NOTES TO SELF – BIZCATALYST 360°: Recent Episodes
BIZCATALYST 360
I don’t know why, but it seems as if many of the ads that show up in the games I play on my iPhone have to do with clothing made from bamboo. Underwear seems to be particularly popular for some reason — and sexy, if the ads are to be believed. I don’t know if I buy those ads. And I certainly don’t buy the underwear. But all of this got me thinking … and exploring.
Bamboo, it turns out, is the largest member of the grass family. I know they make skirts from grass in Hawaii for luaus and such. But I wondered how fabric could be made from bamboo for underwear and other garments. I discovered there are two ways:
- Mature bamboo is crushed or chipped into small pieces and treated with sodium hydroxide to break it down and extract the cellulose. The cellulose is dissolved with carbon disulfide to form a viscous solution called viscose. The viscose is forced through the tiny holes of a spinneret into a sulfuric acid, which regenerates the cellulose into solid fibers. The fibers are then washed, bleached, spun into yarn, dyed, and woven or knitted into fabric for clothing. The fabric is sold as a soft, silky, breathable fabric with excellent moisture-wicking properties, not so much for the environment effects of its processing.
- The bamboo is mechanically crushed or ground. Natural enzymes or bacteria are used to break down the cell walls and separate the fibers. The fibers are combed to remove pith and impurities, leaving natural bamboo fibers. The fibers are spun into yarn and woven into fabric, which is rougher, stiffer, and more linen-like compared to the viscose version.
So, your options for making bamboo garments are to ruin the environment or to endure chafing. That realization gave me another idea.
Selling Cellulose
In an earlier post, I wrote about a surgical procedure I underwent in 1974. That procedure left me with adhesions, bands of scar tissue that form between internal tissues and organs. They can (and do) cause adhesive small bowel obstruction. In my case, those obstructions are caused by consuming insoluble cellulose, which is present in whole grains, fruits with peels, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds. So, I need to be careful not to eat too much of any of those things, lest I pay for it dearly and painfully.
The fibrous strings on the outside of celery stalks are insoluble, too. They comprise bundles of collenchyma cells or collenchyma tissue that provides structural support and gives celery its characteristic crunch. While safe to eat for most people (not me), that collenchyma tissue can be tough and chewy, especially in older or larger stalks. Removing it improves texture and enjoyment, particularly in raw applications like snacks or salads. And that gave me an idea.
What if, instead of going through all the machinations of making fabric from bamboo, fabric could be manufactured from celery strings, which don’t require chemical treatment or mechanical crushing or grinding, don’t require forcing through spinnerets, and don’t require regeneration into solid fibers? They’d only require spinning, weaving, or knitting. Even dying could be optional.
I can just see the write-up for my new Celeryware in the J. Peterman catalog now:
He sauntered into the party like a man who knew his way around botany, wasn’t afraid to show it, and wasn’t just comfortable in just his own skin. In fact, he wore his shirt as if it were a second skin, a part of him, almost as alive as he was.
The original Great American Celery Shirt was cut full and long. But his was shorter, tucked neatly into his elegant celery trousers, and darted trimly in the back to accentuate the hard-earned V shape of his masculine physique. Women swooned as he maneuvered deftly, almost imperceptibly, to avoid cream cheese and salad dressing.
Gentlemen, this is the time for real men to get their celery on. You can feel it.
Most plant-based fabrics — or vegan textiles as they’re more trendily called — are manufactured in China, Japan, Canada, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia, Belgium, France, Mexico, Tanzania, and Kenya. So, I’m going to put my Celeryware plant (no pun intended) in Flint, Michigan, to restore the jobs lost when the auto industry moved to Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mexico, China, and Korea. And since I won’t be processing bamboo, I won’t be dumping carbon disulfide, sulfuric acid, bleach, or dyes into the Flint River.P.S. Given its elasticity, its viscosity, its strength, and its extensibility, I’ll also be using gluten to manufacture wearable alternatives to spandex. That’ll give me the opportunity to employ even more former auto workers to pick the glutens I’ll need out of wheat flour.
From early 2000 to early 2004, I worked for an advertising agency in Avon, Connecticut. As you may have surmised from some of my earlier writings, my office was full of all manner of Batman stuff, including a neon Batman clock on the wall.
There was a young, brilliantly talented graphic designer on the Creative Department staff at the agency. Her name was Jennifer McKenzie. She was largely overlooked and woefully underappreciated. And she had at least one tattoo of which I was aware. It was on her right ankle.
One evening as she was leaving, I asked her to come into my office. I gestured toward all the Batman stuff and said, “I have no idea what you make of all this junk. For all I know, you may see it as just some macho nonsense. But considering how talented you are — and since you have a tattoo — I wonder how you might interpret this stuff for a tattoo. And I have no idea how any such interpretation might be influenced by your feminine sensibilities. But I’d like to know. What do you think?”
She smiled and said, “Thank you. I’d love to work on it. Please give me a little time, and I’ll make some sketches.”
“Take your time,” I said. “I already don’t have a tattoo.” I smiled, too.
A few weeks later, Jen came back with six or eight pencil sketches, none of which I’d ever have been able to imagine. Two of them especially knocked me out. I asked her to finalize them.
The Proof is in the Inking
This is the first one. It obviously has the look of a shield about it. The metallic sheen was something I’d never considered. But since I knew I wanted my tattoo to be all black, I wondered how the shading of this design might reproduce on skin. I suppose I needn’t have worried. The next design, however, really caught my eye and eliminated all worry.
As Jen was showing me the design below, she said she’d started to find my initials in it: M and O. Needless to say, I found that intriguing. I also knew this one would look very good in black — with stark, clean lines against my fair, Irish skin. It now resides on my left shoulder.
I read somewhere once that something like 90 percent of people who get one tattoo get another. Since the artist who did my Batman tattoo is named Kevin O’Brennan, it seemed fitting to go back and have him put a Celtic cross on my right shoulder, which I did. That, too, is all black.
Both of my tats are hidden, even when I’m wearing short-sleeve shirts. I’m the only one who needs to know they’re there. I didn’t get them for effect or for anyone else. As with so many of the things I’ve done in my life, I wanted to get tats to have the experience of getting them, to see what it felt like. Now my curiosity’s satisfied … at least for now.
I may get Jen’s shield design inked on me someday. I don’t know.
All I know is I’m Batman.
Here’s a highly unofficial and utterly arbitrary pop quiz: The photograph above is:
- A licensed furbearer trapper’s cabin in Bismarck, North Dakota?
- The home of our unlicensed neighbors across the street in Middletown, Connecticut, after two feet of climate change fell?
But before we get to the answer, a little history:
Bismarck, North Dakota, was named after the German battleship, Bismarck, which was named after Otto von Bismarck, the former Chancellor of the German Empire. Thinking it was in Norway, Bismarck lived in Oslo, North Dakota, on the Red River of the North, before moving to Germany and entering politics.
Since the battleship Bismarck was only around for about 27 months (launched on Valentine’s Day, 1939 — sunk May 27th, 1941, just 16 days after Mother’s Day) and since Otto moved to Germany, the natives of Bismarck wanted to honor and remember the ship and the man. So, the residents changed the name of the town to Bismarck.
The original name of the town had been Edwinton, named after Edwin Ferry Johnson, a civil engineer for the Northern Pacific Railway. Surveyors who worked under him honored him by naming the settlement after him, thinking Edwinton sounded better than Ferry Town. But after Otto left for Germany, the townsfolk changed the name to Bismarck in honor of Otto, thinking Bismarck sounded better than Ottoville. They also hoped to attract some of the 114 German sailors who survived the sinking of the battleship named after Otto.
Let’s Solve the Puzzle
So, now that we’ve come this far, the answer to the quiz is B.
I took the photo at the top of this post from the window in my office that faces the street. Some people are confused about how two feet or more of snow could fall given their ardent faith in global warming climate change. They find it somewhere between counterintuitive and contradictory that the planet could be getting hot enough to kill us all, yet Connecticut saw more snow in this most recent storm than it had seen since February of 2013. The answer lies in these two simple physical principles: Hot air rises. Cold air falls.
Figure 1.As you see in Figure 1 above, as air heats from global warming climate change, it rises, forcing cold air out of the atmosphere. (Just as nature abhors a vacuum, it also hates crowding.) As the cold air is squeezed out and falls through the clouds, it freezes the water molecules in the clouds, causing them to crystallize into snowflakes. The snowflakes, then, fall to the ground. And Bob’s your uncle.
Since the average annual snowfall in Bismarck, North Dakota, is 50 to 52 inches, the folks up there already know all that. I haven’t yet explained it to our neighbors across the street. But I think they’ll be cool with it, too. No pun intended.
I suspect they’ll find it right on the Bismarck.
I’m not generally one to dispense advice, but I’m going to break character and offer four pieces here:
- If you’re taking your trash cans down a steep icy driveway, don’t let your feet fly out from underneath you, causing you to elevate horizontally and to whack the back of your noggin on the pavement when gravity takes over.
- If you fail to heed #1, experience dizziness the next day, attribute the dizziness to whacking your noggin on the pavement, and go to a local emergency room (ER) to get checked out, make sure you don’t have atrial fibrillation (AFib) before you go.
- If you fail to heed #1 and #2, be prepared to see a lot of really concerned faces in the ER, to have gallons of blood drawn, to undergo more tests than Victor Frankenstein conducted on his monster, to be admitted to the Critical Care Unit (CCU), to have a different doctor and a different crew of nurses for every shift, to be taken through the dark corridors for a CT scan of your head, your chest, and your abdomen at 11:30 at night, to have people coming to take your vital signs and to draw (more) blood at all hours of the night, to have an echocardiogram at 7:30 the next morning, and to be told horrifying things by a no-nonsense cardiologist about the possibility of stroke-inducing blood clots around your heart, procedures involving tubes down your throat to find the damn things, and electric paddles put on your chest to shock your heart back to a normal rhythm.
- Be prepared to fall in love with every caring person you meet during your stay because every person you meet will be deeply caring, compassionate, and professional.
Run River, Run
What qualifies me to dispense such advice? On Monday, January 19th, I did #1. On January 20th through the 23rd, I did #2, #3, and #4. The good news is my heart looked so good on the echocardiogram, only one of the other two procedures will need to be done. No tubes. No clots.
Some people might say all that — any such experience — was a nightmare, a disaster, a grim reminder of our frailty and our mortality, something that happened to me. Nothing happened to me. It was an awakening, a blessing, a beautiful chance to see humanity at its most compassionate and its most noble. It was an opportunity. It didn’t happen to me. It was given to me.
All things being equal, I wouldn’t have chosen to be there on the night of the 20th. I wouldn’t have chosen to be in a hospital bed. I wouldn’t have chosen to have three IVs running at the same time. I wouldn’t have chosen to have an automated sphygmomanometer taking my blood pressure every 15 minutes. I wouldn’t have chosen to have my blood drawn in the middle of every night. I wouldn’t have chosen to hear the monitors chiming, the dispensers dispensing, and the conversations of patients and their caregivers in the hallway. But when Natalie, my night-shift nurse, asked me how I felt that first night, I said, “Completely at peace.” And I did.
Then there was Shannon, my nurse on the day shift Wednesday and Thursday — brilliant, funny, conversant, forthright, caring. There was Elle, Diane, Maddie, Norma, Lexis, Jonathan, Nadine, Laura, Chloe, Claire, Madeline, Lynne, Emily the Nurse and Joe, the Physician’s Assistant in the ER, Dr. David, Dr. Sam, Dr. Shani, others whose names I’m sorry I can’t remember, and still others — including the uniformly cheerful people from Housekeeping who kept my room immaculate — whose names I never knew. Each of them made it impossible for me to be anxious. All of them made me positive I was in genuinely caring hands.
The Ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus said, “You cannot step twice in the same river.” When I was discharged from the hospital on January 23rd, I did not step in the same river I’d been in when I entered the hospital.
The river was different. The world was different. I was different. Those things are the same.
I thank every one of the people I met at Middlesex Health in Middletown, Connecticut, as humbly, sincerely, and enduringly as I can for making that true, for teaching me that lesson without ever even trying.
With a very full and very grateful heart,
Mark
P.S. On the afternoon of the 23rd, after returning home, I received a call from a man named Tim Barron. His 88-year-old father, Bob, lives across the street from Anne and me. We’ve gotten to know Tim, Bob, Tim’s younger brother, Jeff, and Jeff’s son, Lee, very well. Given the tone of Tim’s voice and the halting way in which he was talking, I thought he was calling to tell me his dad had been injured or had passed away. Instead, he wanted me to know this.
I’m 18 years older than Jeff was. I just spent three days in the hospital with a heart condition. I’m still walking around, and Jeff is not. I don’t know why my life is charmed. But it irrefutably is.
The other morning, I was at the kitchen sink making coffee when Anne came into the room, opened the cabinet underneath the sink, and pulled out a bottle of Formula 409. The first thing I wondered was where the name came from. So, I looked it up. It’s an interesting story with which some liberties have been taken.
