My Life is a Sealed Book

One of my first jobs was as a grocery store clerk for Winn Dixie--I worked in the store all through high school--it was a nice escape from home, and I could make my own money for stuff I needed. It was a pretty fun job--one crazy guy tried to smush another guy in the trash compactor one time. Another guy still owes me $5 from buying his lunch--with compounding interest, it's up to $20. The pet store next door went out of business and they released a boa--legend still had it that the stockroom manager found a huge shed snake skin draped over the heating pipes in the back....

When you're in the store for just a little while, you may not notice this, but some of the advertisements are on a continuous loop. One time, I accidentally memorized one, and I can still recall it word for word

"Ever get the feeling that if you mess up in some small, seemingly insignificant way it can have disastrous effects? Well, one of my girfriends forgot to put Jet Dry in her dishwasher and...."

Pretty trivial, right? But, one of my favorite poems is Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken", which ends with the lines:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And I, I took the one less traveled by

And that has made all the difference.

What if you don't relize you're choosing a road? What if you just find yourself walking and realize you're going down a path?

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It was October 1996 and I was full swing into graduate school. Fran and I had just bought a new, black Honda Civic, our first new car, and we drove up to Washington, D.C. just to shuffle through museums and gawk at public monuments for a week. Washington is one of our favorite cities, and the musuems are absolutely great. Of course, Fran loves the gift shops as well and we always spend some time going through the unique items they sell.

Wandering through a shop in the National Gallery, this leather book caught my eye immediately--I loved the design on the cover and opened the book to find that it is a blank journal. An idea hit me that it would make a really cool, distinctive lab journal for my research--typically we just used a very cheap, blue notebook from the school bookstore--over time they would get very worn because they were so flimsy. I was so excited that I bought it immediately and made plans to begin using it when I got back from my trip.

It took me about 8 months to realize how bad an idea this book actually was. The book turned out to be exquisite--a hit with everyone who saw me using it. Up until this point, I had really been on track to roll through my master's program quickly, despite working full-time at a difficult job and taking full loads of graduate courses and seminars, teaching, and doing independent research.

I was in love with the idea of having the perfect lab notebook. I carefully photographed different stages of experiments and kept copies of all kinds of papers and references. Whereas in my "junky" lab notebook I had scribbled utilitarian notes, my new notebook was inspiring me to reach the heights of neatness and perfection. I would budget time to carefully write in just the right notations, glue photographs, and reference attachments. Notations became a tedious process.

Within a short time, the extra effort required to document things was enough of a deterrant to take away my momentum and distract me. I started to procrastinate the tedious recordkeeping procedure that I had designed for myself, leading to delays in advancing my experiments until I "caught up". Additionally, since the book was so thick, it wouldn't lay open like the typical lab notebooks, so it was pretty inconvenient to read important protocols that I had noted in the book.

I don't know if it was the money I invested, or the time, or the pride in trying something new, but I stubbornly couldn't make myself consider giving up the notebook. My work started taking much longer, and I got behind. By the end of May, I was just discouraged, and I stopped going into the lab. I was growing some plants, and just let them overgrow and die. I walked out on my mentor without saying goodbye and was gone for several months. Not a time I am proud of.

Just as I am glad I had an opportunity to work in the lab, I'm actually glad I was compelled to leave. I became career-focused and moved up, which, for me, ended up being the right path. It would have been nice to have finished my advanced degree, but it wasn't something that I was truly passionate about--I even went back and made some amends with my mentor and let him know how much I appreciated everything he did for me.

Going through my bookshelf last year, I found the leather-bound lab notebook and opened it--glossy photos and stiff writing popped out at me and I was filled with dread--the nagging feeling that the book represented unfinished business. I realized that it was the way I always felt when lugging it around campus and in the lab.

Last month, I noticed it staring at me from the bookshelf by my desk--I put it there because it's just a handsome decoration. Irritated, I took the blank book out of the leather cover and flipped it over and put it back in. Then I started writing, scribbling notes starting from the opposite side of the book. Stories, character sketches, an idea for a story as a Christmas present to Ryan...I just kept going, excited to finally be using the book for something productive.

Getting this book was certainly a catalyst for taking a different path in my life, but the components for the reaction were already there. It's funny how small changes can have a big impact.

Tur-duck-in

Toward things Americana, with no apologies:

This Thanksgiving weekend, I had three drunk people enthusiastically trying to describe what a Turduckin (Cajun misspelled alternate: Turducken) is. They acted like they had the inside scoop on a hot stock.

Here's what it is: idiot bait!

These are the same people burning down their homes trying to deep fry a turkey in their backyards.

Slightly Gross

Tap-dancing on the line between intelligent and grotesque humor...

A colleague of mine recently flew down from Canada to work with me on a project. I took him to a nearby Tex-Mex restaurant for lunch, which is known for really fabulous enchiladas and tacos. As usual, I made a recommendation of a couple of different things that I know people like, but he chose to give some rather unusual instructions to the waiter: He wanted a chimichanga, which is a rather large rolled up, meat-filled tortilla, covered in--lumpy, brown chili sauce. It was kind of a custom order that isn't on the menu.

I must admit, when it came to the table it looked shockingly like...well, not food.

Even the cook must have thought it looked a little excrement-ish, because he carefully, yet ineffectively, threw a garnish of parsley on one corner, something this restaurant never does...

I can almost see what my face must have looked like when the meal arrived. I had to balance out nausea and the overwhelming desire to belly-laugh. I ended up biting my molars together and politely averting my eyes. My Canadian friend, unshaken, methodically sawed off pieces of the monstrous, turd-shaped burrito and ate it completely, declaring it delicious.

Seriously, the enchiladas are great! Why couldn't he believe me?

Huh(?)-nting

I went deer hunting on Friday. Over the past year, particularly through discussing hunting with some of my friends from Alaska and Idaho, I've come to feel a little guilty about the way hunting is set up in Texas. Most of my friends that move here from out of state are outraged at the fact that you have to pay landowners to hunt on their land--in many other areas the land is open to everyone to hunt for free, if you are a resident of the state. I guess it is an inherited way of hunting from the huge private ranches that were established when Texas was young. We really don't have mountains, and you have a limited range of sight in the trees.

So we use a different style, mostly what's called "ambush hunting", where the hunter sets up a blind along known deer trails and waits for them to wander by heedlessly. Kind of like shooting fish in a barrel, as one of my friends put it.

To me, hunting is a great excuse for just going outdoors. One of my favorite parts of hunting is just driving along small country roads, stopping at a risky Fina station somewhere in small-town Texas and getting a dubious cup of coffee to wake me up. I like the anticipation of getting out to the deer stand (blind), being a little scared of walking in the dark by myself, even if it is just a few hundred yards (and I'm 6'2", 250 lbs, armed with a high powered rifle). There's something soothing about deeply breathing in the crisp black air in the early morning, and smelling the pure air, freshly expelled by the forest and fields--air that has typically been filtered through cars, across pavement, and breathed by other people before it reaches me in my suburban home.

I really enjoy spending three or four hours clearing my thoughts, shifting my mind from one issue to another, maybe getting a song stuck in my head, or a poem, or a conversation. After about an hour and a half, I mentally catalog and name the natural structures that are within my view. Friday, I named one tree "bicycle flag" because it was a bare trunk with a large, single, red leaf waving wildly from the top, even though the wind wasn't blowing very hard. Bicycle flag started getting on my nerves because it kept catching the corner of my eye and making my heart race.

Most of the time, when deer appear, it's as though they were immediately transported into view, and it can sometimes be very shocking. You don't typically hear them coming through the leaves or brush--they are very quiet, even in the crunchiest blankets of leaves. You just look up and there they are--nonchalantly standing right where you were looking just seconds before!

