B1026-1 Nouveau Riche

I wasn’t sure how they got into the building. The three of them approached the International gate. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and cutoff shorts. He had flip-flops on his feet and a Houston Astros baseball cap on his head. He held a shaving kit in his hands. His wife wore a plunging-neckline blouse that was twice as big as it had to be. She wore a full skirt, sandals and a big floppy straw hat. She held an enormous wicker purse in her hands. You might have easily confused her with a migrant worker. The young boy, who I thought might have been their child, looked much like a smaller version of his father: the same sort of Hawaiian shirt, cutoff shorts and ballcap. But he had nothing in his hands except a brown paper bag.

They approached the ticket counter and I heard the ticket agent asking the trio if she could help them. The man spoke. “We want three first-class tickets to London.” And then almost as an afterthought, he said, “Round trip.”

The ticket agent nodded her head slowly and smiled - almost as if she didn’t believe them. She gave the impression of an adult listening to the wild fantasies of a child who had just woken up from a dream. The three certainly didn’t look like international travelers to her. To be perfectly fair, they didn’t even look like they had two nickels to rub together. “Well,” she said, “how would you like to pay for those tickets?”

The man smiled and took his wallet out of his shorts. He rummaged through the wallet for a brief time, and then came out with a credit card. He had an expression on his face much like the man who had just discovered the Rosetta stone. “We’ll use this,” he said, offering it to her. The ticket agent raised her eyebrows. Again she smiled as if she were waiting for the inevitable punch-line. This could only be a joke, she thought.

She went to the telephone and called the credit card company and, to her utter surprise, she discovered that this hapless-looking trio actually had the funds to cover the airfare. [This was way back when, before credit card scanning equipment had come into general usage.] When she began preparing the tickets and the boarding passes, she asked them where their luggage was. The man held his shaving kit at the end of his index finger, smiling, and said, “Here it is.” When the agent asked the woman about her luggage, she was shown the woman’s wicker purse, and, of course, the woman’s own version of the smug smile. The boy had no “luggage” at all, unless one were to count the bag of jellybeans he held tightly his hands. “This is all you have for luggage?” the agent asked, incredulously. “This is it?”

“Yup,” the man said, “we’re just going for the weekend. Gambling.”

“You’re going all the way to London just to gamble?” the agent asked.

They nodded their heads in unison. “Third time this year,” they said.

“And you have no luggage?” the agent said. “What about jackets? Do you have any coats that you’re taking along? It’s cool at this time of year in London, you know.”

“Nah, if we need coats, we’ll buy them over there. We’re just going for the weekend.”

Later, when they had received their tickets, they sat in the waiting area. If you used your imagination, you might picture that same trio sitting in the customer return area of an Appalachian Wal*Mart.

It never crossed my mind to look at those three with some sense of envy. Instead, I wondered greatly at a people who could do such an extravagant thing with a plastic credit card, and, at the same time, could hardly dress themselves at all. Why is it that the charism of wealth is at times unmated with the common sense to use it well? Why is it that the nouveau riche oftentimes remind you of a man in a row boat with one oar, whirling in endless circles, because of a want of sense?

Yeah, I might have only a couple of bucks in my wallet (and the brains to use them well). You won’t see me flying to London in my birthday suit to spin the roulette wheel, that’s for sure. And, now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some stuff to take back to Wal-Mart.

B5014-1 Moron Science: Life on Pandora

“The new science fiction blockbuster [motion picture] ‘Avatar’ [December 2009] is set on habitable and inhabited moon Pandora, which orbits the fictional gas giant Polyphemus in the real Alpha Centauri system.

“Although life-bearing moons like Pandora or the Star Wars forest moon of Endor are staples of science fiction, astronomers have yet to discover any moons [exomoons] beyond our solar system. However, they could be science fact, and researchers might soon not only be able to spot them, but also scan their atmospheres for key signs of life as we know it, such as oxygen and water.

“‘If Pandora existed, we potentially could detect it and study it atmosphere in the next decade,’ said astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass” (Choi, 28 December 2009).

UNDISCOVERED MOONS: Science fiction notwithstanding, “astronomers have yet to discover any moons beyond our solar system.” The question one might ask is this: given that scientists have no evidence whatsoever for such exomoons, why is there such unbridled optimism about future discoveries? Imagine, if you will, trying to be convinced by a horse racing gambler who said he had never ever won a nickel at the track, but that tomorrow he would clean up. Would you believe him? Hardly. Why would you place any confidence in an astrophysicist who made a similar promise? Show me the money first.

POTENTIAL NUMBERS: Even though such exomoons have yet to be discovered, the author claims that “they could be science fact...” Yes. But exactly how? Science is an empirical enterprise, depending on observation (among other things). The unseen - and undiscovered - does not fall within the purview of science. Instead, some astrophysicists appear to speculate on the existence of those exomoons based upon the huge numbers of celestial objects that can be seen. It is almost as if to say, that the sheer numbers planets...require the existence of those exomoons. Perhaps. Yet, to conclude that is beyond the practical scope of science. Science deals with reality; not subjunctive and metaphysical probabilities.

THE UNSEEN IS RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER: Not only are we treated to this vast wash of limitless potentiality, but the author also seems to think that “researchers might soon not only be able to spot [exomoons], but scan their atmospheres for key signs of life...” Happy day, indeed! Something we’ve never seen will soon be discovered. We all admire this heady, third-grader, bubbly optimism. Such optimism makes us long for the days when Christopher Columbus tried to convince his crew that India was just over the horizon - just before they slapped him into leg-irons and put him in the brig.

INDESTRUCTIBLE CONDITIONALS: Ms. Lisa Kaltenegger tells us, “If Pandora existed, we potentially could detect it and study its atmosphere in the next decade.” Really? We have no evidence that a Pandora-like moon exists. If it did exist, we could detect it (potentially), given the proper instrumentation with which to see it. Unexplained at this point in her argument, however, is Ms. Kaltenegger’s contention that the atmosphere of an undiscovered planet could be studied “in the next decade.” Why the next decade? We should understand that Ms. Kaltenegger’s conditional depends upon the existence of Pandora, which at this stage of space exploration is an unproven assumption. However, Ms. Kaltenegger’s statement would be true even if Pandora’s existence were a sheer impossibility: “If (Something-Or-Other; or A Heavenly Body Composed of Blueberries) existed, then we could see it.” Well, yeah. If my brother-in-law was Einstein, I could see him, too. But that wouldn’t prove anything.

You might want to rethink some of this, Lisa.

Choi, Charles Q. “Moons Like Avatar’s Pandora Could Be Found.” Online posting. 28 December 2009.

C3001-102 Thanksgiving: Frozen Rain

I am thankful for this wrought-silver day, with its array of rain-streaked silver coins hanging from each and every tree. All is coined in those argentous hues, from the palest metallic sheens to the hard and brittle skeins of black, through every recess of silvery shade in between - beauty mined in the mind of God. It is a monochromatic day of shimmer to remind us what can be done with a single tinge of angel-light on a cold and rain-swept day. Christ is born! Glorify Him!

B1018-1 Dressing Up

Some years ago (okay, many years ago) I worked as a maintenance engineer for a large manufacturing company. This was in the olden days, before AutoCAD or computer assisted drafting programs. The engineering drawings that I prepared back then were made with pencils on vellum, using T-squares and triangles. How primitive is that? I asked my supervisor one day where I had to go to get my pencil drawings reproduced. He told me to take the drawings to the engineering center in a building several miles away. “The print room is on the second floor,” he said. “They can make copies for you there.”

Now, even though I was a maintenance engineer and frequently had to work with the people in the maintenance department out in the shop, there were days that I wore a suit and tie to work. I wore the suit because I liked wearing suits. I also wore it because it created immense consternation in those around me. Some were quite disturbed by that geeky engineer running around in a suit. They wanted to know exactly why I would wear a suit to work. I had a relatively low level job with no supervisory responsibilities. I told them that the suit made me look like something instead of looking like a bum. I wore the suit, I told them, because it made me look good. Well, yes, you have to remember that was back in those days when I was still svelte and hadn’t taken on those disgusting “Before” looks that you see so often on those weight loss commercials. After all, I had read the book, Dress for Success, and I had absorbed its lessons well. Those around me thought that was complete nonsense, however.

I took my drawing to the engineering center and found the print room on the second floor, just like my supervisor had said. There were about six or seven people standing there waiting to get drawings. I joined the line.

There was a man standing behind me and he had all the earmarks of a typical engineer. He wore a white shirt with a rolled up sleeves. He had a pocket protector with about eight or nine ballpoint pens in it. He had a Number Two Drafting Pencil up on his right ear. In his right hand he held a drawing, and he stood there in line behind me and waited for his turn to talk to the print room woman.

