It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's an Ad!
By Tom Swift
May 8, 2026
A quintessential twenty-first century American moment: On a beautiful spring morning in an area of the country, Minneapolis, where such days are few and therefore cherished, I’m walking around a middle-school running track with the aim to exercise, think, and otherwise enjoy an hour in the sun. A tow plane flies overhead. The banner doesn’t face me so I can’t easily read the specific name of the prescription medication mentioned in the aerial advertisement. But I can clearly make out the message I’m being given from on high: “Ask your doctor about it.”
It’s part of the ambience of life in the United States, circa 2026, that several times a day our eyeballs are presented with advertisements for drugs. It’s worth nothing that it didn’t used to be that way and that it still isn’t that way in all but one other industrialized nation (New Zealand). America used to effectively prohibit direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs — and this wasn’t back in the days of bloodletting. Before 1997, the FDA required all prescription drug advertisements to disclose a summary that included all warnings, precautions, contraindications, and adverse events — requirements that effectively blocked most advertising, since you couldn’t fit all of that in a television or radio ad (and it would have made for an exceedingly long airplane banner). Direct-to-consumer campaigns initiated in the 1980s, for example, rare as they were, used print media only. Then, in 1997, the FDA relaxed its rules, which gave rise to the advertisements that dominate our feeds, fill our airwaves, and blemish our blue skies.
As I do my loops and the plane does its loops, I look to the heavens and wonder: Is there a drug that would immunize me against drug company advertisements? You know, I think I’ll ask my doctor about it. Because that would be right for me.
The Gathering
By Tom Swift
March 26, 2026
I step outside for the morning walk and there are the geese. All the geese. Waves and waves of geese.
If I lived in a Hitchcock film this scene would be scary. But it’s not scary; it’s the opposite of scary. Immediately overhead, high over my leafless maple tree, the geese are loud and proud, and this happens every year, I suppose, but never ever have I seen this many geese flying together, all at once, no, sir. More and still more join in. The geese align into a decidedly upper-case V.
Come one, come all, join in, wherever you are.
I go for that walk. I find myself in good spirits. I chat up a neighbor or two as we pass on the sidewalk. I greet the dogs (of course). Upon my return home, I notice that the steps sunk in. I have the sense this was a good decision. I go back inside my house. I sit on my couch. I take out my notebook. I don’t write long. I set my pen down.
A calm — a rare calm for this cat — comes over me. I have this unmistakable sense that everything’s going to be all right, and I don’t just mean today. I have this sense that something passed over me, through me, and that I will never be the same.
The only logical conclusion is that this feeling is a gift from the geese.