It usually takes me about two hours before the hallucinations start.

Sitting in one place for a long period of time, especially as the lighting changes from dark to light (or vice versa in the afternoon), shadows and lighting start to play tricks with your mind. You start to create "deer" out of tree trunks, rock formations, even shadows. In large fields and open areas, your perception of size can get thrown off quite a bit--one time a raccoon crawled out from a tree that I thought was about 200 yards away--the biggest raccoon I ever saw! I mean freakishly HUGE! I soon realized that the field and trees were much smaller than I thought and the raccoon had only been about 40 yards away (so my perception made it about 5 times larger than actual size). I had to chuckle to myself--anyway, these are the mental gymnastics that take place while sitting still and trying to be quiet.

After a little over three hours on Friday, I decided that my hunt was over--the sun was set, everything was getting very grey, and there had been no sign of life except for a turkey calling in the distance through thick brush, and a pair of cardinals that flitted by all afternoon..

I got out of my seat and came out of the blind. The four-sided structure had one wall along the back that is completely blocked out, and this is the side that the door is on.

As I opened the door, I spotted a small deer, chocolate brown with a triangular black patch between it's shoulder blades, about 150 yards away, grazing in a field. Behind the deer about another 300 yards away was a road, but that's still a little too close to risk a shot, in my book. But as I watched that deer, a second deer, a very large doe walked out openly about 40 yards away, right into an open field and completely unaware that I was there.

My rifle was still in my hand and I knew that this, truly, would be like shooting fish in a barrel--no problem at all. My only hangup was that she was in a field across a fence, and I wasn't sure why the fence was there. When the leaseholder dropped me off at the location, he didn't give me any particular instructions, but typically on private property you don't want to shoot across fences because it may be the border of the land, or have some other significance such as bordering off a residence.

And here's the real truth: I really didn't care to shoot the deer that day. About 10 years ago (maybe even five), that deer would be in the freezer today, but the panic that makes me need to bring home something, anything to prove that I can pull the trigger is just gone. But, standing there with my rifle in my hand and without the will to use it made me feel a little conflicted as to why I was out there at all--is this the deer hunter's version of erectile dysfunction?

I reached down and slowly raised my binoculars with one hand--the doe filled the whole field that I could see. Oftentimes, a large buck follows a doe into a clearing, so I was watching her closely to see if I could catch a glimpse of the doe looking at anything coming up behind her, but no. I stood there for a good four or five minutes, realizing that she would wind me very soon as she made her way across the field. She did, and her head snapped quickly in my direction--she saw me immediately and snorted and raised her tail in the air, standing still a good minute or so before rushing off up a lightly wooded hill in exactly the opposite direction.

Walking back to the rendevous site, I couldn't help but think this was a failure of purpose to show up empty-handed despite having a couple of really nice shots. I thought of the erectile dysfunction analogy thing, which made me laugh, and then I thought that maybe I shouldn't share that with my buddies because, well, maybe they would get ideas. And I really don't want to put it in my blog because that'll put me on some kind of wacky search engine, but oh well...

Lost in mundane thoughts like that, I trudged through thick grass and something caught my eye on the left--a skunk, about 20 yards away, was extremely irritated with me! Thankfully, I had taken a course to not walk directly at him, and also had spotted him although it was already heavy dusk. If I hadn't, I could say it was "heavy musk"--I tried to resist.

One of my buddies also passed up a nice shot today, and the other two, who had seen nothing at all, were a little incredulous, maybe even questioning our truthfulness a little, that we both had declined opportunities to put a "trophy" in the back of the truck.

But I have no regrets.

New Year's Resolutions

Believe it or not, this is the time I start planning out my new year, including new directions that I want to go--I really dread calling them New Year's Resolutions, because EVERYONE knows that those aren't kept, right?

Here are some past successes:

1) Didn't drink soft drinks for a whole year!

2) Hired a personal trainer for 3 months and lost 40 lbs! Then, didn't rehire him and stopped working out...

3) Read 10-15 books that I planned out (plus several that weren't on the list)

4) Read the whole New Testament of the Bible.

5) Planned one special event with my son, and one with my wife every month

6) Last year: planned out about 25 activities with Ryan, and have done almost all of them this year

7) Also last year: spent 1 hr. per week for 6 months with a professional career coach. I think it's good for some people--just not for me...

8) Last year, I resolved to write chapter 1 of my novel. I mentioned this to my sister Nicole, who told me to get off my ass and actually do it--then encouraged me to start writing a blog

If I had to say what my goals are for this year, I would start with the following:

1) Be a more peaceful, positive person

2) Give more of my time and money to charity

3) Write the first 100 pages of my novel.

4) Cut down on critical thoughts and remarks--it would be nice if this wasn't the first thing that came to mind...

5) Get serious about my personal health--make a plan and stick with it.

6) Be a better friend

7) Take my wife on a nice vacation for our 15 year anniversary in October.

Anyway, that's what was on my mind today...

Tilman's Failing

"We gon haf ta git dat man t'chuch, Mister Mike!" Mr. Tilman confided to me, speaking of our boss, Greg. We were waiting outside his office door to have a meeting. Invariably, it was about money. Tilman knew he ran the Austin route quicker and better than any of our other drivers, and, in his eyes, it gave him some negotiating leverage.

In my cynical mind, however, it was a superstitious comment. Guys like Tilman don't have a deep faith--they like to talk about it when it's convenient, thinking it makes a good impression with some people, and I suppose it does. But let something go wrong and these are the same people who rip out a string of profanities, dark words rolling off their tongue like a native language. But, like my Sunday school teacher once said: "Point a finger at someone else, you have four pointing back at you." This was the same Sunday School teacher who used racial slurs so offensive I can't bring myself to repeat them, even as a direct quote. I was aware that I could be projecting a little of my own hypocrisy on my judgement of other people.

In my eyes, though, Tilman was no different--he always seemed to be working an angle. On the road he was productive and quick. He startled me one time when I was riding down to Austin with another driver. He drove up behind us with 70,000 pounds of truck, trailer, and mail, and blasted the air horn loudly, waving as he rocketed past us on the right at 75 mph, making me feel as though we were standing still. In the warehouse, he was gossipy and often acted like a primma donna--complaining about every little deficiency in equipment that came along, and threatening to delay a delivery until things were put just right. Although he only worked for us a short time, his age gave him natural respect among the other drivers, which he openly enjoyed.

We had come to the conclusion that he was completely illiterate. His application had his name spelled "Tilman", but his driver's license read "Tillmon". When we asked him about the correct spelling for payroll purposes, he responsed "It don't matter--whichever one you want." And when all his paperwork came back in different handwriting, we learned that he was sweet-talking the receiving clerks into filling it out for him--I didn't object to it, and in fact marvelled that he had been able to get by his entire life. Compensating for this problem must have been one of the things that contributed to his overall amiability.

We had somehow all come to call him "Mr. Tilman". I think the person that started it was the manager who ran the training class. Tilman ran a long-haul load for us, so, unlike local drivers who were in and out of the office all day, we would just see Tilman once in a while. By the time Greg started calling him "Mr.Tilman", he had been working for us for a month, and the show of respect stuck during his short tenure with us. In racially-charged Texas, there was also another interpretation possible: In the old days of slavery, and even for a long time afterward, blacks were made to call the bosses "Mister", and never by their first name. Given his race and extremely poor economic state, some of the managers intended the name to be an ironic mockery. Greg would alternate between using the name as a sign of respect and mockery, depending on who was around.

When we came in, Greg greeted him "Hello Mister Tilman, come on in here."

Tilman was clearly uncomfortable sitting in the boss's office. Papers lined the desk, and, even though it was winter, the air conditioning was going full blast. It must have been forty degrees in there, but Tilman was sweating.

"I don want to bother you very long, Mister Greg, but I need to talk to you 'bout Austin."

"How are things going on that route?"

"They goin' great...now, anyways"

Greg smiled. Tilman's taking over the 200-mile route had stabilized our delivery schedule. Prior to his hiring, we had run four or five men on that route, but none of them had worked out. Tilman knew the history.

"Way I see it, these last three months nobody had to worry 'bout nothin' on dat route. I figgered is 'bout time you jus' put me in charge permanent; maybe give me a little mo jus' to handle the whole thing myself!"

"Mister Tilman, we're already paying you a flat rate for handling those deliveries. It's a fair amount, especially since you don't have to do any lifting or work outside. You drive our newest truck--it seems like we've done everything to treat you right."

"Well, like you say 'It's a fair amount', but wouldn't it jus' be right to pay a real good amount for somebody doin' a good job, instead of just a 'fair' amount."

I had to stifle a laugh and wonder if Tilman had misunderstood Greg or was skillfully turning his own words against him. I wasn't sure if I was ready to give him credit for being that quick. But Greg wasn't amused--he didn't like being confronted, especially about money.

"Listen here, Mr. Tilman, how many places you gonna go work that are go around calling you 'Mister'? Now, I think that's great, and I wonder if you appreciate what you've got here. Sure, you do a good job, but there are a lot of guys standing in line to do the same thing. If you want to make more money, maybe we could put you on a route that generates more--like hand-unloading in the summer heat!"

I could read on Tilman's face that he realized that he wasn't going to get anywhere with Greg today, and that he had fully expected to get an increase. I was also privy to the fact that we had closed a very lucrative contract extension on the Austin route, and that there was room for a little more salary--even a few dollars a week would make a difference to Tilman. Looking from him to Greg, I had to wonder what the effects of giving him a little more money would be--Tilman would inevitably brag to the other drivers, and we would have a line outside the door of guys demanding raises. It was difficult to know what to do.

When Tilman left, I heard him mutter "Les jus' see him drive da goddam truck and see how he likes it on da road every day!"

And I remembered how, just minutes earlier, he had been concerned for the boss's eternal soul and was imploring me to drag him to church.

People of faith can look at this story and see a sincere person who is frustrated and has a momentary failing. Cynics see a hypocrite exposed once his convenient mask isn't helpful to his cause. Sometimes it seems like anyone who tries to live by religious convictions is just set up to fail, because inevitably they will, to the knowing nods of some who use such examples to justify their own position of agnosticism. Seeing cases like this in myself and others keeps me very humble about my faith.

NANO MO

It's National Novel Writing Month---who knew?

Second Chance

How often do you get a chance to fix a mistake? A real second chance when you thought one was never going to come?

Ok--I'll answer for you--not nearly often enough.

I was cleaning out my Spam folder and found that Classmates.com had emailed me...again. At one point I was trying to track down an old friend of mine that I had known since we were six years old, and with whom I had parted ways after we shared an apartment for a year. His crazy friends clashed badly with my crazy friends, so it was best that we not hang out anymore...

So Classmates had my number, and has continued to pelt me with Emails in an attempt for me to get the "Gold Package" so I can apparently monitor live web feeds of my old classmates and have their vital signs FedEx'd to me weekly (sorry for the sarcasm). Basically, I don't care about these people anymore--I really didn't like them that well when I was in high school. But when I was in the process of deleting this spam Email, I (like a sucker) clicked on the link out of unkillable curiosity and found a comment by one of my old teachers (whom I hated) which reminded me of another teacher whom I loved dearly.

I decided to leave her a brief Email, which I did (it probably creeped her out), but while on the school's website, I saw that they were cleaning out their old yearbook stash, and had supplies of my Junior and Senior yearbooks! Unbelievable!

For some reason, I could never put my hands on $30 during my high school years, so I never bought one of these books--the only book that I had was from my Sophomore year, and the picture is, seriously, the worst picture of me in existence (no way am I putting it in this blog). The story is: I was awakened at my house during the summer by one of my friends, who told me that we were due in 5 minutes at school to sign up for classes. I threw on some clothes in 2 minutes without looking in a mirror--and I looked like a crazy, homeless person. They took our photos, I missed make-up photo day, and that horrendous shot became an unfortunate documentation of the event which is bound to haunt me forever.

So, it has always kind of been a sore subject with me, because if I need to whip out the old yearbook, "the picture" is there--seriously, it makes me absolutely ill.

So I was very excited that my Junior and Senior yearbooks were available, not just for vanity but again for curiosity's sake. Sure enough, four days later, I had both books in my hands and was remembering that high school wasn't all that bad. It even reminded me of some old friends that I hadn't thought about in quite some time.

This picture from my days in the marching band (yes, they actually put the negative in backward--the drum is supposed to read 'Ludwig' instead of 'giwduL' , which actually is translated "idiot agape" in one of the Celtic dialects). I wonder if I still hold the record: I figured out a way to carry 4 (count 'em) of these bass drums simultaneously (we had a lot of time on our hands).

See...Jane...Eat

I guess I'm a Jane Austen fan now, suffering severe depression that I've finished Persuasion, knowing it is considered her best work, and realizing that, by the end of the holidays, I'll probably have read everything she's written (started Sense and Sensibility today). I'm currently addicted to understatement. Do you get depressed and panicky when you're enjoying a book and then you realize there are only a few pages left? I always mourn that the characters are going to fade away and I'll never hear from them again...

It's weird that these faddish reading binges that I go on let me voraciously rip through books when the mood strikes me, soaking them in (I've self-edited and deleted some imagery here, to spare the reader--something akin rolling around in a vat of chocolate).

As I was reading Persuasion, I was struck with the memory of a scene which is at least partially relevant to Captain Wentworth seeing Anne Elliot again after over eight years, and noting her as to be so changed that he would have hardly recognized her as the same person. Of course, ahem, I play the role of Captain Wentworth, in case there was any doubt.

It may be hard to believe these days, but I went through a brief period of wreaking heartbreak through the halls of my high school--unfortunately, of course, the heartbreak went both directions. But one of my short-term interests was a very sweet girl named Kim who had a very nice sister who was at least 10 years older, who will always have a special place in my heart because she wrote me a very nice letter when one of my friends died in a car accident. So, through association of our families we came together for a very short period of a week or two, and then I moved on... Her father had later died suddenly and I had paid my respects to the family; overall, we parted on friendly terms.

Flash forward about fifteen years, to a scene where my wife and I were eating lunch after church at a restaurant down the street from my old high school. It was Sunday afternoon, and we had gone to that particular restaurant because it was one of Ryan's favorites (he was nearly three years old)--built on a hill, with huge windows overlooking a railroad track. If you were able to get a seat in the corner, you could have your silverware rattled by occasional passing trains, which was much to Ryan's delight but probably the reason they soon thereafter razed the place in favor of a Home Depot.

I looked up from our meal and caught a glimpse of a large family sitting a few tables over. I soon recognized it as Kim's family, and then remembered that their family went to church nearby. My seat faced their party, so I was able to scan the table quietly and eventually recognized Kim's mother, with Kim sitting close at her elbow.

I was shocked at how different she appeared--it was almost as though she had shrunk by four or five inches. Her shoulders seemed narrow and she was pale and thin, and was quietly hunched over with her head pointed down toward her plate the entire time--I was sure that she did not see me at all. I originally had mistaken her for a young child even though she was over thirty years old now. I watched her for a few minutes, wondering what in the world had happened to her--there must be a story. I also calculated the effects of both disclosing this and not disclosing this person to Fran. Typically, she gets somewhat violently jealous in such situations, usually sending a witty criticism as if almost out of duty to prevent me from breaking my chains and flying off to Aruba. In this case, I wasn't sure I wanted Fran to know the truth as it may damage my reputation in her eyes.