Because I tend to favor even numbers over odd, I decided to look up the numerological significance of 409. That compelled me to look up the numerological significance of 408 and 410. While I’m happy to leave the details to you, dear reader, I’ll digest and paraphrase their respective significances here, in numerical order:
- The combination of numbers in 408 creates a powerful energy that can help you achieve success and abundance in all aspects of your life, especially if you have excessive grease buildup under the burners on your stove. Seeing this number repeatedly can indicate the universe is trying to guide you towards your goals — or toward the excessive grease buildup under the burners on your stove.
- Because 409 comprises the energies and vibrations of the numbers 4 (practicality and hard work), 0 (spiritual growth and potential), and 9 (spiritual enlightenment and serving others), it provides a powerful message of the balance between materiality, spiritual pursuits, and unsightly bathtub ring.
- Unlike 408 and 409, 410 contains the number 1, which signifies new beginnings, personal growth, and positive change. As a result, 410 creates a powerful message of perseverance, positivity, spiritual enlightenment, an almost unlimited number of clean toilet bowls, and the elimination (no pun intended) of evidence of pet accidents.
A Word About Practicality
Their numerological significance and cleaning abilities notwithstanding, I’d have been inclined, of course, to buy Formula 408 or 410. But those formulas aren’t made. I try not to think about the fact that I’m stuck.
And I don’t know if this is related to my predilection for even numbers, but there are times at which I wonder how much success, abundance; spiritual growth, spiritual potential, spiritual enlightenment, perseverance, and positivity I need or can take. I think I’m in respectable shape on those fronts. And I’m pretty happy with myself and my life.
I also have to wonder if a cleaning formula with a positive number is too much to ask for. People by and large tend to underestimate how much success, abundance; spiritual growth, spiritual potential, spiritual enlightenment, perseverance, and positivity there is in a clean house.
That seems practical to me.
If you’re a language snob like me, you pay attention to things other people don’t notice — or disregard if they do notice. I’ll cite a couple instances in a moment. But first, a note on linguistic mechanics — more specifically, a mechanical abbreviation with the literal, functional purpose of condensing terminology:
initialism (noun): a set of initials representing a name, organization, or the like, with each letter pronounced separately
In an initialism, the initial letters are pronounced individually — FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), CEO (chief executive officer), HMO (Health Maintenance Organization), HTML (HyperText Markup Language). In those examples, it’s clear the initialisms are condensations of the full, formal terms.
NOTE: Initialisms are not acronyms. Acronyms are abbreviations that can be pronounced as words — NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), COVID (coronavirus disease), radar (radio detection and ranging), SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), FOMO (Fear of Mark O’Brien).
So What?
As a devotee of police dramas and true-crime programs, I’ve noticed everyone who speaks during any of those shows refers to GSWs (gunshot wounds). In all likelihood, that initialization has been around forever. And by noticing it now, I’m probably manifesting the Baader–Meinhof Phenomenon, which is sometimes referred to as the frequency illusion or the frequency bias. People commonly experience this phenomenon when they notice a particular make and model of car on the road for the first time and thereafter seem to see that same make and model everywhere.
In this case, though, it’s not the frequency I notice. Rather, it’s the seeming illogic of it. If we’re talking about something like CID (Criminal Investigation Department), I’m with you all the way:
Cop: I need CID on the scene right away.
Dispatcher: Roger that. CID en route.
But consider this scenario:
Cop: I have a GSW. Get an ambulance here ASAP.
Dispatcher: If it’s that urgent, why didn’t you say gunshot wound? It’s three fewer syllables.
And here’s another scenario, this one from more than 50 years ago when I worked as a hospital orderly:
Nurse: Transport this patient to the OR [operating room]. He’s having surgery for CA [cancer].
Me: Why don’t you just say cancer? It’s the same number of syllables as CA, and the dude already knows why he’s having surgery.
Resolutions
I don’t know why I notice these things. I don’t know why they mean anything to me or compel me to write about them. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to get over myself. But I don’t see that working out.
I’ll just have to be careful to pick TRW (the right words).
If you’ve never read anything I’ve written about my baby brother, Woody, here are a few things you should know:
- He loves animals.
- They love him (like Eddie and Sammy).
- He loves music.
- He particularly loves Christmas music.
- He loves Elvis Presley.
- He loves to sing.
One year at Christmastime, my sister, Lynn, and her daughter, Johanna, had flown up from Virginia to visit my parents in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Woody was also visiting my parents at the time. The five of them got in my parents’ car and drove up to where I lived in Glastonbury, Connecticut, to have yet another Christmas celebration.
When they arrived, Lynn and Johanna’s eyes were red and teary as if they’d been crying. It turned out they had been, in a sense. Mom and Dad had smiles on their faces I can only describe as sheepish. Habitually curious as I am, I asked what happened.
It seems Woody had brought his Sony Walkman cassette player with him in the car. He was playing an Elvis Christmas tape, wearing his headphones, and singing along. As a result of wearing his headphones, he couldn’t hear himself singing. And while he does, indeed, love to sing, his singing resembles nothing so much as a sack full of cats in a cement mixer.
Perhaps out of the undeniable humor of the occasion — and likely because of their sincere appreciation for Woody’s blissful obliviousness — Lynn and Johanna had laughed themselves to tears on the ride to Glastonbury. Needless to say, that story is now an indelible part of our family lore.
The Measure of Woody
When Dad passed away in January of 2014, Mom and I drove to the group home in which Woody lives in Middletown, Connecticut. As hard as Dad’s passing was for the rest of us, we imagined it would be hardest on Woody. Mom and I sat on either side of Woody on his bed and told him the news.
In that moment, he just looked at Mom and said, “He was so good to you.” (I cried as I wrote that.)
Shortly before Mom passed away in January of 2023, I took Woody to the long-term care facility in which she’d draw her last breath a day or two later. As we were driving from there, he said, “She’s down to her last wire.” (I cried then, too.)
As a recovering Catholic, I haven’t been to Mass since Mom’s funeral. Woody was there, too, of course. There’s something about the purity of his piety — about the way he treasures family, about the way he simply is in every aspect of a Mass, about the way in which he sings every hymn unabashedly — that moves me to tears that have nothing to do with humor.
The moral of this story is that everything — beauty, music, piety — is in the senses of the beholder. If you doubt that, spend some time with Woody. Singing is optional.
What a wonderful world.
‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house,
The Nigerian Prince was as mum as a mouse.
“They know me,” he thought, “as the Master of Sham.
But they’ll still take the bait for my Christmas Eve scam.”
“I’ll tell them that Santa Claus had his sleigh filched,
And children all over the world will be zilched
Unless they send ten million smackers to me,
So I can make sure Santa’s sleigh is set free.”
The Prince laughed a laugh that was haughty and smug,
Quite sure that his plan had not one single bug.
It seems he forgot or perhaps never guessed:
The one who laughs last is the one who laughs best.
Then just as his laughter was fading away,
He heard something pealing … like bells from a sleigh.
He heard something else, like a loud, “Ho, Ho, Ho!”
That seemed like it came from within a stone’s throw.
He ran to the window and there in the light,
The Nigerian Prince saw eight reindeer in flight.
Sure enough, they were hitched to a shiny red sleigh,
With Santa Claus calling, “Up, up, and away!”
“Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now Prancer and Cupid!
That dastardly Prince wants to play folks for stupid.
On Comet! On Blitzen! On Vixen and Donder!
We’ll give that Clown Prince something worthy to ponder.”
With that, Santa pulled on the reins one more time.
The sleigh and the reindeer then started to climb
Up into the sky to deliver the toys
The Elves had all made for the good girls and boys.
With a nod of his head and a shake of his fist,
Even Santa, that good man, just couldn’t resist
Forewarning the shifty Nigerian Prince
He’d seen through his villainous scamming long since.
“You might fool us now and then,” Santa exclaimed.
But when you do, know that it’s you who’ll be blamed
For taking advantage of people’s goodwill.
But they’ll remain faithfully generous still.”
“Especially now, on this bright Christmas Eve,
The people you target will always believe
That hope, peace, and charity always prevail.
And scoundrels like you will be destined to fail.”
Perhaps, there and then, the Prince started to hear
Because we could swear his eyes started to tear.
When Santa saw that, he knew all would be right.
And he called, “Merry Christmas. To all a good night!”
The moral of this story, if there is one,
Is that good can always triumph over bad.
And Santa Claus might be here to remind us
Christmas miracles aren’t just a passing fad.
As this year was coming to its inevitable close, I found myself feeling more contemplative. Because I wasn’t sure why, I posed a number of questions to myself, each of which I was able to answer without taxing myself unduly. Here are some of them:
Question: Do you think you’re becoming more reflective as you get older?
Answer: That can’t be it because I’m getting younger.
Question: Do you think it’s because you’re acquiring more wisdom?
Answer: You don’t know yourself very well, do you?
Question: Do you think it’s because you’re anticipating more change?
Answer: Now that the penny’s been discontinued, I expect to get less change.
Question: Could it perhaps be seasonal affective disorder?
Answer: I don’t even believe in gravity. So, why would I believe in seasonal affective disorder?
Question: Have you ever been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens?
Answer: We agreed that question would be off limits.
Question: Numerologically speaking, do you think you’re feeling especially ruminative because the significance of 2026 is that it’s a Universal Year 1? Some people might feel undue pressure because ….
Answer: Did you see my answer above about gravity?
Question: I don’t want to get too personal — and I certainly don’t want to pry into your medical history or anything — but have you ever been diagnosed with or treated for Bonkus of the Konkus?
Answer: Will you take it personally if I say you’re starting to get on my nerves?
Moving On
At that point, I decided it was probably best to stop asking myself questions. Maybe it was because I was digging too deep. I don’t know. But I seemed to be getting a little touchy. And since it was the end of the year anyway, I figured I’d give it a rest.
I guess I understand why we become introspective at the end of the year. For those of us who use the Gregorian calendar, December 31st has the effect — psychological, chronological, cultural, symbolic, imagined, who knows? — of separating the past from the future. Except for the occasional hangover, I’ve never felt different on January 1st than I did on December 31st. But maybe I’m just fooling myself.
And in a really odd twist, this is the time of year at which we announce our resolutions; although, we never make a corresponding announcement when we decide to abandon those resolutions months, weeks, days, and sometimes hours into the proverbial New Year. That’s why the salespeople in gyms max their commissions between December 1st and December 31st, then take the next 11 months off.
But all of that notwithstanding, as we head into 2026, here’s hoping you’re in a better headspace, as we say in the biz. If you’re comfortable you did your best in the year that ends today — and if you’re reasonably committed to making the year that starts tomorrow a good one — you’re probably doing better than most folks. If so, as I tell my wife routinely, take the points.
Here’s to a Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous New Year.
‘Twas four days after Christmas at BIZCATALYST.
Most things still looked normal, but there was a twist:
Santa had skipped over Dennis and Ali.
They somehow got left off his Christmas gift tally.
So, Santa sent word out to 360 Nation
To ask for some help with his miscalculation.
And what to his wondering eyes should appear
But outpourings of goodwill from far and from near.
Yes, all they’ve paid forward came happily back
To make sure there’s no joy for which they might lack.
The hearts that they’ve touched and the friends they have made
Took care to make sure Santa’s fears were allayed.
For Dennis and Ali, as most of you know,
Spread much love and kindness wherever they go.
With all of their writers and all their good deeds,
They seem to be tending to everyone’s needs.
As Santa Claus learned on that dark winter’s night,
Some people like Dennis and Ali spread light.
Because they’re committed to doing their best,
The members of 360 Nation are blessed.
From all of us whom you’ve touched, thank you, Dennis and Ali.
Best wishes for this Holiday Season.
An article popped into my feed from History the other day. The headline grabbed me immediately: “Why the Inventor of the Cubicle Came to Despise His Own Creation”. If you’ve ever worked in a cubicle, as did I, that headline may have restored a little of your faith, as it did mine. My faith was bolstered still more when I read the first paragraph:
How do you envision corporate hell? It probably involves fluorescent light, a micromanaging boss and a tiny, impersonal cubicle. But the office layout that’s come to represent the worst in work was actually designed to bring out the best in workers. When they debuted in the 1960s, cubicles were supposed to make offices breezier, less confined and more efficient … Propst watched in horror as an invention intended to liberate American office workers was used to fence them in. “Not all organizations are intelligent and progressive,” he lamented. “Lots are run by crass people. They make little, bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rathole places.”
Well, there you go. The man had a heart and a conscience. His name was Robert Propst. He died in 2000 at age 79. Since I wanted to talk with him about his creation, what happened to it, and how his intentions were perverted, I got in the Wayback Machine and traveled to the late 1970s when Probst, who’d founded Probst Company in 1953, was working for MillerKnoll, Inc., which did business as Herman Miller.
