Splashdown!

 

Still Alive!

Don't worry, I haven't died. I just went to Pittsburgh.

It was a nice break to be able to take: Going to Mike D's (lovely) wedding. It didn't occur to me that there was a place in the world that wasn't experiencing 100 degree heat, so I was shocked to find myself wearing short sleeves and bermuda shorts and sandals, freezing my tail off in the 50 degree chill of the northeast. Surprisingly green: I previously thought of Pittsburgh only in greyscale images of soot and steelworking equipment.

I somehow slunk into stealth mode during my travels. Sometimes I find myself chatting with strangers, but I guess all of the personalities within me spun the wheel and the James Bond wannabe won out for this trip. I had an interesting experience at the airport standing in line to get on the plane. The exiting passengers had to walk right by me one by one, and I my creative backlog broke through the dam: I made up a flash short story in my mind about each person as they filed by me. Each one was surprisingly complete and took only about 1-2 seconds: If Fran was there, I would have whispered them to her and it would have kept her laughing for days (she gets me).

It would be anticlimatic to list them all or even to write them out in complete detail, but here are snippets:

-(Older man with white, puffy hair and deep creases in his face, very clean clothes) He has a deep, dark secret that, when he was a kid in junior high, he and some friends killed a hobo who was just passing through by smashing him with rocks. He still has nightmares about it. He's on this trip to visit his elderly aunt who is his last remaining relative.

-(Young, short guy in workout clothes carrying a gym bag: he's about 32) This guy works out like a fiend every day to compensate for only being 5'3" tall. He tries to pass himself off as athletic but really only works out in the gym. He's really proud of his muscled physique, so he went to the airport in his workout clothes to call attention to it. Gay.

-(twenty-something woman, glazed look on her face) She was having sex exactly one hour before getting on this plane.

...and so on.

then, I overheard this man who made call after call in a booming, baritone voice. He was in his mid 50's and was wearing a fedora, speaking in the blandest midwestern accent yet using the strangest dialogue and laughing at his own cleverness. He would start his conversation with:

"Commodore! How goes it with thee?"

and continue with the quirky language and plays on words all the way through to the end, which he completed with: "Over and Out!"

It took quite a lot of self-control not to fall on the ground laughing at his self-important silliness.

During this time, I sat against the wall and started writing a story about Ryan. It is really personal and I was thinking of having it bound and giving it to him as a gift. I was really focused on it and typing pretty fast, when I realized that a woman next to me was reading the story over my right shoulder--I didn't know if I should be flattered or outraged, if I wanted her to read it or not...at any rate, I got distracted and lost my train of thought. I tried to pick it up again but started writing a ridiculous analogy and got embarrassed that she was reading that particulary idiocy, so I packed it up.

--more to come.

The Mirage of the Yellow Bird

It was an awful day last November when I checked my Email and learned some horrible news--a friend's child had fallen down the stairs in their house and was being rushed to the emergency room. I decided to continue from my home office to a business meeting before going to the hospital to be with the family, but I was in shock. I shuffled like a zombie out to the car and felt "zoned out" as I started it and backed into the alley behind our house. I had a sense of dread; my body was inexplicably exhausted.

I pulled forward slowly and a bright yellow bird landed on the mirror of my car. I couldn't tell what it was: a canary, parakeet--I don't know anything about birds, but it struck me as terribly out of place and unique. The bird surprised me out of my stupor, but was so out of place that it felt that it could possibly be just my imagination. This accident felt like a dream to me: I wished it to be a dream. I couldn't cling to that thought and accept the reality that the yellow bird was there.

I'll never be able to explain exactly how, but seeing the yellow bird on my window made me certain that the little girl had died. There was no question in my mind: I swallowed hard against the lump that rose in my throat. Later, I felt guilty about the thoughts that went through my mind at the time: Detachment, sadness, a renewed thankfulness for my kids' health and safety, grief for the parents. My mind flashed to the last time I saw her. The guilt came from the egocentricity of these thoughts--I certainly had empathy for them and would do anything to help them, but fifty people rallied around them: fifty people who seemed better equipped to help them and who seemed closer to the family than we were. There was nothing for us to do but assimilate this tragedy as a part of our lives, which, although necessary, felt selfish.