At any rate, I decided to mention it to her so I wouldn't later feel guilty.

I leaned over and quietly told her, "There's a girl over at that table that I used to date in high school." I described where she was sitting.

Fran had to maneuver to steal a glance, but when she did, I saw the shock in her face. She turned to me and exclaimed "Mike!" Then, leaning in with sincere horror that she couldn't disguise, she whispered incredulously:"Woof!".

There are some people with whom I associate certain smells. My grandparents smelled of cigarette smoke, and at certain times (it must be their old brand, which I had passively smoked by the pack when around them), a cloud of smoke has made their image briefly flash in my mind. There's a perfume,which my wife has not worn in years, which reminds me of a crisp fall evening and one of our first romantic dates. If I detect in in the mall or on an elevator, it makes my knees weak.

Kim was athletic--when I think of her, I remember her wearing a knee brace from a vollyball injury and the powerful menthol smell of sports cream. She had been strong and bright-eyed and clever, with a good sense of humor. These things shouldn't be completely assessed during Sunday lunch at a distance, but she did look remarkably changed.

It was true that Kim had never been beautiful, and by elaborating on how pitiful she now looked I feel in danger of being superficial to the point of Sir Walter in Persuasion, but I will just reiterate that it was shocking to see, and her state would stand out to the casual observer who had not known her earlier in life. Her sitting so sidled up to her mother was a little alarming as well--obviously single, she seemed to have shrunk into a state of dependence on her mother that required her to be at arm's reach. They left before we did, and that's where the story ends.

But this scene helped me enjoy the moments when Wentworth came upon Anne again after so many years.

To My Anonymous Friend

And now for something completely different...

I had a nice chat with Anon today (frequent commenter on my blog--no, it's not one of the other personalities in my head).

Not sure exactly how it happened, but at some point, Anon held out his hand, like the Kung Fu master, and suggested, very solemnly, that I snatch the pebble from his hand.

In my best affected accent, I replied, "Yes, grasshoppah!" and reached out quickly, to which Anon feigned drawing back and inspecting a squashed grasshopper.

Mixed metaphors abound--maybe you had to be there. It conjured up a mental image of a funny Far Side, though...

This One's for You, buddy

Humbled

It's almost as though I was set up.

Everyone has work problems, disagreements at home, and annoying occurrances like getting your car door-dinged. So what if it happens to you all on the same day?

I also got lots of good news the same day. I just felt compelled to put all the "bad" stuff together because I wanted to get it out of my system and move on. But maybe it gave the wrong impression that I don't appreciate the good things in life.

A lot of criticism that I hear about blogs is that they are trivial and self-important, poorly written, and overly dramatic. There's even a group of guys on the radio who read fake blog entries mocking this style of writing altogether. Is my website this way? Is it time to end the project? It's been a good run of nearly a year (started in January), 200 posts, over 300 photos and poems on my photoblog.

Maybe I could just take a day, print them all out, bind them, label it "2005", and bury it all in a time capsule (literally or figuratively). I think I've accomplished what I set out to do when I first started: I cleared my mind of random anecdotes and overwhelming life lessons, so now I feel I can clearly write fictional stories without so much personalization.

Yesterday, I was reminded about how lucky I really am. My friend's 1-year-old baby died in a sudden, tragic accident. We had just seen them 3 days ago, and it's hard to believe she's gone. I don't know what more to say on the issue without writing a gushy, overly-personal flow of words and feelings which would later embarrass me. Suffice it to say, compared to this event, I haven't had a bad day in my entire life. This is the kind of thing that ruins people forever. But something still tells me life is good.

OK--Yesterday Officially Sucked

Here's why:

1) Sitting in my car in a parking lot. A crazed 50-ish lady slams her car door into mine, then drives off without acknowledging it whatsoever. I sat, astonished, mouth gaping wide open like a paralyzed idiot, cowardly watching her drive off without confronting her in my freshly dented and scratched car.

2) I went into a customer's office--my budgeted amount of time to support them with their purchase was about 20 hours. They are quite needy and I've already devoted over 100 hours, with no end in sight. One thing went wrong, completely beyond my control and the fault of one of my colleagues, and the customer became highly critical of me, including threatening to return their whole order for a complete refund. I had to stand and take accountability for the problem, though I have no control over it or means to fix it--very frustrating.

3) Speaking to one of my colleagues, discovered that his brains are as thick as pig shit. So obtuse as to be non-communicative. Great.

4) I'm working on a huge order. My boss called and verbally gave me a price on one custom component and details, which I conveyed to the customer in writing. The next day (yesterday), my boss called and said that the price we were going to charge is now actually three times the original price (arbitrarily, and not related to the actually cost of manufacturing the thing), which makes a significant difference in the total price of the system. He asked me to apologize to the customer and tell them the real price. I'm being made to look like an idiot.

5) Then I'm told that I left the cover sheet off my TPS report...seriously, something to that extent. I reply--if that's priority #1, can somebody put that in writing? Because it seems quite minor in light of the other 300 projects I have going, and actually does nothing except tell you the status of all the things I'm working on. Is it more important that I stop what I'm doing to tell you the status than to complete the thing itself? Apparently so. This opened up a black hole in my head which sucked out any desire to put any extra work in for the next month.

6) Came home and was telling Fran about the craziness of the day. I was actually quite relieved to be home and looked forward to relaxing with the family. Got home, and it was a child's war zone with Ryan's 6-year old friend bouncing a basketball off our chandelier...

7) Dinner scene:

M: Wow-I'm glad today's almost over

(Ryan gets up from the table and leaves).

M (agitated, but not yelling) : Ryan, I'm sorry but you aren't excused from the table yet.

F: Don't snap at him just because you've had a bad day! Don't take it out on him!

M: It doesn't have anything to do with it at all.

R: You're just being mean, Daddy!

M: Ryan, come to the table--you were only sitting down for four minutes! I want to hear what happened at school.

F: You're just in a bad mood!

Me: No, I'm really not. I promise. Besides, it doesn't have anything to do with him leaving the table without being excused.

F: Who cares? I'm not going to let you take it out on him...

Me: Stop contradicting me in front of Ryan! You're sending him a mixed message.

F: Ryan, come to the table.

But, of course, it wasn't over, so I had to get out and get some fresh air for a few minutes. I looked up, and sure enough, it was a full moon.

"I'm In Love Again..." --Cole Porter

It had really started to bother me that I couldn't find a good novel to dive into wholeheartedly for several months--I've read a dozen books, but can't get "into" them for some reason. FINALLY, I've run across one that I just can't wait to get to each day: Persuasion, by Jane Austen.

It's my first Austen novel and I believe I am hooked.

But, beware--please notify me if I start to write rigid parlor scenes or tales of odd financial encumbrances into my blog. Examples of past literary influences:

1) Faulkner--earlier this year I read 2 or 3 of his novels in a row and wrote a blog entry entitled "Thank God I'm a Country Boy"

2) Tolstoy--okay, this is a stretch, but I got all worked up and started quoting Dr. Zhivago and referencing "Crime and Punishment". Had to drop this book because it induced narcolepsy.

3) Hemingway--Compared working at a Biological methods workshop to blowing up a bridge in Spain.

4) Shogun--introduced haiku into my blog almost weekly, some serious and some very tongue in cheek.

Notice I don't include links for your ease in mocking me...

At any rate, I can't believe it's taken me this long to get to Jane.