I also waited in line until it was my turn to talk to the woman. And when she asked me what I wanted, I handed her my vellum drawing, and told her I wanted six copies of it. She looked surprised. Then she asked me when I wanted them and I told her right now. She said, “Yes sir.” She turned around and walked over and made the copies for me.

The engineer behind me asked if I was “new around here.” I had only been with the company for a couple of weeks and so I told him I was. He said he had never seen me before. “Do you work in this building.” I told him I worked at Plant Six. “Are you a vice president or something at that plant?” I told him I was a maintenance engineer. He threw his vellum drawing on the floor, anger suddenly flashing across his face. “A maintenance engineer? You got to be kidding me!”

He told me the that no one could get more than three copies of a drawing without getting the Vice President of Engineering’s approval. No one, he added, could get copies of a drawing on the same day. He pointed at the little slips in a box on the counter. “You have to fill out one of those slips and turn it in with your drawing and wait just like the rest of us,” he said. “Who the hell are you, getting six copies of a drawing on the same day?”

The woman came back with my copies and handed them to me and asked, “Is there anything else, Sir?” I told her that there wasn’t anything else that I needed and I thanked her.

The engineer behind me stood there, shaking his head. “He ain’t shit,” he said to the woman. “He’s nothing. He’s just a maintenance engineer.” The woman smiled.

I turned to the engineer and said, “It’s all in how you present yourself. Wear a suit tomorrow and you’ll get all the copies you want. And you’ll probably get them on the same day, too.”

Yeah. I never liked Dress-Down Days. I’m more of a Dress-Up Day sort of person.

By the way, how do you like the suit?

B1025-1 Surprised

We were moving quite slowly. I would guess we were doing perhaps five turns. Some might have said dead slow. But we were hardly moving at all. We picked our way through assorted craft varnished by the bright, angular sun: a late afternoon flotilla come out to see the sea. We passed the Ambrose Lightship, rocked gently by the wash, stilled by duty, tensioned by intransigent anchors. And then slowly - almost imperceptibly - our ship came to a stop.

A buzz of speculation flickered through the crowd of soldiers leaning on the gunnel. Some thought that we would spend the night there. And others thought that we would go into the harbor and slip into the slip. No one really knew for sure. The minutes passed and nothing seemed to be happening. Everyone gawked at the New York Harbor to see who might be coming out to pilot us to our berth. But all we could see was the squint of the low-setting sun.

When nothing much seemed to be happening, I went below to the forward head. There was no one else there. I sat on the toilet and studied the line of stools opposite me: each stool was perched on a four-inch pipe that connected to a drain with the sea water running through it. I thought about those who had wadded up dabs of toilet paper earlier in the day, and set them on fire, and threw them into the bowls. Then they watched the progress of the fire as each person’s keister was startled by the flames as it flowed down the pipe. In my mind it was certainly a childish diversion for soldiers bored by the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Troop ships have such simple enjoyments, you see.

As I sat there and traced the tesserae of black and white tiles on the floor with my foot, suddenly the ship dropped anchor. The chains roared through the hawse-pipes and hawse-holes with such a sound that I imagined a massive floe of ice crashing through the hull - the RMS Titanic quickly meeting her end. I looked toward the bow, expecting to see an alien prow coming through the side of our ship as an unwelcomed guest - the MS Stockholm impaling the SS Andrea Doria. You could not imagine how loud those chains were in their flight through those pipes.

But this I will tell you for sure. It definitely got rid of my hiccups!

B1035-1 Vacation

It is very difficult to go to Wisconsin on vacation. There’s that awful, 12-hour drive to get there. Half of the drive seems to occur on the barricaded and devastated roads through Chicago, bumper-to-bumper, motionless, still. If one had to find a metaphor for busted-up streets, Chicago would force itself upon the mind like some burly construction worker elbowing his way up to the bar. It seems as if the roads there were always in a state of disrepair. Chicago, unhappily, is caught in an unending state of reconstruction. All of the bulldozers that Caterpillar and John Deere have sold in the last twenty years now seem to be located on that thin finger of land - that virtual Hiroshima of destruction - between the concrete barriers along Interstate-294. I was tempted at first to blame the construction companies for the enormous holes on both sides of the highway at Granite City, Illinois, until I remembered that the limestone quarries there preceded the concrete-busters by several years. They were, after all, Silurian limestone reefs, formed ages ago when the highway work had hardly begun. Surely, it was an easy mistake to make. Everything is busted-up, gouged and wrecked in Chicago.

Then, too, it is very difficult to go to Wisconsin on vacation for another reason. Beyond the near impossibility of even getting there in the first place, one has to participate in the endless fantasies of others once the actual arrival takes place. One is carried along on the winds of another’s fantasy like seeds from a dandelion. You will find that, although you may call it “Your Vacation,” it really belongs entirely to someone else. Wisconsin is a place where you always dance to the tune of others.

The last time we went was no different. There was the usual mandatory trip to Salchert’s Meat Market in St. Cloud. And, yes, we went to Vern’s Cheese in Chilton as well. A trip to Wisconsin would not be complete without those two trips. Somehow we missed going to Widmer’s Cheese in Theresa. I don’t know how that could have happened. After all, her cheese shelf in the refrigerator was empty when we left on vacation.

We went to relatives’ houses and found that we had to visit several times before we began to pall upon one another like the wilt on a Mother’s Day bouquet two weeks after Mom had first clasped it tenderly to her bosom.

Foolishly, I had planned to watch the breeze that came in off the lake to see how it played tickle with the trees. But others wanted to pull me from my chair and make me stare at pictures taken in a different time, and guess who might be whom in the sepia corduroys of yesteryear. I just wanted to sit and watch the wind. I wanted to watch the clouds clambering up the face of God. I wanted to walk along the road and study the plants and trees - and the blue-flower chicory - that he had planted there. They, however, wanted me to run to the Piggly Wiggly and the Pick-n-Save. And you should have heard how they raved about the watermelon cluttering the aisles there. I was surprised at the things that brought wonder to their eyes. Wonder? You want wonder? Look across the lake at night, when the stars and the lights dust the shore with magic, and speak to me no more of grocery stores. Verily, rutabagas do not populate the Milky Way.

Of course, we had to look at the things that weren’t there anymore. We do that every year. It’s a kind of game to figure out what’s been leveled flat and what’s just risen from some farmer’s field. Last year our attention was focused upon the hospital. Half-bulldozed and half brand-new, the things inside the hospital made you shake your head and ask, “What were they thinking?”

I looked at the lobby that was a day’s journey away from the gift shop by telephone, and thought about the infirm who would shuffle down those twenty-foot aisles like hapless victims at Auschwitz. It would take them a month to get to the other end, passing through two time zones, and again as many cultures. What fool would build a structure that big, that useless, that expensive? I’m surely glad that I’m not paying their heating bills.

And that chapel! An atrium at the Holiday Inn wouldn’t look very much different from that. You’d have to search pretty hard to find God in a place like that. Yet, I seemed to be the only one who found that architecture odd and out of place, much like a mathematician’s nightmare, filled and zigzagged with permutations and summations. They, however, professed to like it. But they couldn’t explain - exactly - what attracted their admiration. I suspect that they may have been pretending.

Then, one morning we got up early and drove away before anyone could notice that we had stirred from our beds. We left a note to say that we were going "to look at things." But we were really going to smell the countryside. Of course, if you didn't grow up in Wisconsin - if you have never lived around a dairy farm - you probably cannot understand this fascination with “smelling the countryside.” Cow manure has the most wonderful smell in the entire world, you see. Oh, I know you won't agree with that. But, as we drove through the Holy Land (that's really what they call it), we saw herds of cows standing next to the barn, stomachs full and udders empty, swishing their tails in the early morning sun. They had just been milked and turned out into the corral next to the barn. They were deliriously happy at the prospect of spending the day under the hickory trees along the highway.

For a moment - lost in the strong whiff of this bucolic scene - I had forgotten all about the Piggly Wiggly and the Pick-n-Save. Hey, I was on vacation, man.

B1034-1 Ambition

Educators (and others) often tell people they can be anything they want to be - or even more audaciously - that they should reach for the very stars. Sometimes it's just as important to tell people to be content with the modest role that they have been given in life and to be happy with that.

To be sure, there are some who are ambitious and who carry their ambition to a very lofty level. Some become very successful in life and achieved exactly what they set out to achieve. But there are many others who are ground into bits of flotsam on the shoals of adversity because of their misplaced and foolish ambition. Perhaps the words of Koheleth in Ecclesiastes are apt: “Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind” (Ec. 4:6).

At one time in my life I was just such an ambitious person. I spent a number of years watching supervisors in the factory where I worked. Somehow, I had come to the notion that I could do the job they were doing, and that I could do it just as well - perhaps even better - than they could. Believe me, this is a common fantasy in many industrial workplaces: "Hey, I'm just as good as the boss." Hah! The real truth might be that the person isn't "just as good as the supervisor over there." Sometimes it's necessary to put on Superman's cape to find out that you really can't fly.

I’ve spent a number of years in industrial maintenance management; actually, far more than any sensible person should. Stated in its simplest terms, I was ultimately responsible for keeping everything running properly. And I mean everything. That included supervising thirty-some people, in a large facility, filled with massive machine tools and equipment. The technical challenges of the job were almost insurmountable because of the enormous variety of control systems on those machine tools. Most of the equipment had modern electrical controls. But several of those older machines had vacuum tubes (Thyristors) in the electrical control cabinets - curious relics left over from World War II. It was very difficult to find any technician who was capable of working on those ancient controls. One time, I called a vendor to arrange to get a serviceman to come to our plant to work on one of those machines. When I gave him the model and serial number for the control, he laughed at me. "The last person who knew anything about those kinds of controls died fifteen years ago," he told me. Strange as it may seem, my high school amateur radio experience served me well working with those vacuum tubes. Almost by default, I became the person who did the troubleshooting on those controls.

But I digress. The real problem with ambition is the Ceiling of Stupidity that one often bumps into out there. True, one can stumble and learn on the job, and eventually become more-or-less competent in that job. Sooner or later, however, one will encounter a screaming boss who cannot understand why that World War II machine isn't running right now. And even when I opened the control cabinet doors and showed him those big vacuum tubes glowing with that weird purple color, he waved his hand impatiently and said, "Just fix it." I looked him right straight in the eye and I told him, "I'm a plant engineer. I'm not God."

Of course, that was exactly the wrong thing to tell a supervisor. You must never say, "I can't." Instead, you must always say, "I'll try." And I can't (sorry, that slipped out) tell you how many times I struggled to resurrect one of those old machine tool controls, with an unsympathetic boss breathing down my neck, and with the words "I can't" right there on my lips. I really think that sometimes I fixed more machine tools with prayer than I did with spare parts.

Then, too, there were those encounters with managers who became angry when I did just what they told me to do. I remember meeting the plant manager in the aisle in the office early in the morning. He asked me why a certain machine tool was "down." I told him that we needed a new table ballscrew. "Get on the horn," he said, "and order one." I told him that our vendor was an hour behind us on Central Time and that I was just waiting until nine o'clock call them. "You do that," he said, "and you have them air-freight the part to us." Okey-dokey. I called my man and gave him a purchase order for the ball screw. The next morning, the ballscrew arrived, and by noon, the machine was back up and running again. All in all, it was a pretty routine repair job. It was something that I had done many times before.

But two weeks later, when that same plant manager caught me in the aisle again, he grabbed me by the lapels and said, "Just who the hell do you think you are?" Moi? I told him that I didn't understand his question. "You purchased an $8,000 ballscrew without a capital expenditure request," he said. I didn't even know what a capital expenditure request was. I was fairly new with the company at the time, and no one had bothered to tell me that I couldn't spend more than $300 without "holding someone's hand." He glared at me. "You spent $8,000 without authorization, do you understand?" Yes, of course, I understood. But then I reminded him that he ordered me to purchase that ballscrew. "You told me to get on the horn and order a ballscrew and fly in from Milwaukee," I said. "Didn't you tell me that?" He looked at the floor. "Well, yes, I did tell you that,” he said. “But get with Accounting and fill out a capital expenditure request form and turn it into my office."

He turned and started to walk away, and then just as suddenly he stopped and turned back to face me. "It's not fair," he said. "What's not fair?" I asked him. "I'm the plant manager at this plant, and I can spend up to $5,000 on my own signature. If I want to spend more than that, I have to go to division headquarters with the request. You're a plant engineer and you just spent $8,000. You can spend more than I can. And that's not fair."

Hey, live with it, pal. Get used to the fact that life is not fair. Try walking around in my moccasins for a while. Then you'll find out that it's much easier to sit in your office with the Comptroller and tell golf stories to each other than it is to actually do something to make this factory put product out the back door.

For me personally, the most difficult part of dealing with the difficulties of that job was the ingratitude of those on the receiving end. No one will ever call the County Highway Department, for example, to tell them how much they appreciate the fact that the roads are in good shape. But they won't hesitate for a second to call to complain about the potholes. And being a plant engineer is perhaps the most thankless job the entire world because no one will ever call to say that the temperature is just right in her office. She'll let you know immediately, however, when it's too hot or too cold. A plant engineer will face an endless line of complainers and it is unlikely that anyone will ever pat him on the back. In my last five years in that occupation - with two different companies no less - no one made any positive comment about my performance as a plant engineer. Not a single positive comment! In fact, one psychotic supervisor did just the opposite when he gave me a performance review. He said I had average technical knowledge of my job. But in every other category he marked me down as "marginal." Every category?

He sat there with a demonic smile on his face waiting for me to react to his review. When I didn't say anything to him, he asked me what I thought of his evaluation. I told him it was a damn lie. "Why do you say that?" he asked. I told him to look at the category called Communication Skills on the evaluation sheet. I asked him to see what kind of an evaluation he gave me in that category. He sat there and didn't say anything. I asked him, "What did you write down for communication skills? Didn't you check the 'Marginal' box?" He admitted that he did check that box. But then I asked him why he came to me day after day and asked me to write memos for him if he knew I was a marginal communicator. "Why would you have me write anything for you if you knew I was a marginal communicator?" He just sat there without answering. A slight smile graced his lips. When I told him he was a %@*#$! liar, he just smiled at me.

Yes, you can be anything you want to be in life. You can soar with the eagles. You can claw your way to the top. But if you’re looking for me, I’ll be over there dozing in that LA-Z-Boy. I’ve learned my lesson.

B1028-1 Moron Politics: Drilling for Oil

Roller Coaster Rides: A number of years ago, when my daughter was still in high school, she asked me to give her a ride to school. I refused. She had gotten up at 6:30 a.m. and began preparing for classes that started at 8:00 a.m. She had turned on her stereo and she was dancing to the music - I could tell that she was doing that because the ceiling above me was moving up and down quite visibly. And she had lost complete track of time. Suddenly, just a few minutes before eight o'clock, she stood in the living room and asked me for a ride to school. I shook my head no. "But, I'll be late if you don't take me, Dad," she said. I thought about that for a moment or two. We lived less than a city block from the high school. If one walked at a leisurely pace, it would take perhaps three minutes to walk to school. My daughter, who set seven school records in Track, could easily run to that school in less than one minute. It would take me longer than that to get the car out of the garage and drive her to school. I told her I wouldn't take her. "I'll be late," she reminded me. "Yes," I said, "and the longer you stand here and talk to me, the later you're going to be." She turned on her heel, muttered "Whatever!", and ran out the front door. I stood on the front porch and timed her. It took her 37 seconds to run to school.

When crude oil prices peaked at $147 per barrel on 11 July 2008, we often heard discussions about drilling for oil in Alaska (and elsewhere). And the constant rejoinder to that suggestion was this: "Even if we started drilling today, we wouldn't get any oil for ten years." Frankly, I do not understand the logic of that kind of response. What does lead-time have to do with the efficacy of drilling for oil?

Suppose, for example, that I told that little girl who lives next door - who graduated from high school just a month ago - that it would be silly for her to enroll in the University because it would take her four or five or six years for her to get her degree. Would that be a serious objection to getting a college degree? Few would have a problem with the amount of time it would take to secure that college degree.

Or, take this example. My son-in-law, an emergency room pediatric physician, was reflecting one day on the years of schooling, internships, and residencies it took him to get to his present status in life. Counting the time he spent in grade school, high school, college, medical school, residency, internships, and the three-year fellowship for his pediatric emergency medicine specialty, it took him 28 years of study and preparation. Twenty-eight years! Would any serious person in the world find something so objectionable with that length of time that they would torpedo the very process that got him there? Would any serious person in the world say, "Hell, even if he started studying today, we wouldn't get an ER pediatrician for another 28 years"?

Give me a break. The longer we stand here and talk about drilling for oil (or going to college), the later we’re going to be. Tell me why we have to apply the Roller Coaster Test to every discussion about drilling for oil. When we talk about drilling for oil, why do we rule out any activity that lasts longer than a four-minute ride on a roller coaster in an amusement park? Just how much lead-time is really acceptable? If we got the oil in two months, could we begin drilling tomorrow? No? How about four months? Or two years? Or six years? Or eight years? Other than four minutes, how much time would you allow? Or, is your entire objection to drilling for oil based on your hatred of our economic system? What, exactly, is your problem?

Forgive me, but it is a pathetically stupid argument to say, "Even if we started drilling today, we wouldn't get any oil for ten years." If you applied that same logic to other areas of daily life, you’d never start the oven to bake your meatloaf or make the effort to put a man on Mars.