Given the time of my visit, I dressed in a leisure suit and a polyester shirt unbuttoned to my navel. And I had my hair blow-dried and sprayed so it looked like a helmet. I arrived at the Miller plant in Zeeland, Michigan, announced myself at the reception desk, and asked to see Mr. Probst. What follows is a transcript of the interview I conducted with him. It’s been edited for brevity and clarity:
Me: Good morning, Bob. How are you?
Bob: Why are you dressed like that?
Me: What? I thought I looked … Never mind that right now. How are you doing?
Bob: To tell you the truth, I’m getting a little disillusioned.
Me: Why? What’s going on?
Bob: After they axed that bum, George Nelson, and I designed the Action Office II, I thought we were going places. But that was rendered FUBAR by Doug Ball at Haworth, another chooch. Then Steelcase and Knoll really screwed things up.
Me: How so?
Bob: The designs were supposed to be flexible to let people set up their own workspaces the way they wanted ‘em.
Me: Not for nothin’, Bob, but those little compartments did look like cubes.
Bob: Oh, for God’s sake. Go take off the ridiculous outfit, will ya?
END OF INTERVIEW
The cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity. (Robert Probst)
Bob died a broken man, shattered by the realization that the seeds he’d sown had reaped the cubicle farm.
According to his wife, “His only consolation was that no one ever called him Cubby.”
RIP, Bob. You did the best you could.
My friend, Rick, and I had our families at roughly the same time. His daughters are about the same ages as my sons. When the kids were small, Rick called their efforts to test their boundaries running for daylight, an expression used to describe what running backs do in football. I never forgot his characterization.
Fast forward to 2006. My younger son, Quinn, was 20 years old, a sophomore at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, and living in an apartment off campus. One night he called me from there.
“Dad,” he said in that kind of drawn-out way he and his brother had of pronouncing the word when a bomb was already incoming.
“Hi, Quinn,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I think I’m in trouble.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s interesting. Every time I’ve been in trouble, I was fairly certain of it.”
After a pause, Quinn said, “Okay. I’m in trouble.”
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“And what might be the nature of the trouble you’re in?”
“Well,” he warmed up. “My buddy and I went out and bought some beer. When we returned and got out of the car with the beer, there were plain-clothes cops in our parking lot in an unmarked car. They stopped us and asked for our IDs.”
“I see,” I said. “Is your buddy underage, too.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And what kills me is the beer wasn’t even for us.”
Even though Quinn couldn’t see it, I started waving a red flag. “Stop right there,” I said. “You were doing really well right up to that point. But now I have to ask you: Do you think I was never 20?”
“Sorry about that,” he said.
“With that out of the way, what are we looking at?” I asked.
“I have to go to court and pay a $400 fine.”
“Relatively speaking, that’s a pretty inexpensive lesson,” I said, “as long as you remember it. Let me know where to send the check.”
“Thank you,” he said.
The Backstory
Lest you think I let Quinn off easy, here’s some context: When Quinn was in 4th grade, he decided he wanted to learn to play the saxophone. He signed up for lessons at school and was given a sax from the West Hartford public school system.
In his report card that year, his music teacher, Mr. Torns, wrote this: “The saxophone doesn’t come easy to Quinn. But he refuses to give up.”
At the time, the City of West Hartford had 11 elementary schools. Every year, students from all 11 schools would audition for the West Hartford Inter-El Music Festival, the inter-elementary band (as well as choir and orchestra) that would perform a concert at the historic Bushnell Auditorium in Hartford. As a 5th-grader, Quinn auditioned for the band, was selected, and played at the Bushnell.
At the end of that school year, we knew Quinn would be moving to a private Catholic middle school, St. Timothy, in West Hartford. There would be no public-school saxophones to be had. I told him, if he wanted to continue playing the sax at St. Tim, I’d buy him one.
I said, “I know you well enough to know if you decide not play anymore, we’ll be able to sell the sax and get back darn-near what we paid for it. And I know you won’t give it up to sit on the couch and eat chips.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll think about and let you know in September.”
Before the school year started in September, Quinn decided he wanted to continue playing the sax. I bought him one, and he played it for the next two years.
Early in his 8th-grade year, he decided he didn’t want to play anymore.
I said, “Remember I told you I was sure you wouldn’t give up the sax to sit on the couch and eat chips?”
“Yeah.”
“You make Honors every quarter,” I said. “You’re President of your class, and you play soccer and basketball. You’re making the sound decision I knew you’d make.”
At the time, there was a Sunday morning program on a local AM radio station that let you call in to list items for sale. I called in Quinn’s sax. We heard it offered over the air. Thirty minutes later, there was a knock at our door from a gentleman with cash in hand.
When the gentleman left, I said to Quinn, “That’s just the way we drew it up.”
He smiled.
When you have a son that good, he’s entitled to run for a little daylight.
Author’s Note: On Tuesday, December 2nd, I published a sarcastic, facetious post on my Substack account about a gluten-free Thanksgiving dinner. It may prove the adage, “Just because you can do something, that doesn’t mean you should.” The truth is we had a close shave. But the person who would have insisted the clan adhere to gluten-freedom declined our invitation. Thanksgiving, indeed. The real story of our Thanksgiving is told here. It’s everything Thanksgiving should be.
On Thursday, November 20th, I published a post on my Substack account called, “Nothing is Sacred”, having to do with the theft of a flag from my father’s grave. On Wednesday, November 26th, I went back to Quonset Surplus to buy another flag to replace the one that had been stolen. The price of the flag was $2.35. I don’t carry cash.
When she saw my wallet, the woman in the store said, “I’m sorry. I can’t take a card for a purchase this small.”
I said, “Not even a debit card?”
She said, “No. I’ll just give you the flag.”
“Do you remember we were here last weekend with our dog, Eddie, and you asked us to bring him back to see you?” I asked.
“Oh, yes! Eddie!” she said, lighting up.
I said, “Eddie and I will be back, with cash, to pay you for the flag.”
I thanked her, wished her a Happy Thanksgiving, and left, reminding myself to take the horrific bullshit the mainstream media feeds us with a very large grain of salt.
The next morning, Thanksgiving Day, I picked Woody up from his group home, and we went back to the cemetery. On the way, Woody reminded me that day would have been our parents’ 78th wedding anniversary.
As you’ll see on the right side of the photo at the top of this post, we placed the new flag in the Marine Corp shield that had been empty the previous Saturday. We stood and reflected for a while in silence. Since the weather was temperate, I took the chills and the goose bumps I experienced to be spiritual communication since I was standing between the graves of our mother and father. You can tell me they weren’t there with us. But I won’t believe you. Neither will Woody.
The Union of Our Spirits …
With full hearts and souls, Woody and I got back in my car and headed for Casa O’Brien. Our guests started to arrive at about 1:00 in the afternoon. While all the players are identified in the photo below, I’ll put the roster and the players’ positions here:
- Keith and Woody are my brothers.
- Anne, of course, is my wife. (Thanksgiving, indeed.)
- Boochie, Devin, Sarah, Jane, Lida (a childhood mispronunciation of Linda), Tige (short for the Italian word for tiger), and Melanie are the legendary Crazy Italians.
- Joanne is one of Anne’s lifelong friends.
With camp set up in our sunroom, we filled the place with love, laughter, and stories. And we enjoyed the amazing meal to which everyone contributed a dish.
Epilogue
On Sunday, Eddie and I drove to Quonset Surplus to pay our debt.
As we walked in, I said to woman who’d given me the flag, “I’ve come to keep two promises. The first is I brought Eddie to see you.”
Eddie walked behind the counter as if he owned the place, and the woman crouched to pet him and talk with him.
Then I said, “Second, I’ve come to keep my promise to pay for the flag you gave me,” and I handed her more than the $2.35 price of the flag.
“I can’t take this,” she said. “The flag only costs $2.35.”
“I know that,” I said. “But you invested kindness and trust in me. I attach value to those things beyond the price of the flag. So, please consider this the return on your investment. And please know how grateful I am for your generosity.”
“Okay,” she said as she smiled.
She and Eddie said their goodbyes. She and I said ours. And I made a third promise — to be back to see her soon.
Those of you with total recall may recall The Great Cologuard Scam Parts One, Two, and Three. If so, you were probably praying to everything good and holy that there wouldn’t be a Part Four. Well, I hate to disappoint you, but …
You may remember two things in particular from Part One:
- My surgical history that stymied an earlier effort to perform a colonoscopy on me.
- The fact that I’d caved and submitted the Cologuard kit my PCP hadn’t sent to me.
There. Now that we’re all caught up, we can fast forward to my most recent annual Wellness Visit, which took place this past October, as it always does. My PCP told me the Cologuard kit he hadn’t sent to me but I’d submitted anyway returned a positive result for cancer. He suggested — and I agreed — that those were dice not worth rolling. And given the fact that my failed colonoscopy had been more than 20 years hence, we surmised the technology, the scopes, and myriad other aspects of the testing procedure may well have advanced to the point at which a second shot at a colonoscopy might be more successful than the first. So, my PCP ordered a consult with a colorectal surgeon.
When we met, the surgeon corroborated the thinking of the PCP and me. He said he’d do whatever he could while being mindful of doing no harm. (Thank you, Hippocrates.) Everything about the surgeon and his manner put me at ease.
The Big DayOn Thursday, November 20th, I reported to the surgical center for the colonoscopy. Since the procedure was scheduled for first thing in the morning, I was prohibited from eating the entire day Wednesday. And I didn’t start the prep (how’s that for euphemism?) until 6:00 p.m. that day. As a result, I didn’t sleep a wink Wednesday night because I was … well … you know. So, as you might imagine, I was alert, refreshed, and at my absolute best when Anne drove me to the surgical center Thursday morning.
After signing numerous forms and having an IV inserted in the back of my right hand, I was wheeled into the procedure room. Shortly thereafter, I felt the euphoric, numbing blur of Propofol and awoke in the recovery room to the surgeon’s telling me the exam had been a smashing success. No traces of cancer. No polyps. No nothing. And before leaving for home, I was told, given the pristine exam and my age (good news/bad news), I needn’t have another colonoscopy for the rest of my life.
I’ll miss the Propofol, but I won’t miss the prep.
Well, at least everything came out all right.
I don’t know what things are like in the rest of the world or the rest of the United States for that matter. But in the Northeast part of the United States, at least in Connecticut, climate change seems to be producing more wind. I don’t mean there are higher speeds or higher velocities to the wind. It just seems like there’s more of it.
I happened to notice this phenomenon while I was staring out the window above our kitchen sink the other afternoon waiting for some coffee to brew. There are lots of trees in our yard. Our gardens are full of hydrangeas, dwarf Japanese maples, ornamental grasses, hostas, and other plants that seem to be moving a lot more due to more wind.
The Settled Science
As a result of doing my obligatory homework, I’ve discovered what’s going on.
Before climate change, Earth’s atmosphere was essentially a closed system. Its fixed mass was about 5.15 × 10¹⁸ kilograms, give or take. And it primarily comprised nitrogen (78 percent), oxygen (21 percent), and trace gases. Air molecules in the atmosphere were conserved; that is, storms, fronts, high- and low-pressure systems, and temperature changes moved, compressed, expanded, or mixed with existing air, but they didn’t generate new molecules. With climate change, that’s no longer true.
Now, as a result of climate change, fossil fuels, cow farts, internal combustion engines, gas stoves, wood-burning stoves, and forest fires caused by climate change, gases like water vapor, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride actually add to the atmosphere’s air mass, creating more wind. (Biological processes like plant respiration add oxygen incrementally, but those don’t count because they don’t fit the climate-change narrative.)
The same is true for water. Before climate change, the volume of water on Earth remained essentially constant due to the water cycle (roughly 1.386 billion cubic kilometers), which included evaporation and precipitation as key processes. Water evaporated from oceans, lakes, rivers, and the land into the atmosphere as vapor, then condensed and returned to Earth’s surface through precipitation like rain or snow. This cycle redistributed water among reservoirs, oceans, mud puddles, ice, groundwater, and the atmosphere without significant net loss or gain on a planetary scale.
Now, as a result of climate change and warming temperatures, more water is evaporating than can be condensed and returned to Earth as precipitation. Consequently, the water vapor remains in the atmosphere, adding to the air mass, and creating more wind.
The bad news is, due to the increasing atmospheric weight, we’ll all be crushed to death. The good news is we’ll be dead by the time all the glaciers melt, so we don’t have to worry about drowning.
Everything, after all, is relative.
Candor compels me to admit I laugh at my own jokes. And few things make me laugh harder than when I tell a joke and nothing happens. I’ll give you two examples.
In 1978, I had a job selling clothes for a now-defunct retail outlet in Westfarms, a mall on the West Hartford–Farmington town line in Connecticut. During a break, I went to a concession that sold bagels. I ordered one toasted, with cream cheese. While the young woman behind the counter was preparing my bagel, she apparently mistook me for her biographer because she started relating the chapter about all the supplements she took.