The Reluctant Princess

Poor Kaitlyn (yeah, right).

Saturday started off with a nice, sentimental moment. I set both Ryan and Kaitlyn down at the breakfast table, served them juice and milk, and turned on some music while I cooked breakfast for them. I let Fran sleep in for a little while...

"Brown Eyed Girl" came on and I started dancing around--I looked up and two little sets of eyes were looking at poor Dad like he had gone crazy--then we all started laughing and I scooped up Kaitlyn and started dancing around with her...

A friend of mine recently told me a funny story about a dad who had planned out a big vacation trip for his family, then got called away to work on an emergency project on the day they were supposed to leave. He vowed to meet them at their destination. The trip was so well-planned out that he pretty much knew where they were going to be at a given time, so at one point a couple of days later, they were driving down the highway, and there was their Dad--hitchhiking with a big sign and a huge grin on his face. Why did he do it? He said, "Maybe my kids can say some things about me but at least they can't say I wasn't fun!"

I realized that Kaitlyn plays almost exclusively with Ryan's hand-me-down toys, and, even though she has plenty to play with and is very happy, she hasn't really had anything "girlie" enough. So that became one of the missions of the day. I asked Ryan, "Don' you think we should go get a nice toy for Kaitlyn to play with?"

If you realize the egocentric mind of the 6-year-old, you probably are one step ahead of me--Ryan realized that, if we are going to the toy store, maybe there's something in it for him, too. How could I resist getting a little something for him, anyway--he made straight A's on his report card yesterday, and his teacher complimented his behavior to me, saying I was "lucky to have such a good boy." (He is very well-behaved).

So I strapped them in the car and we went to the toy store.

An aside: It is unbelivable to me how it is already Christmas shopping season! The roads around the stores were crammed with desperate people. Christmas music was blaring in every store, and trees, lights, ribbons, etc. were everywhere. Hey people, it's 80 degrees outside! Inside the toy store, I saw people set their jaw against the crowds and whip their buggies mercilessly, menacing each other to clear a path while I prepared for an inevitable impact. What urge causes this craziness when it is barely November? I can't stand crowds like that.

Kaitlyn has never been in a toy store like this--I took her from section to section in the store, and, within a short time, she was overwhelmed and quiet. I don't think it occurred to her that we would be taking home something.

The choice was hard at first--nothing jumped out at me as an obvious choice. Being nearly two, Kaitlyn didn't need another baby toy that wouldn't keep her interested for very long. And God knows we have enough stuffed animals! Earlier this week, I set Kaitlyn on the couch, and, while she giggled, put stuffed animals all around her like the scene from ET--we've got dozens of them! Most toys that are any fun are rated for three years old and above--and Kaitlyn tends to put small pieces in her mouth still, which makes us nervous wrecks.

I found a "Disney Princess" car that she could ride on--it plays songs and has little activities she can do and all different buttons she can press which play songs--she loves it, and was busy playing with it for hours! But the best part was that it came complete with a shiny tiara which she wore the rest of the day, including when we went out to dinner with family. We all got a kick out of it because she wore it like a "natural". She was happy--I just chose this picture because I found the juxtaposition a little funny. I take enough smiling, happy pictures of my kids that it's fun sometimes to snap one or two when they are fussing...Fran really likes a saying from one of her favorite authors that describes a kid whose mouth has "gone square"--she thinks that's a great description of what they look like when they cry...

I had fun with my little princess today. I think it's good for a man to have a daughter--especially someone like me who grew up mainly with brothers. It opens a different dimension of my heart that might otherwise have gone dormant.

Inscribed on a Headstone

When I was about 14, I visited a 100-year-old gravesite, not exceedingly common in North Texas. Most of the tombstones were crumbling and in disarray. One epitaph stuck in my mind--a young woman had died, and her tombstone haunted me--20 years later I can remember it word for word:

The sweet remembrance of the just
Shall fluorish though they sleep in dust

This inscription has haunted my memory like a curse--a spell. It's both blunt and inocuous, but also eerie and remorseful. It used to send shivers up my spine. I could really creep myself out (not too difficult, actually) by lying in bed at night and thinking about that poor girl from so many years ago...

Now, it just makes me sad.

Habeus Corpus

I glanced around nervously as I drove this morning. I had wrapped the cold, stiff body in plastic and loaded it into my car. As I drove to drop it off, I was hoping I wouldn't get stopped or have to answer any questions.

I had already spent a sleepless night and our family had suffered enough--I just wanted to dispose of the body discretely so we wouldn't have to think about it anymore. Ryan was traumatized and none of us had gotten any sleep--we weren't used to this kind of thing.

Maybe this is a punchline for some people--I know I've thought it was funny, and it seems to be a prevalent theme. Ryan's goldfish, Goldie, whom we had only had for one day, suddenly passed away in the night.

We bought it for him as a reward for excellent behavior in school--the 6 weeks period just ended and he had only been corrected a couple of times--a big improvement over the previous period. He loves animals and has a beautiful heart--he was so upset when we found Goldie dead that it was just heartbreaking to see how hard he was taking it. He picked her out because she had a great personality and was lots of fun. He didn't like the Beta's because they were "too bug-eyed."

We did everything that the pet store people told us--treated the water for chlorine, let the temperature equilibrate, waited the presecribed amount of time, etc. When I returned poor Goldie's body, "the guy" somberly and philosophically said, "Well, sometimes it just happens..."

We're trying again, but I would like to spare my 6-year-old unnecessary trauma, so I'm open to suggestions.

Sheiz! A Shyster!

In my misadventures with the small trucking company I worked for, there was one person who stands out as an enigma--in some ways a mystery, but in other ways completely transparent. He was a colorful man, part guru and part con man. Coldly calculating and passionately out-of-control. His name was Ed.

The very first time I met Ed, he was dressed with the intention of making an impression. He had a huge belly that he tucked into his new blue jeans, wore a long-sleeve, brightly-colored "cowboy" shirt, and a thin, brown leather vest over it. On top of his head was a crisp, new, white, straw cowboy hat. In 1995 he sported a salt-and-pepper goatee and mustache, which wasn't nearly as common as they seem to be today (my wife referred to the look as his "disgusting snout"). Over the five years I knew Ed, that same hat would wilt and droop with sweat, heat, and constant wear, and eventually it became both his trademark and a topic of conversation--sometimes behind his back and usually not in a positive light. Ed didn't seem to care--in fact, he seemed to enjoy the attention.

Real life isn't as simple as the movies--the bad guys don't always wear a black hat to help you identify them and, to complicate things even worse, maybe they aren't completely evil. In this case, Ed was dangerous because he was a political player who was always working the room for an advantage. His deep, kind, overly-friendly voice could lull you into a peaceful sense of security like a snake charmer's call. The characteristic that made him dangerous was the combination of the savvy sense of reading people and situations, combined with the willingness to do absolutely anything necessary to come out ahead in any situation, with no conscience, no qualms.

I had been working part-time for a trucking company and at the same time was finishing my college degree. I was hoping to continue with graduate studies and apply for medical school. My job was to analyze data and put it into a format that would help the owner, Greg, make operational decisions. The company, which Greg had recently purchased from his father, had 7 trucks, an operations manager, and rented dock and office space from another larger company. Greg, a true visionary with big ideas for expansion, had no mind for business analysis. He would often give reports back to me challenging any assumptions made in their calculations. This was a very common argument that we would have would sometimes end with me saying something like: "Greg, I can tell you right now that we're losing money on this contract. If you want to know within $100 either way, I can tell you in about 45 minutes. But if you need to know, down to the penny, exactly how much we are losing on it, it's going to take about 10 hours of work." And sometimes he would make me put in the 10 hours and show him every bit of evidence that every factor had been accounted for, just to satisfy his fear that my statistical estimates were somehow flawed.