The Hood Ornament Diversion: Closely allied to the Roller Coaster Ride argument is the Hood Ornament Diversion. Every single time they say, "Even if we started drilling today, we wouldn't get any oil for ten years," they follow that line of argument with this red-herring statement: “Instead, we ought to be investing in wind, solar, biofuels, and alternate energy sources.” Huh? You want me to put a windmill on my SUV? You want me to install some kind of hood ornament on the vehicle to get me past the gas station? You want to address the high price of gasoline by installing solar panels on my internal combustion engine automobile? How will these alternate energy items help to alleviate the price of gasoline? My SUV runs on gasoline, not wind or electrical power. In fact, the entire U.S. economy runs on gasoline and diesel fuel.

The weaners ("We have to wean ourselves off fossil fuels") want us to build alternate energy sources to power the economy. In itself, that's probably not a bad idea. Yet, there are few who are actually prepared to accept the real implications of that Pollyanna change-over suggestion.

Consider this: the nascency of an interstate highway system in the United States began with the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916. For the last 93 years this country has been engaged in building and/or repairing federal highways. In Chicago - a particularly unique and egregious case - they have been working on the roads since the last Ice Age. If some sharp economist were to tally the cost of building all those roads and bridges and highways since 1916, the total might well be into the trillions of dollars. If that same economist tallied the total cost of all the motor vehicles in United States - both internal combustion and diesel engine vehicles - along with all the infrastructure necessary to operate those vehicles, viz., the tanker trucks, the gasoline stations, the auto parts stores, etc., what do you suppose the total might be? $10 trillion? $20 trillion? $30 trillion? Pick a number and run with it. I won’t quibble. Whatever the exact number is, it is an astonishingly high number. You can count on that.

What the weaners are actually telling us is this: abandon all of that infrastructure and build something different. Throw the $30 trillion away. Junk your SUV. Bulldoze the oil refineries. And ride the inter-urban electric train instead. Cool. After 50 or 60 years of construction, you might have the rails laid and enough trains to put on them to ride from coast to coast. Oh, and I almost forgot: it'll cost you another $20 trillion to make all of that happen. $20 trillion!

Let's see. "Even if we started drilling today, we wouldn't get any oil for ten years." Okay. So, let's go with some alternative energy source that will take 50 or 60 years to put together and cost us a cool $20 trillion. Yeah.

And you thought I was dumb?

B1016-1 Funeral Verses

Every now and then, a youngster stands up during a funeral service and reads a poem specifically written for the occasion. Usually, it is a sincere encomium of a deceased relative - generally a grandparent. It is almost always delivered in a rapid and unintelligible sewing-machine cadence to an uncomprehending audience of indifferent adults. And those adults, as adults are most wont to do, often tell the youngster afterwards just how wonderful the poem was, even though they haven’t understood even a single word. Yet, any objective observer would think otherwise if pressed about the quality of the child’s “poem” as a poem.

That is not to say that something sincerely spoken should ever be confused with something well-composed. There is, after all, a categorical and substantial difference between “sincere” and “good.” But it strikes me as surprising that almost never do we hear estimable poetry read at a funeral. Instead, we are treated with mere doggerel and tears. And always - always - someone will be standing there in the receiving line with the icing bag in her hands, waiting to trace a pink and cursive “LOVELY” on the forehead of that unsuspecting youngster, like a decorator frosting roses on a wedding cake.

It would be beside the point for me to comment here on an educational system that would allow students to filter out into the streets without the slightest concept of what - precisely - constitutes a poem. So much is scribbled today that calls itself poetry that I’m convinced that the “language arts” no longer teaches the subtleties of that medium. But, just as Warhol could paint soup cans with impunity and call it art, so too a desultory handful of words cast onto a page can masquerade as poetry - even at a funeral service.

It is to the point, however, to comment on the habit of the present age of pouring raw sentiment down the sewer in the giddy expectation that doing so will water the wilted flowers of one’s would-be admirers. I speak, of course, of the excesses of J-land.

Journaling, to be sure, is a narcissistic gaze into the mirror of oneself, and no amount of pious pitter-patter will disguise that fact or change its self-reflexive nature. The observer who looks over the shoulder and sneaks a glimpse into that journal will notice that the hand that paints the portrait of self is connected to the arm of the very same person. The portrait and the portrait painter form a single, common tautology, unconfused with boundaries of “otherness” or whispered contradictions that might suggest a smoldering, dissenting view.

And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Each gaze into the mirror reveals yet another thing that wasn’t seen there the day before. Each gaze into the mirror reveals something that now appears as more than it was just a moment ago. Each look daubs a dab of paint on the canvas that constitutes what we really are. Little by little a picture emerges, not of the semi-conscious world of the dreamer, but of the realist looking at the truth of himself. In the end the narcissist sees, not the paramount and dazzling image of himself that he imagines himself to be, but rather, the first faint outlines of his own shortcomings as he really is.

Journaling seems to be much like those radio telescope transmissions years ago that broadcast an endless brood of clatter into the ether in the high expectation that intelligent life somewhere would reply. To my knowledge, none has ever seen fit to reply to those fitful radio emissions. And why would we expect them to do so? A narcissistic noise foisted upon a quiet and peaceful universe? To reply to that babble would surely encourage more of the same. One hardly replies to a child plunking on a piano. Why would intelligent life elsewhere answer a very similar - and annoying - electronic plunking?

So too with journaling. Often the plunkings in J-land take the inane form of tiny fonts dotting a blackened background: indecipherable and unreadable texts each vying for the smaller amount of notice. Who could reply to that? How is it possible to comment on what cannot be seen?

Or, often the plunkings take the form of endlessly variable color schemes from one line of text to another. It is almost as if their fabricators were still chained to the chairs in their third-grade classrooms and forced to explore the entire chromatic spectrum sliver by dreary sliver. Who, I ask, could follow a sustained argument that’s all alight with Las Vegas’ bubbly glow? Indeed, those plunky colors defy comprehension for those with thinning hair and less than the full compliment of natural teeth.

Did I mention those endless menageries of pets that somehow confuse photo albums with written journals? It seems that if those pictures of dogs and cats were left out, some would have absolutely nothing to say. And what about all that glittered deckle edging?

I do profess a personal alienation when looking at a woman’s journal that’s flowery and glittery and filled with the 21st-century equivalent of antimacassars that one might have seen plastered all over Victorian furniture. So many of these journals look like my grandmother’s parlor: a mysterious room I was forbidden to enter as a child. Her parlor was filled with large and ponderous furniture, with everything arranged just so, and reserved exclusively for “company.” As a five year old, I sneaked into the parlor when no one was looking and discover the joys of jumping up and down on grandma’s couch. Those joys were short-lived when grandma pulled me from the parlor into the kitchen, squalling and shrieking (her - not me), and made me sit on a hard wooden chair next to my grandfather, who was being disciplined himself for some irregularity or another that same afternoon. The two of us sat there like Death Row inmates awaiting the arrival of the chaplain. I was never to enter grandma’s house again until well after her death. Sic transit gloria mundi.

An unstated need so often in journals is the need to be recognized by others. It is not to say that one writes merely for the adulation of others, but rather that in the final analysis one desires to be heard. Most of us have seen a certain arm’s-length sexism tainting these journals, in that the women, by and large, comment and stroke other women’s journals and ignore the journals of men, and vice versa. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this rather rash corollary.

I write and post in this journal to beat my daughter at her own game. She looks upon my writing with disdain and contempt, and I find the prospect that she might press my collected works to her bosom to be remote in the extreme. I would delude myself to think that anything I may have written is worth preserving for posterity. And so, I’m quite sure that she will cart my opera to the curb when I’m cold and moldering in the grave without so much as a second thought. The landfill will become my library, awaiting those archeologists in the future, who will wonder greatly at the extravagant expanse of forest cleared to print such palpable dribble. If they listen very carefully, I’m sure they will hear my daughter murmuring in the background: Daaaad!

B1032-1 The Woman Who Knows...

Some years ago, when my sister-in-law was a teller at a small branch bank, she dug her heels in when they asked her to break in another branch manager. She had trained ten "snot nose kids," as she called them, to become her boss in the bank. And then, after a year or so, they would leave to go "downtown" to the main branch, where they would sit at a desk by the front windows and read The Wall Street Journal all day long. One after another, she had nurtured those young men - they were always and invariably young men - and she had to teach them that the simple-looking man who came into the bank in those crusty farmer’s overalls really had enough money to buy and sell the bank a half a dozen times over. More than once she had slapped those young men on the back of the head as if they were nine-year-olds, and called them dumb shits, when they told her they had turned down a loan for Herbie. My sister-in-law was a beautiful, feisty woman!

The "main suit" downtown was surprised when she refused to break in another man. He was surprised to the point that he requested that she come downtown to the bank in the city “to have a little chat with him." She told her husband that she was probably going to get fired. But she didn't care. "I've had it with these damn kids," she said.

Initially, the "suit" talked to her in those mushy and patronizing tones, and explained to her that it was necessary for her to break in these young men so that the bank had an adequate supply of up-and-coming managers. She nodded her head as if she agreed with him and let him babble on and on about the need to train those new managers. Finally, she told him that she was the most qualified person at her branch, and that if he wanted to train somebody to become the branch bank manager, she was the ideal candidate. "How much sense does it make for me to train some dumb kid straight out of college to become the branch manager when I know more about banking than the kid will ever know?" she asked. "Why don't you just make me the branch manager instead of wasting my time on those stupid kids you keep sending me?"

Of course, he turned in his swivel chair and looked out the window. He gave her that pensive look that he always feigned just before telling an applicant that "the bank will be unable to grant your loan request." He sat there with his fingers, interwoven together, tucked under his chin. From time to time, he would look down longingly at The Wall Street Journal lying on his desk. Then he would pinch the dial of his wristwatch between his thumb and his index finger as if he were checking the time. "So," he said, "we'll send the new trainee to your branch next Monday so you can get started on his training."

"Nope,” she said, “I'm not training another man." She folded her arms across her chest and looked him right straight in the eye. "Make me the branch manager instead."

They sat there for a moment or two, staring at each other. She was prepared to walk out the door if it came to that. But she wasn’t going to train another kid.

He ran his fingers through his hair and exhaled noisily. “Well, unfortunately we might have to terminate you if you refuse to comply with our orders.”

“Yeah. Go ahead and try it,” she said. “I’ve got thirty years at this bank and I’ve trained a truckload of dummies to be your branch managers. Still, you have to remember one thing: I’m just a teller. I’m not a professional trainer. You’d have a pretty tough time in a court of law making the case that I’m not doing my job. But if you want to rile up the big boys upstairs, just go ahead and invite an unlawful termination court case. They’ll love you for that. Why, they might even make you the branch manager out in the sticks where I work.”

Of course, I tell this little story as I imagine it might have happened. And I say that because my sister-in-law reconstructed that story for my wife and me when we went to that small branch bank to ask some advice from her about a proper place to park the proceeds from a real estate sale. When we did not see her in the bank, we asked one of the tellers where she was. The teller walked to that office in the corner and told her that "someone was here to see you."

We were shown into the room, and she looked up from her desk. She was quite surprised to see us. She was wearing a very smart suit and she almost looked like she belonged in that room. On the desk in front of her was a copy of The Wall Street Journal - her Wall Street Journal. I asked her what she was doing in that office. She seemed quite surprised by that question. "Where else would I be?" she said. "I'm the branch manager and this is my office."

There is in every company a person who comes in early in the morning and turns on the lights and makes the coffee. That same person knows where everything is kept, and how everything is done. If you really want to know how to do something, you must go to that person who turns on the lights and makes the coffee. And I've found over the years that person is always a woman. The go-to person, the depository of all corporate knowledge, resides in the person who is the first to come to work in the morning and the last to leave at night.

For years that person was my sister-in-law. But when she started wearing those smart suits to work, and sat in that fancy corner office and read The Wall Street Journal all day long, she told us how much she missed bantering with the customers at the drive-up window. "I should have trained one of their dummies and just kept my mouth shut," she said.

B1006-1 The Words We Use: Nothingness

An old European immigrant, who sat on a bench outside a mom-n-pop grocery store, used to tell us that our language was “funny.” When we asked him what he meant by that, he said that we say “we are going to catch train. How is possible to catch train? Train very heavy.” Well, yes. You might say that this was a typical misunderstanding of idiomatic English. And perhaps it was.

But we use expressions that are often senseless even to native speakers of the language. For example, our American friend told us that she went to that new restaurant in town. When we ask how it was, she replied with some general affirmations of its goodness and suitability as a restaurant. She said she had the filet mignon. Again, when we ask how it was, she told us that “it was like nothing you ever tasted in your life.”

There’s a problem with that way of speaking, however. How would we know what something was like when we never tasted it in our lives? Indeed, how could we begin to understand this particular form of tasty “nothing?” I suppose one could imagine varieties of nothing - some of which could be tasted - in some erudite, philosophical sense. Once you fall through the trapdoor of nothingness, though, all possibilities for affective interaction seem to disappear as well.

The problem here is to know when you have arrived: if something “is like nothing,” then it ceases to have an ontological existence. Accordingly, it can no longer be intuited, or even be considered in any constructive sense of the word. So, our American friend’s comparison was considerably beyond nonsense: it was logically impossible to even consider the contours and implications of nonexistence, and, moreover, to compare that with something with which we were familiar. Once you open the door to nothingness, “there is no there there.”

During the O.J. Simpson murder trial (1995) we heard this statement: “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” But, apropos of our discussion here, if the glove doesn’t exist, we can’t even talk about it.

Well, if you’ll excuse me, I have to run along now. I have to catch a train.

B8001-1 Going to Mars

Every now and then a person appears on television arguing for greater space exploration spending. There is always a rather extended list of benefits the nation stands to collect if only it is wise enough to spend some $50-60 billions each year on rockets. I find those arguments amusing in the extreme.

Space exploration was a Cold War exercise, principally between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. It was a technological bet that purported to prove which society was somehow superior to the other on the basis of sending men and equipment to the moon. It was curiously similar to an advanced drag race between two teenagers with multi-billion dollar equipment. In the end it proved only that one nation sent men to the moon before the other nation without settling the bet on cultural superiority.

What I find so amusing is the extended arguments of those participants of early attempts at space exploration (Buzz Aldrin, et al.), who now talk about colonizing Mars or other planets, without realizing what actually happened in the 1960s. The pilots went for a plane ride in very expensive equipment back then and all of it was quite thrilling. But it had nothing to do with “advancing the frontiers of mankind” (supply your own favorite cliché here). It was a carnival ride pure and simple. And today they confuse that carnival ride with something important.

B4022-2 Moron Economics: Percentage Arguments

“‘In 1970, the top 1% of households held roughly 9% of our nation’s income. In 2005, they held 22%, the highest level since 1929.’ [quoting Senator Hillary Clinton, speaking at a technical school in Manchester, New Hampshire on 29 May 2007]” (Michael Novak. "Economic Reds: A Diagnosis," National Review, 9 July 2007, Vol. LIX, No. 12. p. 40).

Poor Michael Novak! Not only does he fall for Hillary’s faulty economic argument, but he makes the mistake of trying to respond to it. Her fundamental argument is silly. It makes little sense to respond to that silliness by trying to argue about exact numbers and percentages in order to arrive at a more palatable position. The exact numbers and percentages make little difference to an argument that’s faulty on a more fundamental basis.

Once again, for those of you of a moronic bent, the top 1 percent of households do not hold any percent of “our nation’s income.” There is no such thing as “our nation’s income.” The expression, “the top 1 percent of households,” is a statistical abstraction without any practical reference to anything existing in the real world. One could also say that the expression, “our nation’s income,” is also a statistical abstraction without any practical reference to anything existing in the real world as well. When we reduce these arguments to their simplest terms, we say “a statistical abstraction” (i. e., “the top 1 percent of households”) holds x-percent of the “statistical abstraction” (i.e., “the nation’s income”). “Statistical abstractions” holding x-percent of “statistical abstractions.” Yeah, like that qualifies as an argument worthy of response. One could make as much sense by saying “the top 1 percent of households” holds x-percent of the Web-Footed Polynomial's Dufus.

B4022-1 Moron Economics: Statistical Abstractions

“Recent incoming data, taken as a whole, have affected the outlook for economic activity and employment modestly” [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke addressing a Fed conference (Vindicator (Youngstown, Ohio), 11 June 2008, p. A10).

Well. Mr. Bernanke’s testimony would be eminently worthy of Allan Greenspan’s (his predecessor) style of speaking gobbledegook: he speaks as if his statements represent sound economic reasoning. They don’t.

Once again, “data” are statistical abstractions, and they cannot “affect” anything, particularly an “outlook.” That “outlook,” an opinion held by others about the future, is also an abstraction. So, what Mr. Bernanke is really saying is this: “An abstraction affected an abstraction modestly.” Of course, you and I recognize that last statement as utter nonsense.

When one abstracts a particular case, the resulting mental construct can be used as a means of dealing with the external world. If I say, for example, that there are “seventeen chickens sitting on the roost,” I am no longer referring to anything (chickens) in the real world. “Seventeen chickens sitting on the roost” is my mentally convenient way of sorting out the flock of chickens that I see before me. “Seventeen chickens” is my way of talking about the birds I see on the roost. As soon as I utter the words, “seventeen chickens,” I am no longer speaking about something out “there;” instead, I am speaking about my personal means of assessing the characteristics of the flock I see before me. There is no such thing, per se, as “seventeen chickens.” But we need to understand that my abstraction about the chickens, being an abstraction, becomes frighteningly similar to the “data” of our friend, Mr. Bernanke. Can any reasonable person say, then, that “data are sitting on the roost” or “abstractions are sitting on the roost?” Would it even make any sense to attempt to speak in those terms?