She ended the diatribe with, “And I take a lot of iron.”
“Well,” I said, “that explains your magnetic personality.”
Nothing happened. Not a chuckle. Not a smile. Crickets. I had everything I could do to keep my composure as I collected my bagel. I was still in hysterics when I got back to the store in which I worked.
More recently, Anne and I went to dinner at Red Fox, one of our haunts in Middletown. As we walked into the bar area, there happened to be a table around which six or eight women from Anne’s hometown of Berlin, Connecticut, were seated. We stopped to chitchat.
As Anne was talking with her friends, one of them asked me, “Where did you grow up?”
I said, “I didn’t.”
When that lead balloon dropped, it darn-near fractured my foot. I was tempted to ask the woman if she or any of her relatives had ever hawked bagels at Westfarms. But as Archie Bunker would say, I stifled myself.
It’s Complicated
In doing some research for this post, I discovered the Humor Styles Questionnaire, developed by psychologist Rod A. Martin and some colleagues in 2003. It identifies four main humor styles based on whether humor is adaptive (positive, constructive) or maladaptive (negative, potentially harmful), and whether it’s self-focused or other-focused. It breaks the styles down like this:
- Affiliative Humor: Using humor to enhance relationships and make others feel good (e.g., friendly jokes to bond). Adaptive, other-focused.
- Self-Enhancing Humor: Using humor to cope with stress or maintain a positive outlook (e.g., laughing at life’s absurdities). Adaptive, self-focused.
- Aggressive Humor: Using humor to belittle or criticize others (e.g., sarcasm or teasing that hurts). Maladaptive, other-focused.
- Self-Defeating Humor: Using self-deprecating humor to gain approval, often at your own expense (e.g., putting yourself down for laughs). Maladaptive, self-focused.
When I completed the questionnaire, it told me not to quit my day job.
Aside from making it evident humor is subjective, the questionnaire indicates how complicated the telling of even a simple joke can be. Depending on things like psychology, physiology, biology, culture, heritability, personal experiences, settings, circumstances, moods, and the wiring of one’s brain, one man’s joke can be another man’s trigger.
In keeping with some things that were expressed about social media’s capacity to inflame and trigger — especially if we’re wont or eager to be triggered — on the Friendship Bench on November 6th, social media can be a minefield when it comes to humor. A joke or an offhand remark used to be like a fart in a hurricane. Now it’s a stomp on an M14, exploding in outraged shares on every social media platform.
Given how hard it is to define, let alone achieve success, I sometimes think we should contend our objective as human beings is to make things complicated. With little more than humor for evidence, it’s clear we’re managing to complicate everything.
Humor is no joke.
The other day, I saw an excerpt from some self-book or other telling me it’s never too late to change — attitudes, convictions, hairstyles, even careers. So, since I love true-crime books, documentaries, and TV programs so much, I’m going to change careers and become a private detective. Plus, I have an idea for the perfect sleuthing tool. More on that shortly. But first, this:
A Botanical Interlude
Most people think yams and sweet potatoes are the same. But at least according to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, they’re not. They are, in fact, botanically distinct root vegetables from different plant families. Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) are roots from the morning glory family. Yams, on the other hand (Dioscorea species), are tubers from the yam family, which has no cousins or other relatives, however distant, in the morning glory family (with the possible exception of Uncle Bert, whose nose looked like a rather unsightly spud). Yams are typically larger (up to several feet long, like the prize-winning Franklin Delano Roosevelt lookalike yam that took first prize at the New York World’s Fair 1939-1940), starchier, and less sweet, with rough, scaly brown skin and white or yellowish flesh.
In the United States and Canada, sweet potato and yam are often used interchangeably because, in the 1030s, the National Sweet Potato Association (now the United States Sweet Potato Council) sought to differentiate orange-fleshed sweet potatoes from the paler varieties by labeling them yams. As a result, what we see labeled as yams in most grocery stores in the United States, Canada, and the Lesser Antilles are actually a firm variety of sweet potato with orange flesh and smoother, reddish-brown skin. Hence, my perfect sleuthing tool.
The Art of Misdirection
Whenever I interview a suspect, a material witness, or anyone with any information, however tangential or peripheral to a case I’m working, I’m going to put a miniature video recorder in a yam. Then, to misdirect the subject, I’m going to put the yam right on the table.
When the subject sees the yam, he’s likely to ask, “Is that a sweet potato?”
“No,” I’ll answer calmly as I pick up the yam and wave it around to get a panoramic view of the room. “In fact, we’ve been conned.”
Then I’ll go into the history of the United States, Canada, the Lesser Antilles, and The Great Yam Scam. That’ll lull the subject into false senses of security and curiosity, distract his attention from the fact that’s he’s being interviewed, and incline him to spill his guts.
I’ll be candid enough to tell you I haven’t patented the Yam Cam yet. And I’ll be charitable enough to suggest, if you’re inclined to try my technique or to try to beat me to the patent, don’t try it with a Russet, a Yukon Gold, a Red Bliss, or an Adirondack Blue. I conducted focus groups before I developed my MVP (minimum viable product) for the Yam Cam. Nobody fell for potatoes, regardless of the variety.
Remember: When it comes to interviewing tools, if it’s not yam, it’s just a sham.
P.S. The quote at the end of the video is from my short story, “True Grime: A Drake Manning Mystery”.
Rumors, as we know, in part due to the inscrutable vagaries of human nature, are wont to take on lives of their own. As they circulate, accruing gravity and credibility, they’re accepted, taken for granted, and finally accepted as truth. And so it is that, in a series of ever-widening circles, it was alleged — nay, believed, taken to heart and as gospel — that I didn’t know my way around a jack-o’-lantern. Pshaw! The bigger they are, the harder they fall pertains to rumors, too.
On Thursday, October 23rd, I flew to North Carolina to spend the weekend with two of our grandchildren, Evan (12 years old) and Maia (nine years old), in Wake Forest. On the evening of Friday, October 24th, Maia, artistically inclined and having already acquired the requisite pumpkins with her mom, drew faces on two of them. On the morning of Saturday, October 25th, we constructed a makeshift surgical theater in the back yard. An overturned cooler served as our operating table. We assembled our scalpels and scoops. And we got to work.
I skillfully performed craniotomies on the two pumpkins on which Maia had drawn faces. Then I purposefully scooped out the stuff on the inside, carefully placing it in the surgical pan we’d placed on one side of the table. Next, I handed the scalpel to Maia, who painstakingly performed the delicate procedures required to create eyes and mouths. Finally, she handed the scalpel back to me to refine the edges of the incisions to remove any traces of the Sharpie with which Maia had drawn the faces.
Waste Not, Want Not
Maia and I put the finished pumpkins on the ground and put an empty dish next to the surgical pan on the table. Going through the stuff I’d scooped out of the pumpkins, we separated the seeds from the pumpkin boogers, which Maia informed me is the clinical term for the goop in which the seeds are stuck. At the conclusion of that procedure, we discarded the pumpkin boogers, and brought the newly carved pumpkins and the seeds into the house.
We rinsed the seeds in a colander to remove the residual slime from the pumpkin boogers. Then we spread the clean seeds out on paper towels to dry. Maia, in fact, took the time to separate each seed from every other seed with the concentration of a scientist and the patience of a saint. We left the seeds to dry for a couple of hours to ensure they’d be extra crispy when they were cooked.
Once the seeds were suitably dried, we put them in a bowl, added olive oil and salt, stirred them, spread them on parchment paper on a cookie sheet, and put them in the oven at 350 degrees, flipping them with a spatula every five to ten minutes to ensure even baking. After 30 minutes, with Maia’s assurance that they were adequately golden brown, we set them out to cool. Once cooled, we sampled a few, and Maia put the rest in a Tupperware container.
When we were finished, I said to Maia, “That thud you just heard was an ugly rumor biting the dust.”
“What rumor, Grandpa?” she asked.
“Never mind, Beautiful,” I said. “Some things are better left discarded with the pumpkin boogers.”
While I certainly enjoyed getting costumed up and heading out to collect a sack full of candy on Halloween as a kid, even then I wondered what it was all about. As it turns out, Halloween’s origins are part of my Irish heritage.
All Hallows’ Eve, now abbreviated as Halloween, refers to the evening of October 31st, which is the eve of All Saints’ Day (also known as All Hallows’ Day) on November 1st. Hallow derives from the Old English word, hālig, meaning holy or saintly. So, All Hallows’ Eve literally translates to the evening of all saints or saints’ evening.
Pre-Christian Celtic festivals like Samhain (pronounced sow-in), an ancient Gaelic celebration, marked the end of the harvest and the onset of winter around November 1st on the old Celtic calendar. During Samhain, it was believed the boundary between the living world and the spirit world thinned, allowing supernatural beings to roam. The Celts believed on the night of October 31st the spirits of the deceased would return to the world of the living, prompting rituals such as lighting bonfires and wearing animal costumes to ward off evil spirits and prevent possession. The festival was celebrated as the Celtic New Year, with the Druids, the Celtic priests, leading the festivities.
When the Roman Empire conquered the Celtic territories around 43 AD, the Romans introduced their own festivals into the celebration, including Feralia, a commemoration of the dead, and a day honoring Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees, which may have contributed to the tradition of bobbing for apples. (If paying homage to Pomona didn’t precipitate bobbing for apples, all the Irish beer and whiskey the Romans confiscated in their conquest would explain it. It also would explain the spate of drownings that seemed to plague the Roman Empire after 43 AD.) Later, with the spread of Christianity, the Catholic Church sought to replace pagan traditions. In the 7th century, Pope Boniface the Spoilsport established a feast for all martyrs on May 13th, which was later moved to November 1 by Pope Gregory the Calendarian in the 8th century to honor all saints.
The Age of Paranoia
As we became more and more averse to having fun — and as we became more deeply committed to being sensitive about everything — Halloween began to suffer. In the 1970s, political expression began to emerge more prominently in Halloween culture, with presidential masks becoming more common during events like Watergate and anti-Vietnam-war protests. Later, people starting dressing as controversial political figures, sometimes sparking debate or offense. For example, in 2019, The Daily Iowan warned wearing costumes of controversial politicians can be tasteless and a recipe for disaster, especially in social settings involving the alcohol and strong opinions that had been retained from the ancient Gaelic celebrations.
More recently, political correctness and cultural sensitivity shaped school policies, with many schools banning certain costumes to prevent offense. In one instance, schools across the U.S. barred clown costumes during the 2016 creepy clown phenomenon. They’ve increasingly regulated attire deemed culturally insensitive or politically charged. And they’ve completely banned Irish beer and whiskey.
More generally, Halloween became a lens through which political and economic critiques are expressed. Marxist interpretations view monsters like vampires and zombies as metaphors for capitalism, since Karl Marx, who hid under his bed on Halloween, described capital as a vampire that feeds on labor. The zombie, which has its roots in Haitian folklore as a symbol of colonial enslavement, has been repurposed to critique zombie economies, zombie banks, and zombie politicians. And since the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President for the second time, people who think the world is coming to an end believe it’s more likely to happen on Halloween.
I don’t know what’s dying faster, common sense or common courtesy.
I’m reminded of that because of an article I saw in Fast Company: “Do you have to say bye to your boss every day?” Here’s all you really need to know from the article:
It’s the end of the workday. You’re ready to bounce. But you feel compelled to check in with your boss. For many workers, it feels like the appropriate thing to do. But … those norms may be changing.
As with so many things in our post-certainty world, the answer to the question posed in the headline is, “It depends.” Here are an even dozen things, among others, on which it might depend:
- Are you an adult?
- Is your boss an adult?
- Did you have parents?
- Did they teach you respect and common courtesy?
- How about your boss?
- Is your boss a miserable person?
- Are you?
- If people get in to work before their bosses and don’t leave until after their bosses leave — but those people don’t get their work done — is that okay?
- If people get in to work after their bosses and leave before their bosses leave — but those people get more work done than they were required to — is that okay?
- Relative to #8 and #9 is the work measured by output or outcomes?
- If you can’t or won’t be respectful or courteous to your boss — or vice versa — why do you stay in the job?
- Can you imagine this article being written 30 years ago? 20? Even 10?
The New Epidemic
The Fast Company article is all part of The Great Infantilization. Seventeen years down the road from the publication of this article, we’re reaping the rewards of the Kindergarchy. Adults are treated like the children they were raised to remain — in large part because their bosses have been treated like the children they were raised to remain — lacking maturity, autonomy, or capability. And if that immaturity yields fear or feelings of inferiority, those bosses may exhibit desires for control, lack of trust, or unconscious biases. As a result, professional environments become overly supervised and patronizing, with policies, communication styles, and management behaviors that undermine independence, initiative, creativity, and morale. It’s a vicious circle.