The yellow bird sat on my mirror for perhaps a second as the car sat in the alley, then abruptly flew to the telephone line along the street that runs perpendicular from our pretty, tree-lined drive. The Texas sun in November appears to be the same washed-out color of boiled corn, but it seemed particularly bright that day. The yellow bird sat and watched me drive away to my appointment.

I was on edge for the next two hours as I was on the road and in meetings, until I could get word of the condition of the child. Time went slowly and everything felt odd and out of place. I ran into an old friend whom I hadn't seen in two years--She seemd to detect that I was out of it, and I cut our conversation short. I had a tough task to perform, and I asked the customer if I could come back another day.

By the time Fran called to tell me that the little girl had died, the bird seemed unreal to me. Fran was reading the Email as she called, and even after she read it to me, she re-read it very slowly--and said "I just can't believe she's gone. I can clearly see that little girl in my mind."

But I wasn't shocked. I had already known it with certainty.

I nearly always reject stories about some kind of death sign--"When Aunt Enda died we had a raccoon knock over the trash can...come to think of it, she always was the one who took out the trash--maybe that was her reminding us to keep the faith." I'm a tough sell on that idea--it feels so much like a coping mechanism--part deliciously tempting urban legend, part trite storytelling, generously laced with over-sentimental wishful thinking.

Whatever my head believed, I started a haunting, secret dialog with myself in which the bird became a symbol of the death of this girl. Two weeks later, long after the funeral, I glimpsed the bird again briefly in the alley behind our house--my mind went to that terrible day. The brightness, the symbol of flight as freedom from the bounds of the earth, a metaphor for being out of place, just like a child has no business being killed at 10 months old.

It took me a month before I mentioned the bird to anyone else.

Even then, I had seen it half a dozen times, always by myself. Eventually, however, I managed to carry my daughter, Kaitlyn, out to the driveway and we watched the bird together on the telephone wire for several minutes before it flew off. I was pretty sure that Kaitlyn saw it, too, because I asked her to point at the yellow bird and she lifted her little finger and said "There it is!" Whew. Hallucination ruled out.

It didn't occur to me that the symbol took an ironic meaning due to the fact that I had found myself in the hospital for several days with Kaitlyn at a young age. Maybe it should have been a reminder to be thankful that she was now very healthy, but it didn't occur to me until much later. After all, this was just a stray bird escaped from someone's cage, right?

Finally, I mentioned my visions and thougths to Fran. She gave me one of those patented Fran looks that makes me feel like documentation is somehow, somewhere, being entered into a file. I felt the ostracized loneliness that must be experienced by people who have glimpsed Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster.

It took another month before she saw the yellow bird--she identified it as a parakeet. When we got hit with freezing temperatures for a week, Fran told me that the bird could probably not have survived such harsh temperatures, since parakeets usually live in more temperate climates. But the bird did make it.

We kept seeing the parakeet, sometimes sitting on our window, sometimes chasing other birds around our yard, and recently coming to the bird feeder that hangs outside our kitchen window. I can't explain how something as simple as a wild, yellow parakeet always makes me stop remember death, yet somehow makes me happy. Living metaphor, mere reminder, or a transplanted spirit, it is forever linked to that day.

American Dream

If I were to be desperate for a colorful character in a story, I would have to reluctantly have to consider adding the character of Yoshi. I remember one of his first days in the US when he could speak almost no English and a bouncing swarm of kids surrounded him, trying to get him to translate curse words into Japanese. He must have been about ten years old.

Always up to oddball stunts, Yoshi grew up to be a chunky teenager--his appearance was almost cartoonish. He had long, bushy black hair, wore mirrored sunglasses, blared rock & roll music on his headphones, and wore a bandana for a headband--usually with the Japanese flag in front. Straight out of a cheesy '80's movie.

We were in Boy Scouts together, and Yoshi was famous for not being able to wake up in the morning. All of us would have gotten up, made a fire, cooked breakfast, cleaned the dishes, packed, and broken camp, and Yoshi would still be fast asleep in his tent. Our scoutmaster would drag him out into the middle of camp, which Yoshi laughed off with a shrug. Being a caricature didn't seem to bother him.

When he was eighteen, Yoshi signed on with the US Navy for some incredibly long period of time. We all thought it was pretty funny that he would select the Navy, because poor Yoshi was the only kid in our scout troop who could never swim. Predictably, Yoshi was miserable in the structure and discipline of the navy, as well as suffered from incurable seasickness--it didn't take long for him to realize that he had made a huge mistake.

Six months after he left for the navy, I was surprised to see Yoshi in town again. He was hanging around my high school, leaning against his car witha fresh mop of long hair, mirrored sunglasses, etc. smoking a cigarette--somehow he had picked up chain smoking since I had last seen him.

He told me that he hated the navy so much that, as soon as he got out of basic training he had started to plot how to get out. He was assigned to a ship, and he said that the open sea freaked him out so badly that he couldn't sleep. His idea, hardly original, was to convince the navy psychiatrist that he was mentally unsound. He invented an elaborately detailed story about a strange man on the ship who kept following him around on a bicycle, chasing him and ringing the bell on the handlebars. According to Yoshi, the doctor bought his story and kept asking him very serious questions like "What does this guy look like?", "When was the last time you saw him?", and "Why is he following you?" Yoshi, who had likely faced dozens of counselors in his tainted youth, shamelessly played the part perfectly.

Whatever the reason, Yoshi was discharged pretty quickly and, the last time I saw him, he was working at a nearby convenience store. He was quite proud of his accomplishments in the navy: Getting through basic training without learning to swim, befuddling a top-notch psychiatry team, scoring free room and board for a few months, and getting out of a bad mistake relatively unscathed.

Just an update

Wow--I haven't posted in the month of May. It's really weird how one thing leads to another, and before you know it a couple of weeks go by. I''ve even caught myself going to sleep at night, working out and laughing at the absurdities which I've encountered and reminding myself to post about them, only to wake up the next morning in a hurry to get going/get Ryan to school/get to work/work on a project/(one day:get to the lake to take Ryan fishing).

So there are a lot of topics which just went by. No work on my book, either. It's just a long dry spell.

Occasionally and erratically, I've posted some photos on my photoblog--we took the kids to the zoo and Ryan got his face painted like a tiger. It was funny because the lady had a book with all different face patterns she could paint, but tiger wasn't in there. Ryan, who has never before let his face get painted, decided that the day had come, but insisted that it be a tiger. At first the woman kindly suggested that Ryan select another pattern, but Ryan just blankly stared back at her for a couple of seconds until she agreed to try--then Ryan ended up getting stopped all over the zoo and asked where he got his face painted.

We've decided that Kaitlyn is a super genius. She's 27 months old, and she can talk to an amazing degree--she uses full, 10-word sentences with prepositional phrases and adverbs and the whole works. Anyone that takes care of her gives a wide-eyed report about how she is "quite advanced". She even tells stories about things that happen during the day, and then asks us to make up stories, too: "Can you tell me a story about Mommy?". It is a very interesting time when a child goes from just being a liability, which was as little as 6 months ago, to having a distinct personality and entertaining us all, which she is doing now.

Teeth falling out, my car getting hit by a lead brick on the highway, Kaitlyn falling down the stairs, dead snakes, remodeling gone awry (actually, it went pretty well, but has taken forever), a strange, yellow bird which keeps haunting me, the triumph of Flat Stanley, me working every day like a crazy person trying to row through the doldrums of slow business, the crazy man from my previous work-related post getting fired, my upcoming trips to Pittsburgh and Miami--these were all topics for my blog that went unposted. Will try to do better.

The Moneyball Concept

I stumbled across Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, while driving around town and listening to talk radio. One of the hosts, whom I've listened to for several years, mentioned that this book changed the way he thought about baseball (before you stop reading, baseball is just the setting here). I thought it was a little interesting, just because I knew this was probably the first book this guy had read in years (he later admitted this), so I thought it would be interesting to check out.

I couldn't put it down.

Here's the premise: A man named Bill James, who was a night watchman at a factory and an avid baseball fan, decided that the statistics that are most often associated with baseball players are a very flawed means of judging performance. He writes and self-publishes (60 copies or so) an amateur analysis back in '77 or so. He does legwork and determines that there are some obscure statistics that are much better predictors of success in the major leagues, and a small, underground craze begins--This question generates discussion among top minds in statistics and economics across the nation--adding academic theory to the raw concepts.

The funny thing is that no major league team picked up on the relevance of this statistcal analysis...until 20 years later, when Billy Beane, General Manager for the Oakland A's, hires a Harvard economist (it's really funny in the book, because there is not one scene where this guy isn't typing into his computer, which they personify: "His computer told them to take such-and-such a player". Using this data, Billy Beane finds players who are undervalued in the market and scoops them up at bargain prices, where they proceed to completely kick the ass of the Texas Rangers (my team), winning the division and going to the playoffs with a substantially lower total player salary.

The moral of this story could be: Nerds rule.

This story struck home with me, because it was completely analagous to the situation in which Gar and I found ourselves at the trucking company ten years ago...before the Moneyball concept was implemented in the major leagues.

We went to a small, family-owned trucking business, and, by applying concepts in productivity and logical business processes, without an MBA among us, I must add, we increased the production of a ragtag company which had never made a profit.

We also encountered some of the same obstacles--old-timers in a good ol' boy industry who were resistant to change--our ideas were flatly rejected quite often, which left us shaking our heads. We would have to prove our ideas with very little error, our assumptions would be questioned, and, in the end, if some old man with forty years of experience decided he wasn't going to do it, it wouldn't get done.

It was an exciting time for us--it felt like riding the crest of a wave on a surfboard, feeling the momentum of the company moving forward as we made huge changes. Gar had been my roommate in college and was my most trusted friend, but at the company he sort of went underground. He dressed in workclothes sometimes and went down on the loading docks to help the guys drive forklifts and load trucks, taking on that responsibility for months in order to get a real picture of what was happening behind the scenes. Sometimes, he would have to leave his dock responsiblities to build a new server, network our office, or help me crunch numbers for a new contract.

I wonder if the authors and implementers of the Moneyball concept realize how stubborn and entrenched businesses can get. The feeling that I get from the book is that the managers in baseball often feel confined to almost superstitious beliefs in trusting meaningless statistics and disproven rules of thumb because they fear ridicule and public scrutiny. The tone that is conveyed is that baseball is composed of "insiders" and "outsiders", and that never the twain shall agree--having a computer pretty much automatically makes you an outsider.

But this is the way that Gar and I felt when we pointed to a printout as evidence that a change needed to be made, only to be met with solemn head-shaking. Reading Moneyball gave me an analogy to point to--we knew we were right but because we didn't have a Harvard pedigree there was more of a burden on us to prove ourselves. Even after 4 years of increasing profits and proving our track record, our voice was given weight, but not enough to overrule the insistence of insiders and their voodoo supersititions of business, which they chanted like a mantra at times while Gar and I incredulously tried to explain.

About a year ago, I wrote a story called The Potato Factor, about the owner of our company who saw our statistical projections and tried to get in on the act by implementing his own, nonsensical, timewasting, and inefficient record-keeping procedure--it was laughable--we felt like we were in our own world, and that nobody would believe it if we told them the story.

Maybe that's why Moneyball made me feel so excited--I connected with the struggle to apply statistical analysis in a subjective world. Suddenly, I felt like there were people in the world who felt my pain, and who also used the same techniques as I did to generate success. In fact, I was applying these concepts before Billy Beane used them to generate a winning team--It fed my ego and made me feel a lot smarter. But why should it? Nothing changed about our success or methods except for the fact that they were given Ivy League credentials and more sophisticated language and several zeros were added to the number of dollars.

There are some lessons to be learned there.

Our Love's in Jeopardy, Baby...

Has anyone heard of the Greg Kihn Band? Okay, that song really sucks. Best parody: "I have a Japanese Baby" and "I Lost on Jeopardy, Baby"

Fran records the game show Jeopardy every day. It's amazing how high a score you can envision for yourself if you calculate your score this way: Give yourself points for everything you know, or remember as soon as the contestant says the answer. Don't subtract for wrong answers. So she scores very well every day and she's ready to go on the show (seriously, and not just so I don't get killed in my sleep, she does know a lot about many things, including royalty, which I am terrible at: I don't know a James from a George, and if there were at least eight Henry's, why does Henry VIII seem to be, disproportionally, the answer to everything?)

So she told me some vague story about testing to be on the show, and how important it would be for me to be present. I promptly forgot.

I got held up at work one recent night, and then my late evening turned even later, and then turned into entertaining a colleage who was in town to help me on a project. I couldn't get out of it even though I tried--I was his ride back to the hotel and I got roped into going out for dinner. I came home to glares and was informed that Fran had to take the Jeopardy test online with an attention-seeking 2-year-old running around the house wrecking things to get a reaction from her mommy. Whoops.

Yes--there is a God!

Ding Dong Wedding Cake...

Reminds me of a very dumb joke:

Q: What does a dyslexic agnostic insomniac do?

A: Stays up all night wondering if there really is a dog...

What's the deal with THAT?

When I took Ryan camping a few weeks ago, I was pretty sheepish when I bought bear spray for protection. I even was a pretty good sport when the know-it-all dude at Sportsman's Warehouse wanted to give me a lecture on the n-dimensional decision tree which should be thoroughly analyzed before bustin' a cap of bear spray.

All I had to say was "Well, they're only black bears" (aka Ursus americanus), not known to be very aggressive toward humans--more likely to run away than the more aggressive grizzly bear (Ursus horibilis, as in they can make your day horrible).

While we were camping, the only other campers we ran into reported that they saw a black bear last year in the area. That made me feel a little less foolish about packing "heat". The campers reported that suddenly came into a clearing and saw the bear, which turned and ran away into the woods.

A couple of weeks ago, a black bear attacked a family in Tennessee and actually killed a child. Last week, a bear attacked and severely injured a man in Washington. It is so rare--there have only been about 50 deaths attributed to black bear attacks in the last 100 years.

Somehow, I preferred life when my fears were irrational.

Glory Days

Something about driving around in the neighborhood where you grew up makes you feel like a spy. You see the house of your old best friend and it may shock the current occupants that you know the floor plan and how it always mysteriously smelled like pickles.

You may even catch a glimpse of an aging ex-neighbor and realize that they couldn't possibly recognize you from thirty years ago--it would be so funny to stop and call them by name and watch the wheels spin. But not intriguing enough to actually do it.

The playground where you used to play basketball. The field where you meticulously played golf for a whole blazing Texas summer. There's an interstate running through the gap where the soccer field once was--I remember fishing icy cans of Shasta out of a cooler at the end of a game.

When I moved back to my old hometown, I ended up on the far north end--it didn't hit me until recently that down the street the site of the grocery superstore has a special significance--the entrance is erected directly on top of left field of the old baseball diamond where my crowning sports achievement took place. It accidentally happened while I was so frustrated that I gave up on playing well and tried with all my might to blast the head off one of the opposing players.

---

I'm not sure why I ever wanted to get into sports. I was always strong but very small and very slow. I must have set a record in soccer for playing eight complete seasons without ever scoring a goal. I was one of the best defensemen there ever was, and we even won division titles, but I didn't even get close to putting one in the net for our team. In football, I remember getting leveled, having the wind totally knocked out of me, and deciding that I didn't want anything to do with that kind of hitting ever again.

I had some raw tools for baseball, but never any finesse at all. I could throw the ball with almost destructive power--I could throw the ball so hard it would zip into the receiver's glove with a loud, attention-getting smack--definitely ahead of my time for my age. The coach rewarded this talent by parking me in the middle of the anthills of the dreaded and boring outfield because I was the only one who could heave the ball in to the other players if it was well-hit by our opponents.

In 1980, I was 10 years old, and Texas was experiencing the worst heatwave in recorded history--50 days over 100 degrees, and there I was standing as the dirt around me baked quietly, ripping open in wide, prehistoric cracks. Even though our games were regulation competitions, the fields were in tremendous disrepair--the outfield was composed of a conglomerate of dirt mounds held together by the scorched brown carcasses of dead weeds, which were woven together to make the ball careen across the lumpy ground unpredictably whenever it was hit over the heads (or through the legs) of the infielders.

In my baseball career, I was always on the same team. The coach's son, Chris, always pitched, and he always sucked. And we always lost. Chris would get unnerved any time he started to get into trouble, and our team would get shelled like we were under attack by anti-aircraft mortars. It made things interesting from the standpoint of an outfielder, but it wasn't very fun to lose every game in the hottest summer ever. Occastionally, Chris would have a meltdown, pitch a whiney baby fit, march off the field and even quit the team. But the next week he'd be back on the mound, serving up meatballs for the other team to shove down our throats. When you're the coach's kid, you don't get sent out to the weedpatch.

