Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Rick Thyne
I've been thinking about the value of being uncomfortable.
For more than fifty years, I had power. No, I didn’t hold public office or accumulate wealth I could leverage; I didn’t come from a lineage of social privilege. Quite the contrary: I was raised in a working-class family, went to California public schools from kindergarten through college, and was a scholarship student during graduate school.
I've been thinking about the complications of touching one another.
Not everyone likes to touch other people or be touched by them, but I do. From my earliest childhood until this morning, touch is essential to my important relationships. I was touched a lot when I was a child. My mother had a welcoming lap, hugged me full-on several times a day, and rubbed my back (“rubbies, Mummy, rubbies”) as I fell asleep. My aunts also had laps and mother-like hugs.
I've been thinking about what makes a movie powerful.
I grew up roaming Hollywood Boulevard when there were more than a dozen movie theaters along the one mile stretch between La Brea Avenue and Bronson Avenue. In our early teens my friends and I knew how to sneak into most of them without paying the quarter it would cost to buy a ticket.
I've been thinking about caring for each other when we're in pain.
We're in a world of pain, both collectively and personally. And what’s worse, supportive communities and personal connections we need to deal with this pain seem to be in decline. According to the data site Statista, as of February 1st, 2023, 1,106,824 of us have died from Covid. And for every Covid death, there were multiple people in terrible pain.
I've been thinking about how I learned that I'm not normal.
The only thing I knew about Black people while I was growing up was that I was afraid of them. Well before the Civil Rights Movement, I was raised as a white boy in a family and culture that were blatantly, comfortably racist in language, social prejudice, and politics. I played high school basketball in Los Angeles in the 1950s and had my first contact with young Black men in the safety of school gymnasiums, but I never followed up on any of those contacts.
I've been thinking about the unfinished adventure of growing old.
In 1991, I joined a men’s group that has met every other week for thirty-two years. There were sixteen of us to begin with, ranging in age from thirty-three to sixty (I was then forty-nine). Death has robbed us of six beloved friends, one just last November, and two comrades moved away, so we’re now seven. From the beginning our agenda was to talk candidly about our experiences with women, work, and God. To date we’ve not run out of new and important issues to share.
I've been thinking about how certainty kills relationships.
It was a rather routine recent conversation with a woman in her early fifties whom I’ve known for most of her life, but what she said stayed with me through days of reflection. She was catching me up on her twenty-year marriage in which she and her husband have raised two very lively and accomplished teenagers, earned and saved enough from both of their professional jobs to live comfortably, yet now carry on endless arguments about anything important – or more often now, about anything at all.
I've been thinking about the holidays.
When you find ten minutes between shopping sprees, drop-in guests, and quick naps, here are three unsentimental, unconventional poems to help you celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas. The first year, I grated potatoes, chopped onions & watched.
I've been thinking about lost boys and men in despair.
It’s been about a decade since my therapy colleagues and I began using the phrase lost boys to describe an increasing number of seventeen to twenty-five-year-old male clients who simply stop developing. Unlike the original Lost Boysin Peter Pan, who gleefully sing, our current lost boys have simply given up. They stop caring about school, marginalize themselves from their peers, get and lose low wage jobs, then get and lose them again.
I've been thinking about how I tried to keep my parents from going to Hell.
In 1910, the French poet and essayist Charles Péguy wrote, In the politically crazed season we’re still in, with an election’s effects still rippling, we talk a lot and argue a lot about Democrats and Republicans and Independents, about democracy and authoritarianism, about inclusion and exclusion. That is, we talk a lot about politics. But we say little about what Péguy calls the mysticism that lies behind our politics and gives various political narratives their core values.
I've been thinking about bodies and shame.
Until adolescence turned it into a danger zone, I seldom paid any attention to my body. I just let it do whatever a young boy’s body wanted to do. I ran with my friends through the neighborhood, wrestled with my cousins, played kick ball at school and rode our bikes until dusk through the streets of Burbank and all the way up to the quarry, unsupervised.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Rick
Contact Rick, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack