An Unlikely Boomer Bromance

As I set out to tell this story, I’m struck by the idea that it started 25 years ago. When it all began, the internet and social media and the dynamics of human interaction couldn’t have been more different than they are today. Google’s “blogger” was in its infancy, Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t begin operations for several more years, and email was just starting to become a”thing” as message boards were in the early days of figuring themselves out.

In ’99 or early ’00, I came across an up-and-coming National political blog and created an account under the pseudonym Haystack, which I carried with me for many years. The general idea of the format back in those days was such that editors would post content, and readers were allowed to comment on the entries as well as speak amongst themselves in ongoing dialogue about whatever the story might have been associated with. News and blogs don’t work that way anymore, more’s the pity, but it was a great way for people to connect and interact with each other directly as part of a larger ongoing National conversation.

After about a year or so, I was invited to become a contributing editor, allowing me to post my own content. I quickly found myself interacting with a lot of people from all over the country, and I made a lot of new “friends” that I would otherwise never have crossed paths with if it weren’t for the internet. As it is with most good things, it didn’t last; management got too far over its skis, and Twitter and Facebook began growing in popularity (and heightened notoriety for so-called “thought” leaders), and management started purging those elements of the readership with whom they had grown tired of debating.

I had known and interacted with “Vassar” and a number of others for a very long time, and after there had been a very large Purge of readership, I offered to build a website for them where they could continue telling their stories and maintaining their own community. Not long after that project began, I resigned from the larger website and went to work helping those guys get up on their own two feet, so to speak. In that window of time, Vassar asked me to build a website where he could put all of his writings in one place, and vassarbushmills.com was born.

As I write this, reviewing his entire body of work, I’m wearing a self-satisfied smile as I report here that he has written nearly 2,000 entries (well more than half of which are between 2000 and 7000 words) since the spring of 2011 and has written just as much, if not more, over at the website (now archived) where all of this began. It is a true Testament to the man’s persistence and tenacity, along with just how much he has had to say over the course of his now-80 rich and well-lived years.

Now that I am at just under 500 words, this is where the story of our unlikely Boomer bromance begins.

Vassar and I stayed in touch by email during the years between 2008 and 2018. I maintained his website, we collaborated from time to time on essays, cross-posted each other’s work on our respective websites, and otherwise did our own thing. We shared each other’s life stories and learned we were both descended from Appalachian people: him from Kentucky coal miners and me from Pig farmers in and around the Harpers Ferry end of Maryland and West Virginia.

Thirteen years my senior, he had already gotten his law degree and served as a Jag during the Vietnam War by the time I was 10. Despite both of us being “boomers,” he was from the early half of the generation, and I came from the latter half, and even though we couldn’t have been more different socially and culturally, our shared experience being raised in God Centric Church going Backwoods country people allowed us to share identical World Views.
Inspired by my oldest granddaughter in 2017, I decided to start a little side project, taking a closer look at the world of wisdom and philosophy. I set up a website (Unwashed Philosophy) and started doing precisely that. It wasn’t long before I invited Vassar, given his range of writing on the subjects of Natural Law, History, and “How Things Work,” to join in wherever he might think he’d like to contribute to the project.

At the start of 2019, I told Vassar I wanted to write a book. Having survived my third stroke and engineering a series of workarounds to be able to read and write despite my visual losses, I told him I intended to do a nonfiction about how America came to be, a commentary on the mess we had made of the country in the days after the founding, and some discussion about what I thought we needed to do to make things better before it was too late.

He didn’t tell me he hated it, so when I asked him if he would partner with me, taking on some of the chapters I thought best suited his talents and interests, he accepted and, over the course of the subsequent nearly 6 years, we have remained in Daily contact by email and weekly 2-hour phone calls that have become akin to little old lady bitch sessions sitting around and knitting circle.

We went on to publish that first book, in time to be in circulation before the 2020 presidential election. We got the band back together to write a follow-up collection of essays after Joe Biden’s first hundred days. In time for the run-up to the 2024 elections, with weekly consult from Vassar, I wrote and published what is equivalently Thomas Paine’s Common Sense Rebooted into modern-day context as it relates to the tug of war between globalism and the sovereignty of the “some several independent democratic nations.”

Our weekly phone calls continued through the Christmas and New Year’s seasons of 2024 into 2025. In the fall of 2024, Vassar was hospitalized with pneumonia, and I spoke with him by telephone… Or should I say listen to him muttering and complaining… About having to be in the hospital when he felt perfectly fine and just wanted to go the hell home where he could get some “peace and quiet.” Laughing with him by telephone, encouraging him to let these caregivers do their jobs in peace, he promised to behave and was sent home a few days later.

None of us could have known at the time just how much of a toll the pneumonia ultimately had on his body, despite the pulmonary therapy he received after he got home from the hospital. He responded very well, initially, to the treatment, but the pace of his decline began to quicken dramatically not long after his 80th birthday, and – in what feels like the blink of an eye – my mentor, best friend, and confidant of two and a half decades finds himself receiving in-home hospice Healthcare as the final stages of dementia and Alzheimer’s work their way through his body and his mind until he is called back home to his maker.

Over all the years that we have been friends, the two of us only met in person once. A group of us met in Pennsylvania to discuss the plans for launching that website I mentioned earlier, and across all of the years that have transpired since, our friendship and mutual respect remained steadfast as the world came and went around us. Even now, speaking with his wonderful wife weekly because he is no longer communicative, she provides me with the gift of holding on to the connection while I give her the opportunity to know her husband as the internet knew him and all the things he taught us and all the lives he touched and made a little better along the way.

If my friend Vassar could read what I’ve written here, let me assure you that he would first read me the Riot Act for all the things I left out (as wordy as I am known to be, I got nothin’ on this guy), and then he would bitch at me – again – for being terrible itself promotion by leaving out all the things about the two and a half books we wrote together that people should be reminded of. And for as long as the good Lord keeps Vassar with us, I will continue to hear his voice in my ear as it gives me the what for about something I could have said differently or should have added to whatever story I’m working on when he sneaks into my head and cuffs me behind the ear.