One thing that drives me nuts about this situation is that Ed was able to read me very well. He knew that I really enjoyed what I was doing for Greg, and had the capability of being a much more valuable asset. He knew some of my story, which included moments of extreme poverty. He guessed correctly that I was currently barely making ends meet, and would seize an opportunity to establish better financial security. And he correctly guessed, and convinced Greg, that I would put my medical school plans on hold and would be a great asset to him if he dangled a new title and enough money in front of my nose--and he was right.

I became the Business Manager and gave up my "work from home" paradise with the company. I knew it was the right move for the company immediately when Greg and Ed proposed it in a meeting. Ed didn't work for the company, and I'm not sure how his association with Greg began, but he acted as a type of guru/advisor, which was easy for him because he was gifted in reading people's motivations. This ability was compounded by Greg's complete inability to do the same thing, and his utter facination in Ed's correct assessments. Ed eventually learned that this capability was valuable to Greg, and he used the relationship to constantly coerce favors from Greg.

Another part of this story that would always bother me is that, as I became increasingly successful in making our business more successful, both Greg and Ed would give Ed credit for my abilities and accomplishments, saying "We're really lucky that Ed picked you for this job!" I would smile and nod, but inside would think "Wait a minute! I'm putting in 60 hours a week and also working from home on the weekends--the success of this has nothing to do with luck!" I always felt it was dismissive of my talents and effort, but I wasn't skilled enough to pick the right time to verbalize this and diffuse Ed's credit for this--besides, the fact is that Greg was lucky, because he would have never recognized my talent on his own and the leadership move led to big financial returns for him--in my first year as Business Manager, we made the largest profit ever in the 17-year history of the company!

People would warn Greg that Ed was taking advantage of him, but in retrospect it seems that he sincerely needed the help from Ed. Greg was testing the political waters of local political groups, including pursuing contracts with major companies, and Ed's savvy helped Greg negotiate these waters. He didn't realize that, by bringing Ed along with him, he exposed this political weakness. You see, Ed was constantly about $10 from being completely homeless, and people who were in tune with people could spot this about him. He lived on week to week rent in a local fleabag motel, and had no transportation (Greg eventually loaned him a car, which was wrecked multiple times and eventually totalled. Then he loaned Ed his father's old, refurbished pickup truck, which was "stolen"). He had an ambiguous answer for his financial dilemma, stating something about a marriage breakp which left him penniless because he wanted his ex-wife to have everything so she could take care of his kids.

Ed had a partnership with a local policeman named Bill, who was a friend of Greg's. They had landed a big contract to provide security at local sporting and social events, and about four months after I became Business Manager, Ed approached me with a "favor": He asked me to accompany Bill at meetings with the event organizers and to represent their company at the board meetings. As a 26-year-old kid who was just a student, I was flattered by the opportunity to be a representative with such a high-profile job.

What I didn't realize was that I was being set up as an "expendable" piece--if Bill, the owner, made committments for security and they fell through or there was a problem, the company's contract would be terminated. But Ed calculated that my representation at the meetings meant that, if something went wrong, I could be blamed, "fired" (with little consequence since I had another job), and the company may get another chance. He agreed to pay me $50 for each meeting I attended.

After about 10 meetings, things seemed to go smoothly, except that Ed hadn't paid me anything. He avoided me for several weeks and wouldn't return my calls. Eventually, I mentioned to Greg that I hadn't been paid for going to the meetings and representing Ed's company (which didn't really have anything to do with Greg)--Greg immediately cut me a check for the full amount and told me he would collect from Ed. This confused me a little--over time I would realize that I didn't fully understand Greg and Ed's business relationship.

Later, Ed told Greg that he shouldn't have paid me anything--after all, aren't I on salary for him? And since the meetings occurred during working hours, wasn't I essentially being paid for going to the meetings by Greg? Ed's idea was that my services were on an "intercompany loan" relationship, and so he didn't owe me anything! I was amazed at this sidestepping of responsibility, especially after he approached me with the offer of paying me to assist their company. It was one of my first big Red Flag events and opened my eyes, for the first time, to "the con".

Another interesting and enigmatic side to Ed was that he was easily able to sidle up next to prominent political figures...or at least give the impression that he was doing so, claiming to be making trips to Washington, DC, meet with senators, even work in support of the president. Now that I've been around politics a little more, this isn't nearly as impressive to me, but at the time Ed used some of his experiences in politics to gain credibility and leverage with our small company.

Ed was "around" but not directly involved with our company for about a year. During that time, he got picked up for DUI, totalled his car, ended up bumming rides in to work from his motel, and other anecdotes, such as the fact that IRS collection agents were after him, would surface that were tip-offs that he had some personal and financial problems.

I was then invited to view a presentation regarding Ed's new Business Plan. It was a PowerPoint that was surprisingly informative and well thought out, regarding the future of Supply Chain Management, and desigining a high-tech business to fit within the model. Ed shopped this plan to several people--it really appealed to Greg's "Undiscovered Visionary" persona, so he introduced Ed to several of his business contacts just for the excitement of being associated with this new idea. There are a couple of funny things about this, especially in retrospect: One, that Ed's ideas now seem to have been a plagarized conglomerate of ideas from trade magazines, and, Two, that the Business Plan was a very vague presentation without a solid proposal for a business. When pressed, Ed would say something ambiguous about "hiring programmers from India" to work out a software, as well as "well, that part of the idea is proprietary--we're just looking for investors."

A funny twist came when Ed pitched this idea to a local multi-million dollar company, RCI. They were a small, family-owned business that handled huge contracts with major companies all over the country. They had recently been accused by some of their major customers of not investing properly in technology in order to better manage the supply chain. The two owners of the company told Ed that they wanted him to present his Business Plan to several of the companies during multi-year contract negotiations. Ed thought he had hit the jackpot! He was excited that this group was going to invest huge dollars to get his business off the ground. He worked hard, prepared, even hired assistants to accompany him to these big sales pitches. RCI hired him on retainer, so Ed would identify himself as the Information Technology department of the company--he closed practically every deal he went after (Back to his, by-this-time gross hat, the RCI boys told him that if he landed their deal with the largest retailer in the world, they would buy him a new hat, a "12x Beaver", whatever that is--but, when he landed the deal, they didn't), landing millions of dollars in contracts for RCI, but was only paid a fee of a few hundred dollars for each presentation. When the time came to invest the dollars, RCI turned Ed loose and sold their business, now buoyed by renewed, lucrative contracts. They knew Ed was a con man, and they reversed the con on him.

During this time, Greg and I had to visit one of our customers in Ohio--we had run into a disagreement and were trying to negotiate with them to release some of the $200,000 in cash they were holding from us. It was critical, so Greg, impressed with Ed's demeanor at the negotiating table (the RCI deal hadn't fallen flat yet), brought him along to sit at the conference table.

A little further explanation is necessary here. Both Greg and Ed are hispanic, and I am not--my ancestory includes family from England and Ireland from about 100 years ago according to a family Bible. Ed was trying to convince Greg to use racial language in our business proposals to be very clear that we were a minority-owned business and to work that angle to try to land business, even imply legal recourse for discrimination if we aren't given full consideration. One tactic that he had in mind for negotating the release of our money was to ask to speak to their "Diversity" department, giving a subtle threat that we were interpreting their lack of good will as a racial move against our company, when it clearly was not. Even our legal counsel had advised against this move. Of course, the statement fell flat when he tried it, even after we had all come to an agreement that he wouldn't use that angle. During this trip, our negotiations failed and it ended up being a stressful trip.

