Hi, I’m Steve Hansen. Welcome to my new web site! I’m the guy on the left. The year is 2022. Those guys on the right are Thomas Edison and Charles Steinmetz. The year is 1922.
First of all, I’m not even a boomer. I’m from the Silent Generation. Boomers are still 70 million strong in the U.S., while us older seniors are starting to fade away into the sunset. Not surprisingly, many, if not most, of my friends are boomers. So I saw a perfect opportunity to skip ahead one generation and buy the web domain ‘boomerhangout.com.’ It was like finding this quaint old graffiti covered abandoned building that the city is offering to sell me for 3 dollars – provided I do something to use and improve it!
As I was completing my purchase with GoDaddy, I’m thinking, ‘WTF am I going to do with a web domain called boomer hangout?? Three dollars is, after all, serious beer money!’
At first I thought of making this thing into a virtual senior center, where oldsters like me could (virtually!) hang out playing Rummikub, Bingo and whatnot. Then I thought about adding in some Zoom or Google Meet support groups for grieving widows, Alzheimer’s caregivers, vision impaired and so on. Next I’d need to throw in some virtual yoga classes, discussion forums, movie nights, Ted talks, book clubs – all stuff you’d find in a real senior center. Then finally I decided this would be too much work for someone like me. Plus, truth be told, I don’t even like to go to the senior center in the first place.
So I decided instead to follow my true passion which is writing, creative original writing about science, philosophy, psychology, history, arts and culture, cosmology, aging, sociology, healthcare, engineering, artificial intelligence, or an almost infinite range of subjects including personal blogs, journals, poetry, stage plays, short stories, anything that is genuinely thought provoking and interesting to me and people like me – people who are eager and willing to have their brains bent out of shape a bit to expand their grasp on what it means to be a conscious, sentient human being.
Then the question arises. How to actually do this? How to fill this place up with the kind of stuff I’m talking about? As an 80 year old senior citizen whose writing skills and talents may be somewhat ‘questionable’ going in, I simply don’t have the capacity nor the stamina required to keep this place going in a useful way all by myself. On the other hand, I know there are many, many of you out there who actually are beautiful and very energetic writers, who have so much to share, yet so few avenues available for doing this!
I can’t tell you how many times I have stumbled across some beautifully written personal blog or article and found myself the only reader or commenter! True, some bloggers may be writing simply for themselves and don’t really care whether they have an ‘audience.’ But I suspect many writers out there certainly wouldn’t mind having a wider readership and knowing that what they write is really ‘connecting’ with other human souls like themselves, especially if there were no additional costs or risks associated with doing so.
So that has lately become my mission. To have a blog that can establish and maintain a ‘critical mass’ and stay alive by magnifying or amplifying what others are creating in a way that gets them more readers and more exposure than they otherwise might have.
Please understand. I have NO profit motive in doing any of this! If this site should happen to generate any revenue, I plan to either donate it to charity or plow it back into the site to make it better, smarter and stronger at what I am trying to accomplish with it.
Likewise, I have NO desire to own or control any material that may appear on this site from time to time.
How the site works –
Besides requesting me to link to material you may have published elsewhere, you may submit articles for direct posting on this site via the site e-mail:
Your material will be ‘vetted’ in such manner that I can keep this site doing what I intend for it to do. Meanwhile, you maintain full authorship and full control of your material at all times. You can ask me to take your stuff down from this site or de-link material you’ve published elsewhere. And you may do so at will, at any time, and for any reason. I will do my utmost to insure that your wishes and your intentions are fully and explicitly carried out.
Just to make clear –
I am not a copyright expert. I have neither the technical capacity nor the legal expertise to examine written material for copyright infringement. If such infringement is suspected or claimed, my remedy will be to promptly remove the offending article/link from this site and immediately notify the person who submitted it.
Limitations on liability –
We all know the world wide web is and can be a very dangerous place. Bad things can happen to people who provide personal information or personal contact info of any kind whatsoever on the Internet. This is especially true for women. So please don’t do that! If you willingly submit material to this site it must be with the understanding that you take full responsibility for any and all consequences that may arise for having done so. I’m basically just a bulletin board here, like you’ll find at your local car wash!
And last but not least –
Although this site is mainly intended for boomers and other adults, I’m not super fussy about that! Teens and other younger folks are welcome here as well, provided they have their parents’ permission!