It was during one of these complete drummings that I completely lost interest in baseball. We were playing the Pirates and they were extremely well-coached. They also were cocky and kept spitting nasty comments at me and my teammates and were smirking as they beat us 12-2. The sun was beating down on my head and I just started thinking about other cool things I could do, like taping baseball cards to my bike tires and making it sound like a motorcycle. I was marooned out in left field and was studying a fire ant mound when I heard the crack of a bat--I looked up and saw Chris' pitch getting rocketed back at our team--specifically right at me with quite a bit of speed as it bounced over the third baseman's head and headed down the line into the outfield territory that I was supposed to protect.

Time just seemed to tick off slowly like the hands of a stopwatch suddenly submerged in gelatin. I could see that the runner on second base fully intended to round third base and head for home. He was a short little guy and I remember seeing the old, beat-up batting helmet wobbling on top of his head as though it were 10 sizes too large for him. Sometimes, especially when your team is good and you're shelling the other team's outfield, lots of runners get on base and when you're up to bat you just have to put on the batting helmet that's sitting there in the dugout whether it fits or not.

This is not what was going through my mind at the time. At the time I was reconciling the fact that I was really mad that our coach's son was ruining all my fun by getting us killed every game, that the same coach kept pointing me out to the ridiculous outback also known as our outfield, and that it was so damn hot outside. That smug bobble-headed midget rounding third was just the topper. I took it personally that he didn't have sufficient respect for my throwing arm, and I couldn't wait to teach him a lesson. I had made a perfect play on the ball--it must have bounced off one of the larger, flatter weeds--and I had a second to think before throwing the ball in. I was supposed to throw it to the cutoff man at second base. The runner would score.

Hitting the cutoff man was for the other players who cared. The ones who didn't have a cannon for an arm. We were losing by ten points and the game was all but technically over.

I clearly remember thinking, even though I was at least forty yards away, that there was no doubt that I was going to peg this guy in the back of the head with every ounce of my strength. I took two quick steps, cocking my arm back and burning it straight at him with very little arc and putting everything I had into it, swinging my arm across my whole body with a huge follow-through.

I couldn't wait for that ball to clank off his head and leave his brains sloshing and ringing inside like the clapper on the Liberty Bell--that goofy-looking bobblety-headed freak.

But instead, a miracle happened. The ball sailed about 6 inches high, sailing over bobble-head's left shoulder and straight into the glove of J.P. Magginola, our catcher and the best player on our entire team. Even though there is no way J.P. could see it coming, he somehow caught the ball and stood in the base path in front of the completely astonished runner--it was a second before the runner got to the plate, and there was no where for him to turn.

He had no where to go.

His coach had no idea of what to say to him. Or time to say anything.

J.P. even looked a little surprised.

The kid gingerly ran right into J.P., who tagged him out. He stood there in a cloud of dust, shocked. The helmet went spinning off behind home plate somewhere.

The parents in the bleachers behind our bench, perhaps for the first time all season, erupted in a jumping, screaming celebration honoring the best play our team had ever made. J.P. was the hero. He turned and waved to his parents, who beamed with pride. The cheering lasted over a full minute, then died down.

Although I was happy to have been part of it, it seemed a little unfair. I was just a kid, and maybe I wasn't a very good sport, but I wanted a little of the credit for that killer play. I had languished in right field the whole damn summer, and I had been running after fly balls from Chris' sorry pitching as they fell in the cracks and the ant piles and weed patches. I couldn't wait for the season to be over, but in the meantime I wanted someone to know that it was me who had thrown that ball.

I mean, J.P. Magginola didn't manufacture that ball himself behind home plate, did he? He didn't pluck it out of thin air--well, maybe he did, but I'm the one who planted it in thin air in just the right place while trying to kill that Darth Vader-looking punk who tried to take an extra base on me.

A couple of minutes later, before Chris served up another meatball, the coach, as an afterthought, hollered out into our weedpatch outfield "Who threw that?"

"I did" I said weakly.

"Good throw, Mike" someone said courteously. And that was it.

My moment in the sun.