Even as I recognize the danger of generalizing, it’s hard to ignore things like policies that limit flexible work options, as if people aren’t responsible or dependable enough to manage their own lives and workloads. It’s hard to condone treating mistakes as failures that require admonition, rather than giving people opportunities to learn from their mistakes. And some of these practices have gotten worse with remote-work tools that enable constant surveillance with things like screen-sharing mandates.
And so it is that we have articles like the one in Fast Company. We have people disengaging, refusing to take risks, and avoiding creative problem-solving. We have talented people leaving jobs for environments that value trust, autonomy, and creativity, while those who stay develop passivity and dependence. This is not good news. But given recent history, it can’t be surprising.
If low self-esteem, anxiety, and dependence have become more common than sense, respect, and courtesy, we shouldn’t wonder why articles like the one in Fast Company are being written — or why the country’s in the shape it’s in.
Here’s hoping the pendulum swings … soon.
My cohorts and I recently engaged in a conversation about humor on the Friendship Bench. As we considered what makes things funny — why some people find things funny and others don’t, why some people can tell jokes to some people and not to others — my friend, Phil Williams, said in his inimitable fashion that it all comes down to relationships. I interpreted that to mean the respect shared between the teller and the listener. Both of those parties have responsibilities in the way, and to whom, jokes are told and received.
Jokes may or may not reflect opinions. They may not indicate deprecation, disparagement, belittling, or, worse, dismissal of a people, a race, or a class. Case in point:
An Irishman walks into a bar and orders three beers. He does the same thing for four consecutive days. On the fifth day, the bartender, curious about the Irishman’s practice, asks him about it.
“Ah,” the Mick says, “I left me two brothers in the old country. But I promised ‘em every time I stopped for a pint, I’d also have one in honor of each of ‘em.”
One day the Mick comes in and only orders two beers. He does the same thing the next day and the day after that. On that third day, the bartender says to him, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Whatever de ye mean, Mate?” the Mick asks.
The bartender responds, “Given what you told me about your two brothers, I assumed one of them must have passed away.”
Ah, no,” the Mick responds. “It’s Lent, don’t ye know, and I gave up the drink.”
If I weren’t Irish, would I or should I tell that joke? Should I tell it to anyone other than Irish people? Should I be offended at what it suggests about Irish people and their tendencies to bend their elbows? What does it say about me that I think it’s funny? In hearing that joke, do I have some specific responsibility as a result of my Irish heritage to perceive it and/or react to it in some way? What is my responsibility as teller of or listener to that joke? Do I have any responsibility other than to recognize, reflect on, and manage my own reaction?
Bigger Pictures
All of that compelled me to wonder how those responsibilities play out beyond jokes and humor.
If I see things, do I have a responsibility to express what I see? If I have particular beliefs, do I have a responsibility to express what I believe? If I know people who disagree with what I see, believe, and express, is it necessarily a sign of disrespect for those people that I express what I see and believe? Do the people I know who disagree with what I see, believe, and express have any responsibility in the way they respond or react to what I’ve expressed? If so, what might that responsibility be? In contemplation of all that, was Albert Einstein correct?
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot stand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thoughts in clear form. (Albert Einstein, in a letter to Dr. M. I. Cohen, March 19, 1940)
I don’t mean to suggest I consider myself to be, in any way, a great spirit. But regardless of the answers to any of the questions I asked above, I recognize two things:
- My right to express what I see and believe.
- The right of anyone else to dismiss me and whatever I see, believe, and express.
On balance, it seems to me that’s life.
That’s what makes horse racing. (Grandpa O’Brien)
Before you read any farther, sit down. I’m about to share a headline from The Washington Post that’s going to jar your preserves. I’d break it to you more gently if I could. But I can’t. By the same token, I don’t want to keep you hanging or to be overly dramatic. And I really won’t blame you if you think I’m making this whole thing up. But I’m not doing that, either. This stuff is really happening.
So, here goes. (Hold the drum roll, please.):
Fall is sweeping into the Lower 48 states. Here are 4 things to know.
Can you believe that? This what follows that bomb in part:
The number of daylight hours are [sic] now steadily shrinking by 1 to more than 3 minutes per day … Besides a general cooling of temperatures, one of the more noticeable impacts of shorter days is earlier and faster cooling in the evenings. That’s because of the increasingly earlier sunset time and because, in many parts of the country, the fall brings drier air that cools off more quickly when the sun goes down.
General cooling of temperatures. Shorter days. Earlier and faster cooling in the evenings. Good grief. We should have seen this coming. It’s what we get for having failed to dump more government (taxpayer funded) subsidies into variable energy resources (VERs), variable renewable energy (VRE), variable solar resources (VSRs), variable wind resources (VWRs), video cassette recorders (VCRs), VHF (very high frequency), Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), and myriad other causes and intermittent renewable energy sources (IRES) that would have left our power grids even more unreliable than they already are if we’d done it right.
We blew it, kids.
What Did We Expect?
Make no mistake: These historically unprecedented phenomena are precipitated directly by the atmospheric effects of anthropogenic climate change. If we weren’t here, none of this would be happening. But we are. And it is.
If you’re curious about how and why this is happening, here’s the atmospheric process that’s causing temperatures to cool. Please refer to the graphic below:
- Because warm air rises, the warmer air at the surface of the earth, warmed by anthropogenic climate change, begins to elevate into higher levels of the atmosphere.
- As it elevates, it displaces the cooler air at those higher levels.
- Because cold air falls, as the cooler air at the upper levels of the atmosphere is displaced by the rising warmer air caused by anthropogenic climate change, it falls to the surface of the earth.
- Once that cooler air reaches the surface of the earth, it’s warmed by anthropogenic climate change, causing it to rise again.
- The cycle continues ad infinitum until the planet spontaneously combusts — or freezes, or floods out, or something — depending on which side of the anthropogenic climate change narrative you happen to be on. In any case, this is all our fault.
What Can We Do?
A number of things can be done to accommodate the devastating seasonal effects of anthropogenic climate change. You needn’t do them in any particular order, but all of them will be helpful:
- Buy a rake. Changes in daylight hours and temperatures will cause deciduous trees to prepare for climate change. As cells at the base of their leaves weaken, they cause the leaves to detach and make a mess of your yard. Even if you don’t mind looking at the mess, at least give your neighbors a break.
- Buy a hat. Contrary to popular fallacies which hold that 40 percent of your body head is lost through your head, just seven to ten percent is lost that way. But that’s okay. There are other reasons to wear a hat. In addition to fall weather, climate change is known to cause tornados, hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, gullywhumpers, hailstorms, and occasional light breezes. And if you’re anything at all like me, it’s better to be safe than to run the risk of having a bad hair day.
- Stock up on firewood. The Climate Police won’t let you burn it because burning wood emits carbon dioxide (CO2), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxides (NOx), methane (CH4), and good cheer, especially around the Holidays. And we can’t have any of that shit. But cutting, splitting, and stacking it will make your wife think you’re busy.
- Renew your subscription to The Washington Post so you can keep up with the climate-change hysteria. You can’t afford to be caught without a rake, a hat, or firewood.
Have a lovely autumn.
Among the many magazines that come to our home for Anne, because she’s a designer and decorator, is one called, Architectural Products. A recent edition ran an article called, “The Smartest Building in Austin” (starting at page 28 in the print edition, page 30 in the digital edition). I don’t remember if Big Brother was identified as the architect of the building. But I do know he’s involved somehow.
I know that because the article said this, in part:
Sensors — approximately 6,000 of them — are attached to the spine. These connect to an automation system that allow[s] ownership and management to understand how people move within the structure and how the various spaces get utilized, such as conference rooms and parking. This data, along with the building’s integrated technology allows for optimization of the user’s experience and a highly personalized and responsive environment for comfort, health, and security … Smart Entry/Exit Stations with license plate recognition (LPR) cameras [are] … Designed to be completely touchless from the time a person pulls into the parking garage until arriving at the individual’s desk.
A few of the terms, phrases, and clauses in that paragraph had my Spidey Sense at DEFCON 1.
Shades of Orwell
Here are the terms that lit me up, along with my translational commentary:
- The spine. According to HPE Aruba Networking, “A spine-leaf architecture is data center network topology that consists of two switching layers — a spine and leaf. The leaf layer consists of access switches that aggregate traffic from servers and connect directly into the spine or network core. Spine switches interconnect all leaf switches in a full-mesh topology.” Guess who controls and has access to the full-mesh topology. Hint: It’s not the folks who work in the building.
- Allow[s] ownership and management to understand how people move within the structure. See #1.
- Optimization of the user’s experience. If you’re not sure who gets to define optimized, see #1 and #2.
- A highly personalized and responsive environment for comfort, health, and security. If you’re not sure whose comfort, health, and security are assured here, see #1, #2, and #3.
- Smart Entry/Exit Stations with license plate recognition (LPR) cameras. The cameras, of course feed into the spine. From there, see #1, #2, #3, and #4.
- From the time a person pulls into the parking garage until arriving at the individual’s desk. If you’re not sure to whom it’s important to monitor said person (who turns into an individual on the way to its desk), see #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5.
In addition to 1984, all that terminological obfuscation puts me in mind of this quote from Albert Camus:
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.
George Orwell’s 1984, of course, is about a totalitarian regime, INGSOC (English Socialism), which exercises total control over every aspect of its citizens’ lives through physical and mental manipulation, surveillance, and propaganda. (It uses violence, too. I don’t know if the folks in the smartest building in Austin are prepared to go that far. Let’s hope not.)
Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsIt makes you wonder what the limits of the smartest building in Austin’s control might be if the spine is run with AI. It’s shades of HAL in 2001. And if it gets that far, it’ll be easy enough to imagine a person getting through all the security checkpoints, turning into an individual arriving at its desk, hitting the power switch on a computer, and hearing this.
After all, if we’re controlling lives, controlling computers, and requiring bioscans, we’re flirting with totalitarianism, are we not? And let’s not forget, totalitarianism is dictatorial and utopian. More specifically, it’s able to become dictatorial precisely because it’s ostensibly utopian. It’s Fred Sanford’s statement, “Promise ‘em the elevator and give ‘em the shaft,” writ large. And while we’ve managed to get 24 years into the 21st century, let’s not forget the 20th century totalitarian state was the greatest intellectual justification for mass murder in history. Just sayin’.
From there, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine the smartest building in Austin and its architects creating a logo for their own regime, something that couches their desire to exercise total control over every aspect of the building’s occupants’ lives in some seemingly positive but nevertheless transparently euphemistic language. The logo and its tagline might be something like this:
Cut the Cards
Mr. Dooley (or Martin J. Dooley) was a fictional Irish immigrant bartender created by and appearing in many columns written by the American journalist and humorist, Finley Peter Dunne, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mr. Dooley was famous for the expression, “Trust everybody, but cut the cards.” That’s invaluably sound advice, more pertinent today than it was when it was written, that should be universally applied. To put it another way, question everything. Always. Without fail.
And be absolutely sure of this: The bigger the organization, the institution, the bureaucracy, or the government that promises what it will do for you will be necessarily good for you, question it all the more. Hidden agendas and unintended consequences are certain to follow any such promises. How do we know that? It’s in the history we ignore so blithely and consistently. It’s why we are where we are.
If you don’t believe that’s true, there’s a building in Austin you’re gonna love.
Author’s Note: May is Mental Health Awareness Month. I offer this post as a means of sharing my experience, even as I grant I’m more fortunate than many. If you or a loved one struggle with mental health, call the NAMI HelpLine at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), text “HelpLine” to 62640, or email helpline@nami.org. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or experiencing a mental health crisis, dial or text 988 to connect with a trained crisis counselor 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There’s more help available in the world than you might think — and more people in the world willing to help than you could ever imagine. You are not and don’t have to be alone.
I have a confession: I play Angry Birds 2.
I started playing to keep myself occupied while waiting for people to respond to instant messages (which, much like the Express Lanes in grocery-store checkouts, are anything but instant), waiting in line at the DMV, waiting for doctor or dentist appointments, waiting at railroad crossings, or keeping my wife company on the couch while she watches Fixer Upper, Property Brothers, Love It or Li$t It, Windy City Rehab, Home Town, Good Bones, Flip or Flop, House Hunters Renovation, This Old House, Grand Designs, and Dr. Pimple Popper.
But after playing for a while (say, roughly 350 levels or so) something revelatory and quite unexpected happened: In the face of what seemed like insurmountable frustration at having to replay every room in every level, sometimes innumerably, only to be unable to reach — or to be unable to conquer — the Boss Pig (or the King Pig, or the Chef Pig, or the Foreman Pig, or any other of his myriad manifestations), I learned patience.
Boss Pig
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
Perseverance
First, Angry Birds 2 taught me the patience to study. The game can be a series of mindlessly distracting tactical moves (which attracted my initial interest), or it can be a strategic, fully engaging, and relentless pursuit of a singular goal (which attracts my abiding interest): Blast the Boss Pig to Hell, move on to other levels and, in some instances, to other worlds entirely. Wow!