During our time together, Ed and I got into a debate over this race issue, so he decided that he would try to sensitize me to the situation by hurling racial slurs at me all weekend (as weak as these slurs actually are against the Irish and English, it still pissed me off). He never let an opportunity go all weekend to work in a negative comment about where I came from, then would laugh and say "See how it feels to have someone against you all the time?" I guess I was just intimidated, or didn't want to give him the satisfaction of letting him get under my skin too deeply, but I just smiled and let this go without recourse. But by the end of the trip, I was really sick of Ed.

A year later, the death knell came. By this time I was Executive VP of the corporation (a group of 5 businesses with 60 employees). We had been profitable every year, but after five years of growth, Greg continued to reinvest every penny into the growth of the business, which I advised against. We took on less profitable contracts against my wishes, cutting backroom deals and giving kickbacks to traffic controllers. One day, Greg called me, drunk, and told me he had just hired Ed to come work for our company. Bill's business had collapsed into debt and was closing, and Ed had just found out that RCI wasn't going to invest in his Business Plan. Ed was about to lose all of his income, so he worked out a rescue plan for himself: he came to work for Greg.

I went home and told my wife that we were in trouble. I knew that there wasn't room in the company for both Ed and me, and that I didn't have the fortitude to fight it out with him (I didn't have confidence that Greg would admit that he made a mistake in hiring him).

Ed didn't disappoint. He assessed the company and saw that one of my employees named Diane, an accountant with emotional problems, was disgruntled. She was skilled at accounting and a hard worker, so I tolerated her constant emotional outbursts, constant criticism, and negative attitude. We couldn't afford a top tier accountant, and her work was some of the best quality we had ever had. I had previously asked Ed for advice on how to better work with her, and he took the opportunity to use the information against me. He reconfigured a "leadership council" to include himself, Diane, and me. He stroked her ego, told her everything I had reported about her, and essentially won her over to be his ally. They proceeded to come together to veto virtually every idea I came up with regarding the business and constantly humiliated me during meetings by assigning menial jobs. Greg protested the treatment a few times initially, but Ed counseled him to let the process take form so the company would operate more efficiently. Essentially, Ed wanted me gone so he could pillage the company's coffers for his own gain. Again, he had read me very accurately and knew I couldn't take the humilation for long.

Within six months, I left the company. Ed and Diane had started to run the company into the ground, but in an incredible show of nerve, blamed me for the deteriorating condition, saying "We got control as quick as we could, but maybe we weren't fast enough!" One horrible move they made was the collection of payroll taxes from our employees without submitting the money to the IRS (Ed had also done this with Bill's company as well as his own, short-lived consulting company). This results in one of the most severe penalties that can be assessed against a company, and they ran up an irreversible debt. They made several other contractual and unwise purchasing decisions, completely against my advice, which led to ruin. And at that point, I completely gave up on trying to contribute to the company's success anymore. Greg had cast his vote with Ed and Diane, and they ran the company into the ground.

In the meantime, Ed started up the con again. He took baby steps to moving me out as fast as possible--he went to the library and copied articles on executives transitioning out of companies. He would get involved in a project that I was working on and wreak havoc. He fired employees that were loyal to me, and made others miserable. He was single-minded and tireless, directing most of his energy toward removing me from the company. He drew up a contract, offering me a large settlement, to transition out of the company and gave it to Greg for me to sign (I refused--the language was insulting after my years of service to the company, and included a retroactive non-compete agreement barring me from pursuing a job with one of my prospective employers). Soon afterward, I had interviewed with a company in the Biomedical Industry, obviously closer to my field, and was certain I would get the job. I accepted the settlement, which called for me to document some of the complex formulas and techniques that were my responsibilities.

And I did get conned. This time, in a seedy scene, Greg met me on a rainy afternoon in a Toys R Us parking lot, collected my computer and the documentation, and drove off without paying me, saying that I hadn't operated in good faith by signing the contract. This move had "Ed" written all over it. As the saying goes, "Lie down with dogs and you get fleas." And Greg proved the statement true. In the end, he left owing me several thousand dollars.

But that several thousand dollars bought me a powerful lesson. If I had stood up for myself and confronted Ed immediately when he refused to pay me years before, he might have had second thoughts about taking me on. I further tipped him off that I would be submissive by letting him get away with his personal attacks and by tolerating his mediocrity. All in all, he knew what he was doing when it came to Greg. Greg was such an uneducated, weak-minded fool that Ed could mentally have his way with him pretty easily. I should have never entrusted the financial security of my family to such a flighty idiot--I knew my position was fragile and that Greg resented my salary. Maybe I should have been nicer to Diane so Ed wouldn't be so easily armed against me. Maybe some situations are just unwinnable.

The last I heard, Ed had sunk three of the five businesses, and only one of them was still viable (I'm proud of this company's survival because it is an off-site company which I formed from the ground up, negotiated the contracts personally, and set it up to run independently without intereference from outside management). Greg had been pursued by the IRS for the huge debt, and a personal fine was assessed encumbering some of his personal property. Ed had been fired, rehired, fired again, rehired again...not sure what the current status is. As soon as I left, Ed had turned on Diane and had forced her out of the company, blaming her (and probably me as well) for the IRS problem and bringing in an accountant that may not watch the day-to-day expenditures as closely...

Ed's skill in reading, communicating with, and manipulating people was powerful and effective. "Con" is short for "confidence", and, how else could a near-homeless, overweight, dirty drunk in jeans and a disgusting, sweat-stained cowboy hat take control of a business? He weaseled his way into multi-million dollar corporations, coordinated impressive multi-national meetings, borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars from banks, and appeared on the national political stage. And when it was time for him to go home each night, he drove off in a borrowed pickup truck to his fleabag hotel, not a penny richer, leaving a wake of ruined finances behind him. In this light, Ed is almost a comic figure.

One of Ed's parting shots to me was delivered in his even, calming, baritone voice"Trust me, someday you'll thank me for this. You're going to be better off having left this company." In a perverse way, it steams me that he was right--like a true con man, he saw the situation more clearly than those around him.

Behind closed doors

I walked through the halls of Parkland Hospital this afternoon, near the same halls where they wheeled John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, quite a while before I was born. Some of the walls are probably the same color--lime green and faded yellow, with wooden-handled stair rails worn smooth like a bone-handle knife that you keep in your pocket for years and years. For a long time, this was the event that put Dallas on the map, and caused many parts of the country to hate Dallas. Still, when people come in from out of town, I usually drive them by the shooting site, pointing out the famous landmarks such as the Schoolbook depository, the "grassy knoll", and the triple underpass. People over a certain age are usually in awe and introspective. Under that age, they politely, maybe quizzically shrug and thank me for driving them around.

Going around a corner and continuing toward my destination, I went down a putrid-smelling hall reeking from plastic bags filled with rotting human tissue--red Biohazard bags piled eight feet high in a large bin, resting and simmering in the still-hot Texas heat just outside the door and a gentle wind just strong enough to waft it in an assault through the adjacent halls so you can smell when you are walking up on this area. Glancing at the bags on the way to my appointment, I remembered the line from Doctor Zhivago about "laying life on the table and cutting out the tumors of injustice", and then mentally flipped the figurative language to realism and wondered whose tumors lay inside the waste in front of me--whose skin, blood, pieces of organ, etc. were being tossed in the trash. I was thoroughly grossed out and I can still conjure up that awful odor. They say that the sense of smell is one of the most primal.

