To the Class of 2025:
From the day you leave behind the instruction of Voorheesville’s incredible faculty, it’ll be your failures that become your best teachers.  So get out there and get into trouble. Come back, but take the long way home. We’ll be waiting for you.

In lieu of flowers, don’t eat meat. 
In lieu of not eating meat, always be kind to animals.

I’m flashing the Bat-Signal to assemble this ragtag outfit of swashbuckling scallywags, rakish rogues, and notorious ne’er-do-wells — or at the very least a few municipal bureaucrats — to right our ship and pilot Albany through the choppy waters of destiny.  Go A-Team.

As goes the city, so goes the county. And both will be irreversibly injured if Albany sleepwalks into the misapplication of nearly half-a-billion once-in-a-generation dollars.

You will not open eyes by covering your ears. And you will not forge the future by driving natural allies into the waiting arms of the devil we know.

Farmers’ markets and other such vendor popups are where the community comes to keep the money inside itself. It’s where “neighbors” become a “neighborhood.”  It’s how we make a living that makes life worth living.

To the Class of 2023: 

Love will persist throughout your journeys despite the inevitable losses you’ll endure, amidst the trials you’ll undergo, and even in your darkest hours. 

It’s our job as Albany residents, journalists, pundits, personalities, and politicians to make Jeff Buell be the hero we seek — not by following him blindly, but by testing his sense of direction.

Goodbye dear friends,
it’s time to be moving along.
Goodbye and so long, we’ll meet again—
but now we’ll be drifting along.

Knock it down.