Second, Angry Birds 2 taught me to persist, to endure, to recognize the temporary nature of frustration, and to realize the conquering power of tenacity. By its addictive nature (or mine), the game compels players to keep coming back, regardless of the seemingly impossible adversity — to think, to examine, to analyze, and to find a way to move on.
To find a way to move on. Think about that. Moving on, determining to move on, finding a way to move on, settling for nothing less than moving on is the modus operandi for a rewarding life. It’s the remedy for procrastination. It’s the antidote for anxiety. It’s the defeat of paralyzing depression. It’s the answer to the age-old philosophical question: Why are we here?
To move on. Period.
Birds of a Feather
Finally, Angry Birds 2 is of a piece with two other things that have always helped me move on. The first is a quote from Mikal Gilmore, from his book, Shot in the Heart. I read the book in the late ’90s, during a bout of crippling depression characterized by stark, unrelenting terror.
The book recounts the Gilmore family’s dark history, leading to the execution of Mikal’s older brother, Gary, in 1977, by a Utah firing squad. (Gary’s last words: “Let’s do it.” Gary’s execution is also the subject or Norman Mailer’s book, The Executioner’s Song.) The book’s unremitting bleakness had me wondering at every turn of the page why I continued to read it while experiencing my own period of darkness. It felt masochistic.
But there, on page 374, I found my answer.
Gilmore wrote:
Depression is a hard experience to communicate, and perhaps a hard one to understand, but once you’ve had it you don’t forget it. It makes you look on the rest of the world with a bit more compassion, and it also causes you to watch the corners of your life more closely, so you can spot the darkness rapidly if it begins to creep back in.
Reading that gave me no instant relief. But I was in the care of a psychiatrist, whom I still see every six months, and I was surrounded by friends who’d also experienced depression. They told me I wasn’t myself — but I would be again. They were right. And Gilmore’s words assured me they were right.
Even more, Gilmore’s words eventually led me to see the depression I’d experienced as a gift. It taught me the temporary nature of misery. It taught me much about what I can and cannot control. It helped me to understand my capacity to overcome affliction and misfortune. It did make me more compassionate. It did teach me to watch the corners of my life ever more acutely. And it helped me to realize all I was capable of achieving if I mustered the resolve and the energy to just … keep … moving … on.
Failure Is Not an Option
The other thing that never loses its ability to help me move on is this quote from the brilliant inventor, accomplished businessman, technological pioneer, and ardent player of Angry Birds 2, Thomas Edison:
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Give up? Not a chance. Giving up is a Boss Pig in a poke.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back in the game.
When I was growing up, our next-door neighbors had some … uh … peculiar notions about housecleaning. As sons of a Marine, my younger brother, Keith, and I would walk into their living room and be astounded at the volume of clutter, the nature of the clutter, and the general lack of order or cleanliness.
One day, Keith, who’s always been the smarter and sharper-witted of the two of us, said, “Holy shit. If aliens ever came down and landed in their living room, the aliens would open the door of their spaceship, look around, and say, “What the hell?!”
To this day, the idea that extraterrestrials would necessarily have that point of earthly reference makes me laugh out loud.
Different Strokes
I understand one man’s pig pen can be another man’s paradise. I get that tastes, styles, tolerances, preference, and priorities differ. It could also be a sign of having too much stuff, making it difficult to organize and maintain a clean environment. Or as George Carlin put it:
Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff? God! And you say, “Get that shit offa there and let me put my stuff down! (Thank you, Mac Bogert.)
On a more serious note, failure to keep one’s home clean can have negative effects on physical and mental health, lead to feelings of stress, anxiety, lack of control, and even depression. But it’s hard to tell, and we shouldn’t be quick to judge, regardless of what extraterrestrials might have to say about it.
That Was Then
In case you haven’t noticed, things have gotten significantly worse since then. And I don’t mean at that next-door neighbors’ house. I mean with the world. The world’s house is in disorder. We’re letting ourselves be divided, be pandered to. We’re devolving into lesser versions of ourselves. We’re judging, fearing, hating, and killing each other. And by and large, we’re acting as if that’s okay.
It’s reminiscent of the philosophical/psychological question of whether fish know they’re in water. It’s likely fish have no conscious awareness of being in water. They’ve adapted to their aquatic environment, thrive in it, and lack the cognitive ability to conceive of their being in water, to imagine any other environment, or to perceive water as a medium with which they interact. They probably experience water as an integral part of their environment, inseparable from it, perhaps in the same way we experience air as invisible, largely intangible, and as much a part of us as we are of it.
Maybe we’ve lived in an environment of corruption for so long — divided, pandered to, devolving into lesser versions of ourselves, judging, fearing, hating, and killing each other — that corruption is like water to the fish. It’s undiscernible to us, and we’re inseparable from it. If that’s the case, it’s as sad as it is wasteful and dangerous.
Plan B
Maybe we can start to recognize and free ourselves from the divided, pandered, devolving versions of ourselves in which we judge, fear, hate, and kill each other by taking personal responsibility for keeping our houses clean. In so doing, maybe we can free ourselves from the negative effects on our physical and mental health like feelings of stress, anxiety, lack of control, and even depression. The fact is I don’t know. But I do know, unless we try, none of us will ever know. We all have to share this third stone from the sun. We don’t have to expose extraterrestrials to the distress we’re inflicting on ourselves.
And we don’t have to compel them to ask, “What the hell?!”
If you’re anything like me, you don’t believe in indecision.
In an earlier post, I wrote about self-faith and our inner genius. Consistent with what I wrote, I typically assess the situation requiring a decision, trust my senses, apply my intelligence (such as it is), and decide. If my decision turns out to have been wrong — and presuming it wasn’t fatally so — I assess the implications of my first decision and make a different one. Since my stethoscope tells me I’m still among the living, I have to conclude that approach has worked pretty well, so far.
Nevertheless, I do understand the complex, contradictory aspects of human psychology. What I don’t understand is why we pay so little attention to them, why we examine and question them so infrequently, if at all. I don’t know if there’s any necessarily ordinal sequence or priority to any of those complex, contradictory aspects. But here are a few:
We have to allow for genetic predispositions, which affect our brain chemistry and our physiological responses to situational stimuli and, so, influence our psychological responses. Hello, serotonin and dopamine. Those chemicals and/or lacks thereof can affect mood and emotional responses. We also have to allow for the extents to which our experiences and the outcomes of those experiences influence our responses to circumstances in the present. If we associate mistakes with lowered booms , we’re likely to live our lives in defensive postures on precarious psychological edges.
Factor in conditioned thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, interpretations, biases, and ideological predispositions, and we start to start to perceive the thickness of the psychological stews in which we live. Add social and cultural norms, traditions, routines, expectations, and pressures — along with whatever independent, empirical perceptions we might have of any of those things — and, voilà! Instant cognitive dissonance.
Another aspect of human psychology, emotional regulation, is related to everything that precedes it here. Our ability to regulate and manage our emotions influences (and, if left unexamined may predetermine) our psychological responses. Throw in varying degrees of goodies like extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness, self-awareness, courage, vulnerability, agreeability, skin thickness, et al., and we have the entire scale from peaceability to volatility.
I don’t give much credence to environmental factors like weather, lighting, spatial configurations, and noise levels; although, I readily admit to hating loud noises. And I suspect if I were locked in a dungeon for any period of time, I might tend to be a tad disagreeable. At the same time — since I’m the poster boy for the fact that wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age — I tend to discount aspects of our psychology like age and developmental stages. But I do recognize (hope) children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly likely have different cognitive abilities, coping mechanisms, and emotional regulation techniques.
Certain Uncertainties
In 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy. (Jean-Baptiste and Ben used to fly kites together.) The letter read, in part, “Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Close but no cigar. Had Ben given that a few more moments’ thought, he surely would have realized the only thing more certain than death and taxes is uncertainty. Given the fact that Jean-Baptiste was struck by lightning while flying kites with Ben, I’ll bet he knew that.
I’ll leave you with two perspectives. The first is from the noted physicist, Richard Feynman, who said:
I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.
The second is from Woody Allen. He wrote:
I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.
If you can’t decide which one of them is correct, make peace with the uncertainty.
It’s the best we can do with our friend, psychology.
Author’s Note: This post isn’t intended to be how-to. Rather, it’s intended to be a why-not. The stunts we can pull — and the trouble we can get into — are limited only by our imaginations. And if you’d known Grandpa O’Brien, none of what you’re about to read would surprise you.
To the south of us, between our home and the next one down the street, there are two empty building lots. Across the field behind our home, running east, and on the hill that rises up from the field, there’s a street that runs parallel to ours. Two new houses have been built on that street. The sewer lines from those houses are going to run west, through the building lots to our south, and connect to the main sewer line on our street.
When the excavators came to start digging the trench for the west-running sewer line, they encountered the shale that comprises so much of the ground where we live. (We encountered that when the foundation was dug for our sunroom 18 months ago and when we make any attempts to plant anything in the yard.) As a result, I imagine there was a conversation that might have gone something like this one between all the contractors involved. (Fast forward to 10:25 for the conversation.) And, so, the decision was made to blast.
For days afterward, there was a bulldozer out on the empty lot, dozing away the earth to expose the shale. The bulldozer was followed by an enormous rig that drilled holes in the shale, west to east, in which the explosive charges were to be placed. During the morning of the day the charges were to be detonated, someone called Anne to say they’d be blasting that afternoon, and she’d get another call 15 minutes before they were to be detonated. When she let me know she’d received that call, I went outside and walked up to a member of the explosives crew.
“Hi,” I said. “Can I help?”
“Help?”
“You know. Help. Lend a hand, be of assistance, hold up my end, pitch in.”
“What the hell are you doing here?!” he asked incredulously. “We’re about to set off a series of explosive charges!”
“Yeah. I know,” I said. “I already have my earplugs in. But don’t you need somebody to yell, ‘Fire in the hole!?’ I want to do that.”
What?!” he asked again.
“Dude,” I said. “Don’t you watch TV? There’s always a guy on TV who yells, ‘Fire in the hole!’ when somebody’s about to blast. I just want to be that guy.”
I have to give that guy from the explosives crew credit. There was no swearing at me. No threats were made. No guns were brandished. Then again, I’m an astute enough reader of death stares that I opted to scram of my own volition.
Put the Shove in Shovel
After the blasting concluded, the excavation resumed. A backhoe showed up on the lot. As the backhoe dug and dumped mounds of earth aside the trench, the bulldozer that had remained onsite pushed it out of the way to make room for more earth as it was dug.
I went into our garage, took my trusty Contractors Choice shovel from its hook on the wall, slung it jauntily over my shoulder, and marched across the lot like the good soldier I am to where the backhoe and bulldozer operators were working. When they saw me walking toward them, they turned off their machines.
“Do you guys need any help?” I asked with deadly earnestness.
“Who the hell are you?” one of them asked me.
“I’m the guy next door,” I said. “My wife and I bought that house …”
“Are you nuts?” the other one asked me.
“Well, I haven’t been certified … yet,” I said. “Neither has it been officially ruled out.”
They shook their heads and turned their machines back on.
Before I went to talk to them, I’d worked out the fact that I could move about a half a cubic foot to one-and-a-half cubic feet of dirt per shovelful versus the 27 to 54 cubic feet per shovelful the backhoe could move. And I was fully prepared to tell them I didn’t presume to compete with heavy earth-moving equipment. I just wanted to do my part. But they didn’t seem as if they’d be receptive to the idea or that information just then. Besides, they wouldn’t have heard me over the noise from their machines. So, I took my shovel and went home with a hangdog expression on my face, doing my level best to look somewhere between crestfallen and despondent. Anne, to her credit, didn’t even hint at divorce.
The Morals of the Story
Unlike most stories, which typically have one moral, this one has two: First, to master the fine art of idiocy, it’s generally best to administer some sort of test to determine if people have senses of humor before you pull any weird shit on them. Second, not all shovels — or the people who operate them — are created equal. But I think that one may be self-evident.
And for safety’s sake, regardless of what Moe said to Curly, remember dynamite does not always blow down.
Fire in the hole!
Author’s Note: I was once asked by a devotee of Simon Sinek if could state my why in five words. Because I’m a writer, I cheated; that is, I hyphenated. My response was, “I write to restore self-faith.” When I said that, I didn’t mean my self-faith. I meant I write to restore the self-faith of all those who’ve abandoned theirs, surrendered theirs, or had theirs stolen.
I seem to be developing a morbid case of FOMO (fear of missing out). It stems from my increasingly empirical sense that I may be one of the very few people on the planet who’s not on a spiritual journey.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I understand a spiritual journey is a deeply personal and often transformative experience. I understand it means to explore, to understand, and to connect with our inner selves, our higher powers, and to attain a sense of transcendence. I understand it involves questioning the meaning and purpose of life (or at least our own lives), examining the nature of existence, and trying to comprehend our relationships with the universe or with the divine.