I flashed back to another scene that shocked me last week. I was in a research facility and I agreed to help fix a piece of equipment. It's a type of "top-secret" place where I have to give 24-hours notice to get in, have a constant escort while on the premises, sign in and out, wear a badge, and even put on a cleanroom suit. One of the researchers was leading me around and I turned a corner and stopped walking for a second. I was at the end of one of the longest hallways I've ever seen which was lined with cage after cage after cage, primed to be filled with experimental animals. There must have been thousands of cages. I can't find the right adjective--it was staggering.

Deep down inside, I know that experimental animals are helpful to all of us, and I typically feel pretty cavalier about that--my instinct is to instantly defend the use of animals in research. I've personally used and killed animals for research and for study. I reject and even mock PETA's agenda because I feel it is so ridiculous and radical that it can not be taken seriously--they really do themselves a disservice through their extremes. But this one time, looking at these thousands of cages, I was struck for the first time that perhaps something is wrong somewhere that makes this whole scene necessary. Do we really need 10,000 animals to die, or could we get our data from a more reasonable number?

Now, here's the real thing that struck me now that I think about it--I saw a 36 cubic foot upright cage with brightly colored plastic toys inside. The cage was cold, grey metal and the wire door in the front of the cage was left swinging open. I thought of the dog or cat or rabbit or even a monkey playing with those toys right before being quickly and coldly snatched up...

The toys are a distraction, aren't they?--a pitiful distraction to keep the animal from going crazy while it is readied for death. Made me think about life...

My mind flashes to the girl in the red dress in Schindler's List. I'm sure that somebody, somewhere has done a well-thought-out academic paper on this girl's role in the movie, but here's my interpretation: Throughout this movie, we see people murdered in mass numbers. It's there in front of us literally happening in black and white (interpretation: it's a cold fact). This girl in the red dress makes you realize that each of the victims is an individual--otherwise your mind goes numb in light of the huge numbers of dead. Later, when the girl ends up hurled into a mass grave, she isn't just a number--we are reminded that she was an individual: living, breathing, precious--she isn't merely a statistic. It's a loss of an individual and the loss becomes more real to us through this device. I jumped, but didn't cry, when the soldier abruptly executes a man with a bullet between the eyes.

That's what those plastic toys did to me--I involuntarily saw the blood-spattered corpse of the girl in red and it gave me pause.

Also yesterday I found myself walking behind a doctor and a herd of medical students. It reminded me of ER, one of my favorite shows--the doctor was quizzing the medical students and they were asking questions back and forth. Apparently, they were discussing transplanting tissue into a patient. The doctor, casting a suspicious sideways glance at me, a "foreigner", walking in step with the group quite by accident, starting speaking in special "doctor code"

"We will insert a porcine heart valve...blah blah blah" (that'll fool this leechy moron).

(besides being a silver medalist in the National Latin Exam, I a) knew what they were talking about anyway and b) didn't really care. But found their evasiveness amusing.)

One of the students hesitatingly asked, "Do they use a special...(quietly, almost whispering) pig?"

The doctor (smiling), "They do raise them specifically to be used for transplants, then they harvest the valve."

(then, chuckling) "They send the rest to the pepperoni factory...I guess I don't want to think if it that way, though..."

I didn't set out to make a political statement today. I was thinking about the ugly things that happen behind closed doors that we know are there but are glad that we don't have to deal with them. I've heard an odd saying "Two things you don't want to know how they are made: Laws and sausage." But more serious things occur behind closed doors--nursing homes crammed with aging people, harvesting animals by the thousands for research every day, cutting out both literal and figurative tumors to save the body--In a way, maybe these things make our lives easier and we're glad we don't have to dwell on them.

Someday I should write about this...really

No one would believe the stories about my days with the small trucking company.

We hired this driver from Russia who was over 6 ft. 6 inches and weighed more than 300 lbs., complete with grizzled beard and thick accent. His name was Victor. One day, he brought his truck back and was very indignant. When one of the girls asked him what happened, he told her "Tis man drive behind me and keep honking. When he stop at red light, I open his door and punch him in face!" Needless to say, he didn't last long.

One woman had a badly chipped tooth that she would superglue back in place when it fell apart.

One time, a thousand pound forklift rolled off the 6-foot-high dock and burst into flames. Oh, sorry, make that two times.

Another time, we hired an accountant and found out he did work on the side for a group of revolutionaries (he was proud to show me his business card).

One guy, Earl, who we all knew was mentally unstable, picked (another) fight with another employee. We had to run him off. When we tried to follow up with him to bring him back, we were told he had been killed. Earl was always pulling stunts, so we didn't exactly break out the black clothing--sure enough, we confirmed with his dad that he wasn't truly dead, but just wanted attention since he was unemployed at the moment. We ended up bringing him back--two years later he was indeed killed in a bar fight.

I got called in the middle of the night to drive to the scene of an accident--one of our drivers had fallen asleep and flipped his 18-wheeler over in the road. Another driver (later, we found out he was letting his son-in-law drive his rig) plowed right through the middle of the trailer (he couldn't see it because the highway was dark). They came out covered in...prune juice. But they really thought it was blood and were completely freaked out.

We were always pretty desperate for drivers. One day, a guy came in who had exactly the same first, middle, and last name as my brother, Don. I figured we couldn't go wrong. We got him trained, and 3 days later, on his first delivery, he turned around, went 20 miles in the wrong direction, sped up to 50 miles per hour, and plowed into a huge brick mailbox, sending bricks flying for 100 yards and totalling our truck. It was a scam he had worked out with a lawyer to collect worker's compensation insurance (in a twist of fate, our company had an alternative coverage that was immune to their scam). The mailbox's owner? The president of a competitor trucking company.

The Air Conditioning was wired very funny--the detector for the thermostat was actually located in a different part of the building that was conditioned by another unit and heater--it belonged to a different company, and was always off--sometimes the heater would kick on in the summer. The office was either literally over 90 degrees in the summer, or in the '40's and '50's in the winter. It was the only place where I saw people quit their office jobs because of the temperature of the office, but it was pretty unbearable.

One manager stole 20,000 gallons of fuel, selling it to another company and pocketing the cash.

One customer asked me for a kickback, which completely offended me. Then I talked to the president and found out that we actually did it all the time, including arranging for "female companionship" for one apparently lonely customer (before I worked there). There was a group of people called "freight whores" that were always shamelessly available to provide work to small companies in exchange for bribes.

I solved a mystery! One of our drivers, after getting his paycheck one Friday, took off in our truck and never came back. A week went by...nobody had seen him. We called his mom and she told us that he liked to hang out at one of the interstate truck stops on the outskirts of Dallas. Apparently, it's a technicality that he did not actually steal the truck since we handed the keys over to him (foolishly trusting he would work all day and bring it back that evening). For a few days, I checked his hangout and saw nothing. Then one afternoon, I thought I would check again and I found the truck! Then I thought--what am I going to do if this PCP's out truck driver comes back (I was waiting for someone to bring me a set of keys)? I jumped up in the driver's seat and locked the door--figuring that he wouldn't come back. Did the driver come back? No. Did prostitutes roam through the parking lot? Yes--it was kind of scary. But that was my one Columbo moment in life.

For a few of the years I worked there, I got to work with my best buddy and former college roommate Gar and my wife's best friend since middle school, Nancy. I got them into it--partly just to keep myself from going crazy and partly just to have witnesses to the mayhem (Gar and Nancy ended up married to each other).

Seriously, I could tell dozens more stories about this place--if I wrote a sitcom about the misadventures of this crazy company, people would call it totally unbelievable. It was almost 10 years ago that I started there, and over 5 years since I left, and today I was thinking about some of those funny times and missing it--just a little. Although it drove me crazy and maybe even lowered my IQ a little, the unpredictability and sheer lawlessness of the place was fresh and made me feel alive--made me live in the moment. But when I seriously consider reality, I'm glad it's over.