F2066-1 Jay & Ethel

Rod and Danny worked until 11:00 p.m. and then they headed out to Washington, D.C. They drove all through the night and arrived at 6:00 a.m.. Rod’s mother-in-law, Ethel, had a big Southern breakfast ready for them: ham and eggs, grits - the whole nine yards. As the men sat down to eat, Jay reached into a large ice bucket and brought out a bottle of champagne. Ethel asked Danny if he drank. What a question! Danny was practically a candidate for a liver transplant and Ethel asked the man if he drank. Foolishly, Danny told Ethel he could probably drink her under the table. Rod told him that he just made a really big mistake in telling Ethel that he could drink her under the table. Danny didn’t know it then, but he was about to meet a couple of real professionals.

After the champagne breakfast, Jay, Ethel, Rod and Danny headed southeast of Washington, D.C. to the Patuxent River, where Jay had his boat docked. They got on the boat and motored down the river and out on Chesapeake Bay. There was word that the “Blues” were running and Jay listened to the boat radio chatter to find out if the Bluefish were hitting on “rubber” or on “hardware.” That day the fish were hitting on “rubber” - 14" lengths of medical rubber tubing, with leaders and hooks configured to mimic an eel. They rigged their fishing poles with lead weights about 7 to 8 feet from the “rubber” bait and trolled for “Blues.” The lead weights bounced along the bottom and the tubing wove back and forth through the currents of water. The fish began to hit.

Jay yelled at Ethel to get him an Icepick. She mixed vodka with iced tea and took it to him. Then she prepared a gin and water for herself and the two of them began their fifth-a-day weekend drinking habit. Rod and Danny were drinking beer and soon found themselves pretty wasted because of lack of sleep and the inability to keep up with the advanced drinking skills of Jay and Ethel.

Jay’s boat cost more than $38,000 when he bought it in 1967. That was a time when Rod earned only about $125 per week and he thought that a boat that expensive was, well, rather extravagant. But it was a decked-out boat. Ethel went to the galley and began to cook something.

After drinking for hours, Jay turned the boat toward the shore when he had consumed his requisite fifth of vodka. Ethel matched him drink for drink, and Rod was amazed that the two of them were able to dock the boat and disembark with a steadiness that would belie their day’s drinking. Rod and Danny had a difficult time getting off the boat without assistance.

They all went to a shabby crab restaurant that looked like a highway department maintenance building: a plain concrete block building, with unpainted walls, in the middle of a crummy neighborhood. It certainly didn’t have the look of a restaurant or even the look of a place one would like to go to. The tables inside were covered with brown wrapping paper instead of tablecloths. The floor was sloppy with spilled beer and remnants of crab legs. They ordered “a bushel of crabs and a gallon of beer.” And Rod said that the crabs were the best crabs he ever tasted.

After their supper, they drove back to Washington, D.C. Rod and Danny were badly sunburned and absolutely exhausted. When they got to Jay and Ethel’s place, Danny went to the shower and Rod sat down in an overstaffed chair, waiting for his turn in the shower. He promptly fell asleep. He had intended to jump in the shower after Danny got out. But he found himself early the next morning in the same chair, fully dressed, hung-over, and still needing a shower.

There was no time for a shower, however. Jay was calling the men to breakfast, saying, “if they didn’t hop to it they would be left behind.” And he meant it. They gobbled their breakfast and drove down to the Patuxent River. Soon, they were back on the Chesapeake, “rigged for rubber,” looking for Blues. The sunlight was bright and blinding and made Rod feel even worse than he thought he felt. But Jay was calling for an “Icepick” and Ethel was starting on her day’s-long journey through the gin bottle as well. The very thought of alcoholic drinks repulsed Rod, and it wasn’t until after noon before he could attempt his first beer. Danny was a bit more aggressive than Rod and got into the beer cooler before he did.

The Blues weren’t hitting on rubber and Jay suggested that they switch to “hardware.” They used a “Tony” and had much better luck. The hours stretched by slowly, and the toll of lack of sleep and beer finally caught up with Danny and Rod. They both looked like something the cat had dragged in. Just like the previous day, when Jay had reached the bottom of his vodka bottle, he turned the boat around and headed toward shore. When they got to the dock Danny and Rod were both asleep on the cushions at the stern. Ethel looked at them and shook her head. “I thought those boys said they could drink,” she said.

B1019-1 The Magazine Ladies

For years I was sandwiched between two old ladies. On one side, there was Ruthie with her butcher string necklace. On the other side, there was the Pink Lady with her toilet paper Christmas trees. I lived between them. And I loved both of those women as dear, dear friends.

Down the street, a few doors away, in that big brick house, the minister’s widow lived among his collected sermons and her potted plants. A block away, through the alley, a retired schoolteacher named Jessie lived alone in that big house behind the manse.

What united these four women was a pile of magazines, brought to their door from time to time, wrapped in twine and given to them to recycle. Each of them lived through the Great Depression, and none of them would throw a magazine away, if given half a chance. Instead, they took these magazines and scratched out their names on the address labels and sent the magazines around the neighborhood until the pages were as curled as red oak leaves in late October.

Ruthie had often heard me clinking and clunking on my car with wrenches and bars. In the summer, when the weather was warm, I left the garage doors open, and she could hear Götterdämmerung mixed in with muted expletives and sudden bursts of rage, as a fat Brünnhilde wailed endlessly in the background.

Of course, I was that “Opera Guy” in my neighborhood, and it had often surprised me that so many people in this small town knew of this strange and lurid proclivity of mine. And by just the smallest of margins - exactly one mile to be precise - I lived on the northern edge of Appalachia, where “Grand Old” could safely precede the word Opera, but some would look with hesitant alarm if the word “Old” were missing from that appellation. You could safely love Grand Old Opry here. But you were immediately suspect if you loved Grand Opera. You might even have to register with the police as if you were given to perverted and odious tendencies.

Then, one day Ruthie appeared at my door with a bundle of magazines in her hands. Her house key dangled from her butcher string necklace, and she explained to me that she no longer lost her key now that it was tied around her neck. And not only that, but she no longer had to walk through the alley to Jessie’s house to get the spare key when she misplaced her own key. She handed the bundle of magazines to me, and she said, “There are some here that you might like.”

I untied the knot in the twine and looked through the magazines. There were the usual cooking and craft magazines and even magazines that showed a person how to take a good house and keep it. And mixed in with that curious assortment, there was a copy or two of a magazine called, Opera News. “Jessie sent these over because she thought you might like them,” Ruthie said, pointing to the Opera News.

I didn’t know quite what to say. It was true that I listened to opera. But it certainly wouldn’t be accurate to say that I’ve read about opera or studied opera. In fact, I’m probably one of maybe two or three people in the entire universe, who regularly listens to opera without any idea whatsoever what might be happening in the libretto for that opera. I am a blissfully ignorant person. Moreover, I am willfully ignorant about those libretti because I care only about the sound and music of opera, and I couldn’t care less about the story. So, you can probably imagine my immense surprise, when I watched a television production of Götterdämmerung one time, and saw those English subtitles crawling along the bottom of the screen. “Ha! So that’s what this opera is all about,” I said. My wife looked at me like I was crazy. I had listened to that opera perhaps 200 times and I knew every single note of that opera by heart. And I had no idea what the story was all about. Surely, Richard Wagner would disown me.

Then at Christmas time Jessie sent a card, along with Ruthie and her bundle of magazines, to my doorstep. Jessie explained that I probably didn’t like to read the Opera News with all those annoying peanut butter stains on the pages, and those coffee cup rings on the cover. So, she was giving me a subscription to the magazine that I might have a nice clean copy to read every month. I didn’t know what to say. I was stunned by her generosity and kindness.

What I did not know at the time was the fact that the subscription to the magazine brought me tightly into the circle of the Friends of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. And then about April, when the Metropolitan Opera boxed up its production sets and took them to Cleveland, Ohio to begin its road shows, a man called from the Opera Guild and asked me if he could put me down for $500 for “The Metropolitan.” I smiled at his naïveté. I told him he could put me down for $6.8 billion if he felt like it. He said I was a subscriber to their magazine, and I was a friend of opera, and that it was my duty to support the opera if I expected to see it continue as a cultural enterprise in the United States.

Well. Of course, I was flattered that a cultural enterprise depended almost exclusively on my efforts. But I was really helpless to do anything about it at the time. You see, I have been doing what my Appalachian friends down here call, “running my mouth.”