But I have questions: To what, to whom, or by whom do we need to be transformed? Why do we believe it requires exploration, understanding, and connection with inner selves and higher powers to be transcendent? What are we trying to transcend? Why do we imagine we’re not already transcendent? What if we connect with our inner selves and discover we are the higher power?
I’m in no position whatsoever to knock or to take lightly the practices of religion, philosophy, meditation, prayer, contemplation, self-reflection, pilgrimages, rituals, or ceremonies. But I can’t help wondering why we abandon self-faith, only to seek peace, harmony, fulfillment, and happiness outside ourselves.
And I have no intentions of being — or being perceived as being — blasphemous. But in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I worked in an appliance-distribution warehouse. It was the last job I had before I went to college. One day, one of my coworkers, Andy, told me Jesus paid his bills. I astutely deduced from the way Andy pronounced the name he wasn’t talking about my Puerto Rican buddy who ran the bodega down the street. I asked Andy if Jesus paid his bills by cash or check. He didn’t answer me. I suspect he’s no closer to finding himself now than he was then, and I can only hope he still knows the whereabouts of his wallet and his checkbook.
What Price Adherence?
I also wonder why we might be tempted to abandon curiosity. Unless we accept the notion that a spiritual journey is a lifelong undertaking, what is it we’re journeying toward? If we get there — if we find what we were looking for when we get there — what’s the source of our certainty that our destination and what we found there is it? And if we adopt that it as the culmination and fulfillment of our journey and live our lives in adherence to it to the point at which we’d defend it, don’t we run the risk of being dogmatic?
The fine line between faith and dogma is illustrated by their definitions:
faith: noun 1. confidence or trust in a person or thing
2. belief that is not based on proof
3. a system of religious belief
dogma: noun 1. an official system of principles or tenets concerning faith, morals, behavior, etc.
2. a specific tenet or doctrine authoritatively laid down
3. prescribed doctrine proclaimed as unquestionably true by a particular group
It seems to fair to say not all faith is dogmatic. But all dogma is based on faith in something.
Genius, Indeed
Maybe, instead of saying we’re on spiritual journeys, we should say we’re on journeys to find our genius. The Oxford English Dictionary contains this definition of the word:
genius: noun attendant spirit present from one’s birth
If we say we’re on journeys to find our genius, we’ll be acknowledging that attendant spirit within us. We’ll be recognizing we’re on journeys to find it, to appreciate the uniqueness of it, to nurture it to its fullest potential. Then we’ll be better able to read these words from Ralph Waldo Emerson literally and take them directly to heart:
To believe your own thought, to think that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense … Great works of art have no more affecting lessons for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility, then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. (“Self-Reliance”)
And while the genius of each of us is, indeed, unique, the journeys we’re on are remarkably the same. In the words of Joseph Campbell from The Hero with a Thousand Faces:
Looking back at what had promised to be our own unique, unpredictable, and dangerous adventure, all we find in the end is such a series of standard metamorphoses as men and woman have undergone in every quarter of the world, in all recorded centuries, and under every odd disguise of civilization.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.So, here’s to our genius journeys. The measure of our success will be the extent to which we find and express ourselves.
The Marshall Tucker Band released its self-titled debut album on Phil Walden’s Capricorn Records in 1973. As soon as my buddies and I heard “Take the Highway” and “Can’t You See”, we were instant fans. In 1977, the band released its sixth album, Carolina Dreams, which was certified platinum in the same year and was their most commercially successful album. It contained the track, “Heard it in a Love Song”, that reached No. 14 on the Billboard charts.
“Heard it in a Love Song” provoked philosophical debate that endures to this day. The controversy is about the last two lines of the concluding verse. Here they are:
Always something greener on the other side of that hill.
I was born a wrangler and a rambler and I guess I always will.
Those lines have produced four distinct interpretational camps:
- Camp One holds that the word, will, at the end of the last line isn’t a verb. Rather, it’s a noun. The song’s writer, the late Toy Caldwell, intended it to invoke the free will of the narrator (singer, Doug Gray), to bail out on his lover and to blame his infidelity on his being a wrangler and a rambler. This view is typically held by Aristotelians. Nietzscheans, on the other hand, tend to see it as a reflection of the fact that being a wrangler and a rambler causes the narrator to experience feelings of guilt; although, he beats feet, nevertheless.
- Camp Two wonders if the last line was Toy Caldwell’s version of the age-old philosophical question: Why are we? That, of course, sends the existentialists into a complete tailspin because without more specificity — why are we what? — they can’t determine meaning or purpose. And without that same specificity, the teleologists have no phenomena — no purpose or design — to direct them toward some ostensible end.
- Camp Three wonders, “Always will what?” Toy Caldwell wasn’t known to be a mystery writer or a practical joker. So, the answer to that question remains perpetually elusive. But it doesn’t bother philosophers that much. The only ones who really worry about it are the grammar snobs and the syntax freaks. They want the same kind of specificity the existentialist and the teleologists want. But the grammar snobs and syntax freaks don’t want it because they’re curious. They want it because they’re perfectionists.
- Camp Four believes Toy Caldwell just didn’t give a damn. Ironically, while not everyone buys that, it’s the one explanation that could satisfy the Aristotelians, the Nietzscheans, the existentialists, the teleologists, the grammar snobs, and the syntax freaks. Go figure.
Nevertheless, it’s a beautiful song and yet another indication of the talent — to say nothing of the enigmatic intellectual acuity — Toy took with him at the tender age of 45.
Plan B
As a public service — particularly for cover-band artists who also happen to be freakish about philosophy, grammar, and syntax — I offer a few modest alternatives to the last two lines of the song. No credit or recompense need be given to me; although, I have set up an account for voluntary donations. In any event, here are the alternatives:
- Always something greener on the other side of that hill.
I was born a wrangler and a rambler and I guess I’ll hang at will. - Always something greener on the other side of that hill.
I was born a wrangler and a rambler, so I guess I’ll hang with Will. - Always something greener on the other side of that hill.
I was born a wrangler and a rambler, so I don’t have time to kill. - Always something greener on the other side of that hill.
I was born a wrangler and a rambler, so I guess I’ll take a pill. - Always something greener on the other side of that hill.
I was born a wrangler and a rambler ‘cause I fought at Bunker Hill. - Always something greener on the other side of that hill.
I was born a wrangler and a rambler and, Babe, this ain’t no drill. - Always something greener on the other side of that hill.
I was born a wrangler and a rambler and I’ve been on Doctor Phil.
No Pressure
As I suggested, there’s no obligation to give me credit or to pay royalties for using any of these lyrical gems. But if the spirit moves you to make a donation to the voluntary fund, please have your credit card ready and call 1-800-BAD-POET. Operators are standing by.
And if anyone ever asks where you got any of those clever lines, just say you heard it in a love song.
Cain’t be wrong.
On Monday, April 8th, we’ll conduct Byline 360˚ as you’ve come to know and love it. Then we’re going to make a change. Starting Monday, May 13th, 2024, we’ll begin meeting twice a month, at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time, for three months. But this time, Byline 360˚ will be an actual workshop, with actual work to be done between sessions.
In short, we’ll talk, draft, share and discuss our drafts, then revise and refine them. Over our six sessions, we’ll figure out why we do the things we do when we write, which of those things we might do better, and which of those things define tone, style, and voice. We’ll take stock of what we’ve done and determine next steps as we go. (Inflexibility doesn’t play nice with creativity.)
The New Ground Rules
The new rules are simple but definitive:
- You must register by Monday, May 6th.
- Participation will be limited to the first 10 people who register. (The workshop may be repeated if there’s sufficient interest.)
- Since we want you to be invested in the workshop, attendance is mandatory for the first two sessions.
You’ll find a full description of the workshop, the complete ground rules, and a full schedule here.
If you have any questions, please email me at mark@obriencg.com. And please remember Rule #1: If we’re not having fun, we’re doing it wrong.
Thank you for your interest in Byline 360˚.
REGISTER FREE HERE
On April 23rd, I’ll be leading a discussion in Salon 360˚. The title of the session will be the same as the title of this post. Inspired by some of my recent experiences with a longtime friend, the discussion has ties to the Herman Melville short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener”; to Unsheltered: Voices from the Street, a book being compiled and published by 360˚ Nation and Peggy Willms — and to A Bronx Tale.
In short, the session will be about reconciling:
- The desire to bring about what we believe to be favorable outcomes
- The illusory and presumptuous nature of control
- The relinquishing of our senses of correctness and our expectations.
I have two requests:
- Please attend the Salon 360˚ session and be part of the conversation. It’s Tuesday, April 23rd, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, via Zoom. The link is here.
- Please read or listen to “Bartleby the Scrivener”. You’ll be a better-informed contributor to the conversation if you do.
It’s my sincere hope that we can be helpful to each other by sharing experiences, thoughts, and support.
Editor’s Note:* RESERVE YOUR COMPLIMENTARY SEAT HERE***
I was recently in a conversation with a client. We’ll call her Petunia (not her real name; although, I wish it were). Petunia happens to work in a very large (as in global), very dysfunctional (as in no responsibility or accountability) company that has her beyond frustrated. Part of her frustration is that she’s very responsible and very willing to be accountable. But her responsibility and accountability aren’t acknowledged, rewarded, or reciprocated. During the conversation, I asked a question it had never occurred to me to ask before:
Do companies like that breed irresponsibility and unaccountability, or do they attract it? To put that question another way, are they incubators or magnets?
I don’t know the answer. But I do know about bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are where initiative, creativity, ambition, and fulfillment (other than power-hunger) go to die.
I can’t decide what’s worse about bureaucracies — that they compel us to toil in rote, anonymous invisibility (unless we’re power-hungry) or that effecting change in them is the rough equivalent of turning an aircraft carrier by sticking your hand in the water: You might be able to do it, but it’ll take a hell of a long time. And what is it about bureaucracies that saps our souls such that we become their willing (if unwitting) agents? How is it that they can make us demean ourselves in the act of demeaning others?
One of the things that damaged my chances of bureaucratic success in my corporate days was my refusal to go to strip clubs with my co-workers. My response to such suggestions was standard: “I spend all day watching people degrade themselves for salary plus bonus. Why would I pay to watch people degrade themselves for hourly wages plus tips?”
The Nature of the Beast
Because the only things bureaucracies want to do is grow and sustain themselves, they manifest uniform characteristics. They love complexity and red tape because that makes them unfathomable and unfixable. With ever more layers of hierarchy; ever-growing volumes of rules, regulations, policies, and procedures; and ever-proliferating degrees of inefficiency, delays, dysfunction, and unresponsiveness, they ensure their survival because no one has the vaguest inkling how to dismantle them.
With all those rules, regulations, policies, and procedures is it any surprise bureaucracies tend to be rigid and to resist change? Intentionally adaptable? Not so much. Nimbly adept at responding to emerging challenges? Nope. Conducive or receptive to creative thinking or deliberate innovation? Fuhgeddaboudit. And if bureaucracies were ever intended to be flexible, fluidly functional, openly communicative, smoothly coordinated, and committedly collaborative organizations, why do they build more silos than grain farms do?
As for accountability, try diffusing responsibilities across and through multiple layers of hierarchy. Then try determining where the buck stops. It’s like squeezing a water balloon: Whatever you squeeze here is just going to pop out there, ad infinitum. And if you think politics has anything to do with that, trust your judgment. As long as the chief concern of people in the organization is for the people on the next rungs above them on the ladder, sycophancy and ass-covering become the rule of the day.
Full Circle
So, here we are. Back to square one: Do bureaucracies breed torpor, complacence, silence, invisibility, anonymity, or compliance? Or do they attract those things? Does it matter? The effect is the same.
If you doubt that — and while it’s not a company, per se — there’s a city on the Potomac River between Alexandria, Virginia, and Annapolis, Maryland, you ought to take a look at. Nothing of coherent substance has been accomplished there for quite a while now. The only thing it does is grow more unwieldy (and expensive), more oppressive, and less penetrable every year, continuing to crank out blatant pandering tactics or attempts at blatant pandering tactics. (Anyone for unintended consequences?)
In contemplating the question — do bureaucracies breed torpor, complacence, silence, invisibility, anonymity, or compliance, or do they attract those things? — let’s remember this: Whether we’re talking about business or government, bureaucracies of any kind, we don’t have to be torpid or complacent. We don’t have to be silent, invisible, anonymous, or compliant. Those are choices. If those choices don’t suit us, we can make different ones.
And speaking of chickens, eggs, and making different choices, thank God it’s 2024.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. (George Eliot)
We live in a horse race. Two nags, Gluefoot and Gimpy, are neck-and-neck coming down the stretch, and we have no idea which horse will cross the finish line first. Gluefoot represents the uncertainty of whether we’ll persist in our belief that we can control (because we’ll be blamed for) everything. Gimpy represents the uncertainty of whether we’ll come to realize we’re insignificant and ineffectual beyond the ability of our imaginations and our egos to comprehend such a thing.
Exhibit A is climate change.
