some try to just pull back and figure out what the fuck is/was going on. It’s as much topical as chronological, though reading straight through works best. The chronology doesn’t always matter—when you’re the only family in the fourth richest suburb in America who’s not wintering in the Caribbean, or the Alps—or both(!)—it doesn’t matter when it happened. It’s that it happened at all, and how you dealt with it.

The same applies to encounters with earth’s lowest life form (except Rick P.), the human resources professional, the mutant hybrid offspring of a ceaselessly self-pleasuring bonobo and an outcropping of granite.

These musings are complemented by many email-bites to and from people I hoped might throw me a referral, a lifeline ... or at least a drip IV. This is somewhat a defensive gesture, to prove that I really did try to find work, though some close to me thought I could have tried harder. Which, of course, is true.

It’s always true, no?

Finally, because it seemed so all about me, I looked for the bigger picture, the contextual. You’ll see press and web citations on white-collar unemployment, and some startling data on today’s Boomers busted, who are hurting a’plenty, and stay-at-home dads. Some of the data are old, but they’re still impactful and all too topical, as they suggest that today’s Boomers are still reeling from the aftershocks of a decade ago—the moment when the middle class began to melt away, one deluded, disappointed Boomer at a time.

Has anything changed? No.

Boomer class of 2008–2013, meet Boomer class of 2000–2005. You have much in common … you’re sure to get along.

Here’s something to blot the blood off your shirts.

Boomers' Bummers

We Boomers are the most important people ever. This is a certainty among experts in many fields, all of whom are Boomers.

Ask anyone … of us. We're the smartest and the coolest. We built this city on rock and roll. We invented the Internet, sex, Asia and fusion cuisine.

We are the champions of the world. As built, maintained and ever glorified—by us.

We’re so cool, we even let our parents get called The Greatest Generation, when we know it’s actually us. So what if our folks endured the Depression, and WWII, and us in the ‘60s, and us in the ‘70s—including platform shoes and shirts with collars like a 747’s wingspan? So what if their sunset years are tenser than a suicide bomber’s thumb on the button?

That’s nothing compared to the soul-whacking wrenches we’ve been through: having so many sex partners we forgot almost every single one;