I had worked as a plant engineer in a large manufacturing concern. And I had seven different bosses in ten years. That may not seem to be something that’s entirely remarkable to you, even though the numbers may strike some as fairly high. Seven different bosses is actually about six more than you really should have in ten-year period. You can only play that Russian roulette game a few times before a live bullet goes through your brain. If you work for a large number of supervisors, you will eventually find one who has a distinct and utter dislike for someone like you. And Number Seven proved to be fatal to me when I “ran my mouth on the man” and he fired me.

You see, I have not been gifted with humility, common sense, or the obsequious ability to suffer fools gladly. I struggled to make myself clear. I present what I think are qualified and logical arguments to my supervisor that he might understand what I’m saying, and that he might see the point I’m trying to make. But when he digs his heels in and spouts endless nonsense, I run my mouth on him. And then I work on my resume, after he watches me waddle out the door. That’s happened enough to me in my working lifetime that I’m actually pretty good at it.

So, there I was, stretched out in the La-Z-Boy at home, resplendent with a three-day growth of beard, and in my underwear, when my friend from the Metropolitan Opera Guild gave me a call. He wanted to put me down for $500. I told him I couldn’t do that. He asked if it would be okay if he put me down for $250. “Hey pal, whatever trips your trigger. $500, or $250, or $6.8 billion. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m flat broke and you aren’t getting a dime from me. You can put down whatever you want.”

We dickered. In very short time he went from $250 to $200 to $150 to $100. And once he broke through that $100 barrier, I began to detect the gossamer twinge of sarcasm in his voice. “Fifty bucks, for crying out loud,” he said. “Fifty lousy bucks.” The staccato sound of those words went through me like well-spaced .50 caliber machine gun bullets.

Yeah. I’ll take it out of my unemployment check, Mister. And you can hold your breath waiting for it to arrive. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going out to the garage now to work on my car.

I think I’ll listen to a little Massenet today because I’m getting pretty tired of that Götterdämmerung stuff. Maybe a little Thérèsa. Huguette Turangeau in the title role. Le soir du bel été, des songes...des mensonges...

B1017-1 Beggars, MADD Dogs & Fascists Out in the Noonday Sun

Every now and then, when you sit down to eat, the telephone rings with some beggar on the other end of the phone. You listen patiently while your food grows cold. You listen patiently while some clown tries to sell you something you really don’t want. And that person - that clown - will become angry with you if you get a little short with them. It’s almost as if there was some expectation on their part that they could interrupt your day with impunity, and rob you of your supper hour tranquility anytime they wanted. Of course, you are expected to sit back and take it. I mean, excuse me, but where do they get off? Who are they?

Oh, they’ll tell you that they’re just trying to make a living. I have nothing against that. I wish them well. Hey, knock yourself out, friend. But don’t call me and destroy the peace of my home so you can go to the bank and cash your paycheck on Friday. I mean, get real.

You don’t see me doing that. I once had a job where I worked until 3:30 a.m.. I got home shortly before four o’clock in the morning, and if my memory serves me correctly, I never called anybody up and told them that I just got home from work or that I was out all night making a living. I never called to tell them that I thought they just might want to know that I had a rough night at work. Had I done that, they would have called police. The police would have arrested me for 1) telephone harassment, and 2) for waking them up during their quiet time (never disturb a fat cop at donut time).

But the beggars can get on the horn and call me up anytime they want. They can disturb my peace. They can rob me of the peaceful sanctity of my home so they can make a living. Big Whoop Dee Dee.

Or maybe those beggars will tell you that they are trying to raise funds for a very worthy cause. Oh well, that’s different. Jeeze, why didn’t I think of that? They’ll tell you that they’re soliciting funds for, say, breast cancer research. What could be more noble than that? Well, I don’t know. Perhaps if I hired six or seven of the teenagers in my neighborhood and had them call you every hour on the hour throughout the night to talk to you about breast cancer research you might get the idea that, the nobility of that grand thought aside, there’s something really obnoxious about being disturbed over and over again - even if it’s for a really good cause.

Oh, and how about those teens? Every September, two or three young girls show up on my front steps, dressed in marching band uniforms, collecting funds for the school band. Each year these beggars ask me for money so they can play in the band. And of course, I am a gigantic curmudgeon if I do not give them money so they can play in the band. But consider this if you will: when my daughter was learning to drive an automobile, did I walk around the neighborhood and collect funds so she could buy a car? No, I did not. Even the thought of doing that would have seemed absurd, not only to me, but to my neighbors as well. “Buy your daughter a car? Buy your daughter a car? Hah. You gotta be kidding. Hit the bricks, pal!”

So here’s my notion of how the world should work: if you want to play the clarinet in the high school marching band, then ask your mom to buy you a clarinet. If you need a uniform to be in that marching band, then ask your dad to buy you a uniform. Why are you asking me to spend my money for something I’m not even interested in? I cannot play an instrument. I am not interested in marching around on a soggy football field. You are the person who is interested in being in that marching band. Why are you on my front porch beating on my door asking me for money? Get your wallet out. Spend your money or your mom’s money or your dad’s money. But don’t come around disturbing me to beg money from me for something I don’t give a hoot about. Get a job and then take part of your earnings to pay for that musical instrument and that band uniform.

Okay. Okay. Put me down as one of those mean and rude persons who just doesn’t care about the rest of the world. Put me down as someone so wrapped up in himself that he can’t support these worthy causes. After all, who am I to stand in your way when you’re just trying to earn a living? Who am I to stand in your way when you’re just the 15th or the 16th person who’s been banging at my door today to collect money for some worthy cause? Who am I to get upset because my mailbox is stuffed to the gizzards every day with junk mail soliciting funds for causes that I’m not interested in? Hey, it’s all for a worthy cause. Why am I being such a heartless jackass?

Well, maybe it’s the principle of the thing. When we give that cancer envelope to a high school kid and send her around the neighborhood to solicit funds, we are not teaching her how to be compassionate, or caring, or how to be of service to her fellow human beings. We are teaching her how to be a beggar. We’re not teaching her some noble enterprise that she will be able to use for the rest of her life. We’re teaching her to become an obnoxious and hated person merely to satisfy our own personal idea of what is useful or valuable. We’re all for breast cancer research, so we enlist the youngster in our cause and send her out into the world to beat on doors even when doing so disturbs the peace of our neighbors.

Did it ever occur to you that the person down the street might not be particularly interested in breast cancer research? If you are so turned on by that breast cancer research, then get your wallet out and send the cancer researchers a couple of bucks yourself. Don’t beat on my door. And don’t make that high school kid traipse all over the neighborhood working on your agenda.

See, you got me started.

Oh, here’s a related issue. Some years ago a business associate gave me a one-year gift subscription to an environmental magazine. The magazine was beautifully printed with gorgeous pictures inside: Yellowstone Park, mountain streams, desert cacti, and so forth. It was lovely. I would look at this magazine when it came in the mail. But I was always somewhat taken aback by the magazine. It was not that I was anti-environmental person. Rather, it was because the magazine dealt with a topic that was not my personal cause celebre, much in the same way that a model railroading magazine might not appeal to someone who had no interest in model railroading. If NASCAR, to take another example, was not part of your world, then a NASCAR magazine would seem pretty inappropriate as a gift, would it not? Well, that’s what I thought of that environmental magazine: it was nice, but environmentalism was not my bag.

At the end of the year, a woman called me on the telephone to renew the subscription to that magazine. I told her that I wasn’t interested. She asked, “Aren’t you interested in the environment?” I told her that a misguided business associate had given me a gift subscription to the magazine, but it was a magazine that I wasn’t particularly interested in. Immediately she asked if I wasn’t interested in clean air. I thought that was a very curious question because who could answer that they weren’t interested in clean air? It’s almost like asking someone if they would rather be hacked to death with a machete or live to be one hundred years old. It was a loaded question. I told her I wasn’t interested in the magazine, and that I had made no statement whatever about clean air.

Well, right away she decided she was going to be one of those I-won’t-take-no-for-an-answer kind of persons. She wanted to argue. She wanted to couch all of her arguments in terms of environmentalism, when I was commenting on the merits of the magazine, per se, to me as a reader. She kept going back to the clean air, pristine environment attractions shown in the magazine. I told her that was all fine and dandy. But I wasn’t interested in paying to look at pictures of clean air and pristine environments. “I can look out my back door to see that,” I told her. “Why should I pay for it?”

Oh, but she was feisty and would not let go. She kept hammering away at her basic environmental argument until I asked her if she was compensated for her telephone solicitation work. She asked what I meant by that. I said, “Do they pay you for what you’re doing right now, or do you do this as a volunteer?” She said, “I am a volunteer.” I said, “Then you are talking from a position of privilege. Someone, somewhere else is paying your freight. Someone is paying your bills and buying your groceries, because you’re sitting here on the telephone talking about environmentalism, and you don’t have to go out and get a real job to support yourself. That’s gotta be nice.” Suddenly the telephone went silent.

Isn’t that the basic problem with speaking from a position of privilege? As long as you can walk over and flip that switch on the wall to turn your lights on, you never really have to worry about the nuts and bolts of generating electrical power. So you can stand there and tell people (with cheeky impunity) that we should have renewable electric generation - wind turbines, solar panels, whatever - instead of those nasty old coal-burning plants down by the river. The fact that we cannot generate enough renewable electricity to meet our current electrical needs is beside the point. If you speak from a position of privilege, you can say anything you want - even if it doesn’t make any sense. And you can send that little girl around the neighborhood with a petition for your neighbors to sign because it’s a Good and Noble and Worthy Cause.

Please. Do not knock on my door and disturb my supper. Do not ask me to contribute to your marching band clarinet/uniform fund raiser. Shovel some sidewalks. Mow some lawns. Get a job at Burger King and use your own money to buy those things. Tell your mom to get a job so she doesn’t spend all of her time thinking up Stupid Things For You To Do, or Noble Causes For You To Espouse. And don’t call me on the telephone. I’m not interested.

It would be very easy to sit here at this particular point in time and pretend that you are dealing only with a narcissistic person. In fact, there is nothing narcissistic at all about not wanting to be interrupted at dinnertime. And I say this because if it were possible for you to be interrupted with impunity all the time, then I think you’d end up with the kind of a situation where you’d be unable to do anything on your own because some interloper would be there beating on your door and insisting that you do things on his clock and at his pace and at his time. But since when is the world structured in such a way that you are fair game for every kook that walks by and knocks on your door, or for every interloper who calls at supper time to sell you something you don’t want? Really, why would you be a narcissist merely because you wish to take a nap after lunch and have a small problem with clowns calling you up and trying to get you to buy something you really don’t want? Excuse me, but let me ask the question again, who the hell are they?

I sympathize with the woman who took her Cub Scout son around the neighborhood trying to sell some trash to people they didn’t want so the kid could go to Camp Shaganappi or whatever. I’m sure she was a well-meaning person. I’m sure that she wanted to teach her son some lessons in dealing with people who lived in the neighborhood. Perhaps she wanted to teach the boy how to sell things. Perhaps she wanted to teach him how to interact with others. Fine. But notice that this woman did not ask permission to do that. Notice that she did not ask others if they minded being part of her little training exercise for her son. Instead, the silly woman got angry, because these people - the self-serving, rotten, narcissistic miscreants - became a little miffed when she came knocking at their doors. They said rude things and maybe they got a little snotty with Mrs. Den Mother. But let me go back to my original point again: who the hell does she think she is?

Each of us holds certain opinions. Each of us finds his own opinions to be sacred and wonderful. Each of us, if we lived in a perfect world, would attempt to impose our opinion on others. Each of us would get quite upset when the rest of the world proved to be unreceptive to the merits of our opinions.

I’’m living here the edge of the world and every day some half-demented woman calls me up and wants me to support her pet project. She asks me if I would like to contribute to, say, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and then she’s suddenly disappointed when I tell her no. But she doesn’t take no for an answer, however. She wants to know why I refuse to contribute. I tell her it’s none of her business why I refuse to contribute. But she browbeats me until I tell her that I don’t like the basic idea of women running around restricting my personal freedom because some drunk driver - somewhere else - ran over a child and killed him. It’s unfortunate that the drunk driver killed the child. It’s unfortunate that the parents of the slain child have to bear the heartbreak and sorrow of that death. On those days when I feel especially persnickety, I tell the woman that I’m for drunk driving; not against it. Of course, she always expresses shock at my wholly troglodyte, knuckle-dragging attitude that I seem to have about drinking and driving. “How can you possibly say that?” she asks.

Again, to return to the central point here: Your attitudes and your opinions are, in fact, your attitudes and your opinions. They are not my attitudes and they are not my opinions. Why, to ask a specific question, should you become angry with me because you have failed to convince me of the logic and power of your arguments? Why am I considered rude because I don’t buy your silly arguments? Why am I a troglodyte because I fail to buy into your fascist arguments?

Fascist? Oh, yes. The rationale for a group like Mothers Against Drunk Driving is essentially a fascist approach to controlling the behavior of others. They never seem to be content to punish the particular person who killed a child after drinking and driving. Instead, they want to inconvenience all drivers everywhere at every time who decide to have a little drink once in a while before they drive home.

I sympathize with the poor parents of the dead child. I feel bad for them. But my feeling bad for them will not bring that dead child back to life. And restricting the behavior of everybody else because a few people drink and drive irresponsibly will do nothing for the dead child or his grieving parents. When you thrust your totalitarian plan on me, don’t get upset because I seem to be rude and uncaring. Call me rude all you want. You’re the one shoveling your trash down my throat, pal. You’re the one restricting my behavior. You’re the one imposing your agenda on my freedom. Again, let me ask, “Who the hell are you?”

So, go out and get a job. Stop trying to micromanage the world. And leave me alone. Okay? I’m trying to take a nap.

B1030-1 A Writers' Workshop

Last night I went into the city and attended a writers' workshop. Initially, there were three women (two Carols and one Gloria) and one man (Carmen), and another person (Jim) who identified himself as the "facilitator" at the meeting. Later, another woman (Lois) and another man (Billy Ray) joined our little group. After some preliminary identifications and introductions, the women began to read the things they had written since the last meeting.

Gloria, an affable and pleasant person who wrote murder mysteries, read part of a story that she had written. She had arranged sections of the story by dating them sequentially. As her story unfolded, we were treated to a long list of events that almost seem disconnected one from the other. I wondered why anyone would write fiction in that manner. Carmen read his story, and if you closed your eyes and settled back into your chair, you might have thought he was reading an extended grocery list. The Pink Carol (who wore a pink blouse) read her piece about the renter-from-hell. Like Carmen, she presented an almost endless list of overflowing toilets and dripping faucets and various rental property headaches that one might encounter with mischievous renters. The Cat Carol (who had perched a large and mangy cat on her book bag on the table in front of her, along with a token sprig of catnip) read her Civil War-era story. It, too, was difficult to follow and to understand because of its staccato cascade of data. Lois read a poem that she had written when she was nineteen-years old. The facilitator thought it read more like an essay in the poem. When Billy Ray read his poem, everyone seemed to think that his poem more poetic than Lois's poem. At least he had some identifiable, poetic elements in his piece. The facilitator shared a writing proposal with us that he had intended to send to publishers. Without actually saying so, most of the people in the group seemed to find his proposal somewhat bizarre. An extended - and almost irrelevant - discussion followed that had viewpoints diametrically opposed the viewpoint in the facilitator's proposal. He sat there and looked on helplessly as the group pawed over his proposal.

All in all, I found the writing workshop experience to be a strange thing. Everyone had put in some amount of time in preparing the writing that they brought to the meeting. And when they "put it on the table," they received those whiny and picky criticisms that more than likely made them wonder why they even bothered to come to the meeting in the first place. It was actually a sad thing to see: honest and forthright effort was seen by others, not as something bad in itself, but rather, as something that seemed to fit a different criteria in everyone's mind. It was almost as if they said, "I do not object to your renter's nightmare story because it's a story about renters. I object to it because it does not meet my requirements for stories with smooth and flowing language." In other words, the objections came down to a single, simple axiom: I do not like what you have written because you did not write it the way I would have written it. Essentially, your writing is bad because it is not my writing. Whew!

Pink Carol beamed when she told us that a piece of hers had been accepted by regional newspaper for publication. No one moved to congratulate her or applaud her accomplishment. They just sat there and looked at her. What everyone seemed to have forgotten at that meeting was the fact that people came there, not to learn how to become better writers, but to be loved for their writing efforts. They came seeking applause, not correction. I am quite sure that not a single person in that room would have admitted that fact. And I say that because not one of them asked that his piece be criticized brutally so that he could learn something. Rather, they groped helplessly for small bits of praise.

They reminded me of the youngster who lived in my neighborhood when I was growing up. He had talked endlessly about his great ambition in life to become a disc jockey. He told us how he was going to be famous and that he would be on every radio station in the whole world. Most of us just sat there and shook our heads when he talked that way. "My sisto sez I'm way-wee good at talking," he said to us. Unfortunately, he could not hear the severe speech impediment that would keep him away from the microphone for the rest of his life. Some unkind person had deluded him by telling him the story of Demosthenes running up and down the beaches of the Aegean Sea with his mouth full of pebbles in his attempt to become world's greatest orator. Hey, if it had worked for old Demo, he thought, surely it could work for him as well.

Perhaps that's the same problem that many of us have with wanting to be writers: we are blind to our own impediments and inabilities. We come seeking applause instead of instruction. We want to grow daisies in the desert.