I came across an article in The New Yorker entitled, “What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet”. While we’re sitting down here thinking we have anything at all to do with the planet’s climate and, even more absurd, that we can fix it, there’s a bomb ticking some 93 million miles from Earth, give or take a few yards. We’re not terribly concerned with the incomprehensible power of that bomb, largely because we’re preoccupied with misguided notions of our own power. But consider just this one example of the limits of our power (to say nothing of our knowledge), from the article:
During the Vietnam War, the United States started sowing the waters outside North Vietnamese seaports with mines that had magnetic sensors, to trigger explosions when steel-hulled vessels passed overhead. Three months after that program began, many of those mines—four thousand of them, according to one contemporaneous source—detonated almost simultaneously. An investigation determined that the plan had been compromised not by Hanoi but by a newly discovered solar phenomenon called a coronal mass ejection.
The potential for phenomena like that, of course, is why God invented the Law of Unintended Consequences. He thought it would make us think about things more, think longer before we made any assumptions or engaged in any boneheaded shit. He thought it might remind us to look before we leap and to be more mindful of the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know. But we didn’t do any of that. We still don’t.
Diametric Opposites
We’ve forsaken the middle ground and made camp on opposing fringes. Maybe that indicates the extent to which we’ve been successfully politically polarized. I don’t know. But I do know we’ve abandoned that middle ground, along with common sense, empiricism, and — especially as it pertains to politics — our sense of irony.
I came across Exhibit B in the same New Yorker article:
In our private lives, we tend to focus on the high consequences: your nine-year-old will almost certainly not be kidnapped while playing alone at the local playground, but you don’t let him do so, because the potential cost is too devastating. By contrast, corporations and nations tend to focus on the low odds and therefore wave away the possible consequences. “I’m working with people and they’ll say, ‘Why do I need to spend a cent on this issue? I’ve been here for forty years and I’ve never seen a problem.’”
Think about that. As Grandpa O’Brien loved to say, “We’re chasing the mice while the elephants are running down the street.” We’re refusing to let our kids be kids and grow up, even as we’re ignoring all manner of legitimate risks and threats. And all the while, in between the two extremes posed by Exhibit B, we continue to persist in our thinking that we can control Earth’s climate. Wow! You really can’t make that up.
The older I get, the more I believe people who don’t believe God has a sense of humor were never born. If they were born, they’re just not paying attention.
Man, it’s astounding to be human.
I was going to excerpt portions of President Biden’s 2024 State of the Union remarks and annotate them with snide comments. But four things happened:
- I realized snark is indistinguishable from truth at this point, and snark doesn’t sit well in some circles. Neither does truth. And here we are.
- I wouldn’t have enough time to peel the onion sufficiently enough to respond to all the delusional falsities in Uncle Joe’s remarks and still have time for everything else in my life.
- I found this post in The Federalist that highlights 30 of the lowlights. So, I decided to let it go at that.
- I found this transcript of the special counsel’s interview with Uncle Joe. If you still think he should be in charge of anything, we’re in much deeper trouble than I can imagine.
P.S. From a post by Ted Hulick: “This man has never had a private sector job in his life — and he’s like a wrecking ball to our economy — he doesn’t seem to understand that billionaires don’t pay a high percentage of tax because they invest in assets that appreciate and they don’t have a lot of liquidity (cash, etc.).”
P.P.S. If you wonder what hypocrisy looks like, wonder no more.
I happened to see a notice that, Melanie, one of the singer/songwriters who achieved some popularity during my wayward youth, passed away earlier this year at the age of 76. It started me thinking about the plethora of famous people who’ve managed to become known by a single name only, often just their first names. This is just a partial list: Cher, Madonna, Sting, Rihanna, Charo, Sade, Usher, Prince, Adele, Beyoncé, Sinbad, Bono, Flea, Liberace, Zendaya, Lizzo, Pink, Twiggy, Slash, Yanni, Snoop, Drake, Kesha, Fabio, Shakira, Björk, Aaliyah, Eminem, Ashanti, Banksy, Seal, Oprah, Morrissey, Donovan, Coolio, Mo’Nique, Naz, Ciara, and Fred MacMurray.
Then I started to wonder about personas — or personae, if you want to get formal or technical about it. What do all those people we know by one name only do when they’re not being just that one name; that is, when they’re not being whatever it is they’re being in the personae they’ve created? What do their loved ones call them? Does Snoop’s wife call him Snoop? Snoop Dogg? Calvin? At times, it seems, at least as it pertains to Sting, things can get downright confusing. According to Wikipedia:
In the 1985 documentary Bring On the Night a journalist called him Gordon, to which he replied, “My children call me Sting, my mother calls me Sting, who is this Gordon character?” In 2011, he told Time that “I was never called Gordon. You could shout ‘Gordon’ in the street and I would just move out of your way”. Despite this, he chose not to legally change his name to “Sting”.
Beyond the confusion, I can’t help but wonder if those personae ever become traps? (I think they do.)
Those Were the Days …
When I was younger, I created a persona. I called him Ignatz. He didn’t have a last name. The purpose of Ignatz was to be invisible. He went out of his way to avoid attracting attention to himself. He didn’t exactly lurk in the shadows. Neither did he seek the limelight. His favorite place to be was out of the way. He was conspicuously nondescript, anonymous. And he was lost.
When he was in his early 20s, Ignatz wrote the poem that follows. He wrote it while looking out a second-floor window of his boyhood home, gazing south down Hamilton Avenue in Meriden, Connecticut, taking in most of what he’d known of the world since his family moved into that house when he was five years old. The poem came to him in its entirety, and he jotted it down when he tired of looking out the window. He didn’t do anything with it because he was … well … Ignatz. The poem is a pretty accurate evocation of the spiritual emptiness in which Ignatz spent his days. If Ignatz had been a happy person persona, the poem would be sad. But he wasn’t. So, it’s not. Rather, it’s a keen if subconscious self-reflection. And it reveals a surprising self-awareness for a guy persona with so little self-possession:
The Age of Aquarius
There’s a neighborhood I lived in
For the best part of my youth.
Friends and neighbors came and went and left their souls.
Over all the years I lived there,
I was sending down my roots,
One for each year lost to counting goals.
And those roots were buried mountains,
Deep and steadfast under me,
A base on which to build my life’s success.
If whatever I was building
Ever faltered in the least,
The foundation underneath would bear the stress.
But those goals were finest powder
Scattered freely in the wind.
In a gust of thought they’re gone and soon forgot.
Impassioned whispered promises
From ladies of the night:
For a while they seem real and then they’re not.
So I move without direction,
Ever dreaming, ever free
From the bondage of commitment to a cause.
And I wonder if this freedom
Isn’t bondage in itself,
If a dreamer isn’t one of nature’s flaws.
Direction. Commitment. Sometimes, when you’re trying to find your way and you discover self-faith, your way finds itself.
Everything Good is Ahead
I don’t need Ignatz anymore. I no longer wonder if dreamers are flawed. (They’re not.) I don’t aspire to be known by just one name; although, I might not have minded being Fred MacMurray. According to Wikipedia, he did pretty well with his name and his dreams:
MacMurray had a provision in his My Three Sons contract that all of his scenes on that series were to be shot in two separate month-long production blocks and filmed first. That condensed performance schedule provided him more free time to pursue his work in films, maintain his ranch in Northern California, and enjoy his favorite leisure activity, golf.
Well, maybe in the next life. But in this one, there’s no looking back … except to learn.
Yes. We are the sum of our experiences. But we don’t have to bring our traumas with us. Yes. We bear our scars. We can acknowledge them as milestones, but their weight is borne by the lessons they taught us. Yes. We remember the pain we’ve endured. But it teaches us to be patient, to be gentle, to be compassionate, to listen, and — most important — to realize nothing, not even pain, lasts forever.
Don’t look back. Don’t ever look back.
I have a theory that, for some people, the calendar just stops. It stops at different times for different people. But it definitely stops. All of their cultural influences — sartorial, tonsorial, musical, et al. — freeze. I don’t know if those freezes could be considered time warps. It’s more likely they reflect periods of time in which the frozen people were most comfortable.
I developed the theory in sixth grade. It was 1966. I was 12 years old. I had a classmate named Dennis Kennedy. I don’t know how old Dennis was. But he shaved, smoked, and drove his own car to school. His calendar had stopped sometime in the ‘50s. He looked like what used to be called a greaser. He sported a black leather jacket, white t-shirts, blue jeans, pointy black boots, and a slicked-back, duck’s ass hairstyle. He was nice guy, probably because he could afford to be. Nobody in school ever gave the slightest thought to messing with him. He was The Fonz long before The Fonz even thought about being The Fonz. And unlike The Fonz, he was bigger with a legitimate air of menace about him. (I never watched Happy Days and never found Henry Winkler particularly convincing as The Fonz.)
Name That TuneIn a sense, I suppose you could say I have a somewhat frozen musical calendar. Here’s what I mean: If you’re anything like me, you get out of bed on any given day with the themes of one of three television programs stuck in your head — The Wild Wild West, Mannix, or Hogan’s Heroes. That would freeze my calendar between 1965 when The Wild Wild West and Hogan’s Heroes debuted, and 1975, when CBS cancelled Mannix. You can probably already start to sense the kinds of days each of those sets up:
- For some reason, the theme most frequently stuck in my head on any given day is Mannix. Composed by Lalo Schifrin, the man who also wrote the theme music for Mission: Impossible, there’s a kind of devil-may-care, free-wheeling jazziness about it. It gives me the sense almost anything is possible, as long as I’m willing to play fast and loose with just about everything. And I know for sure I’m going to get the girl, or at least one kissing scene before I revert to my role as the heroic loner.
CBS Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons After Mannix, the theme that sticks in my head most frequently is The Wild Wild West. On days when this theme is stuck in my head, I feel like some kind of Western swashbuckler, riding the range on horseback like the Marlboro Man, feeling like the rugged, individualistic nonconformist I am because I’m supposed to be on the train with James West and Artemis Gordon. Like my Mannix* days, I know I’m going to get the girl, or at least one kissing scene before I ride off on the train with Artemis. I also know Artemis is going to be pissed at me again because I got the girl again, and he didn’t … again.
CBS Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons I dread the days I wake up with the theme from Hogan’s Heroes* stuck in my head. Those days typically turn out to be routine, predictable, almost militaristically repetitious. I know I’m going to end up coming and going from wherever I am — especially if I don’t want to be there — as nonchalantly as I want to. There won’t be any meaningfully challenging or threatening risks or dangers during the day. I may or may not get the girl, or at least one kissing scene. If I do, it’ll be with a girl I have to send off in the escape tunnel, with a feeble promise to find her again after war. Or it could be with Colonel Klink’s secretary, Fräulein Hilda. But in the end, Klink will come back into his office, and I’ll be stuck with Schultz.
CBS Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsGuilty?Does that make me guilty of being stuck in time like Dennis Kennedy? I don’t know. But from my perspective — and in my own defense — other than waking up most days with theme songs from the mid-‘60s to the mid-‘70s stuck in my head, I’m a pretty progressive guy. I have an iPhone. I have an electric toothbrush (Sonicare). And like every other word I say is like like.
If you get like any more hip than that, you’re like totally on a different scale, no musical pun intended.
On The Scale of Self-Deceit and Frivolity Unto Extinction, there are points well beyond first-world problems. They indicate the extent to which life in the United States is luxurious enough that we can afford to make shit up to worry about. They also confirm the point made by Bill Maher that Americans are a silly people. Consider this item, which was brought to my attention most recently:
On February 9, 2024, The Virginian-Pilot newspaper ran an article with the headline, ”PETA wants carousel maker to stop creating rides with animal figures”. Not animals. Animal figures. At the very least, that indicates the folks at PETA (the Professionally Emptyheaded Troublemaking Association) are in desperate need of hobbies or would benefit from something considerably more substantial to worry about. But no. These folks are as serious as a wide-open southern border. Get a load of this:
PETA, the animal rights organization based in Norfolk, appealed to a Kansas-based manufacturer of carousels and other amusement park rides to stop using images of animals in its designs. The organization sent a letter Tuesday to Aaron Landrum, president and CEO of Wichita-based Chance Rides, stating animal-themed carousels “reinforce the notion that these sentient beings are simply here for our entertainment.”
Sentient beings? No. They’re not. They’re inanimate, unthinking, unfeeling objects, just like the folks at PETA.
Think of how stupid the average person is and realize half of them are stupider than that.” (George Carlin)
Follow the Bouncing Ball
What the hell are we doing? It seems as if I ask that question with disarming frequency. But another one occurs to me: Have we lost sight of the fact that more and more of what we’re doing is frivolous and meaningless because we (think we) don’t have more important things to worry about? I think that’s possible. I also think its possible we’ve become so carelessly apathetic because the government has convinced us (or we’ve assumed) it will take care of everything. It won’t. All it will do is grow and exert more control, even as it becomes more and more bureaucratically dysfunctional.
According to USAFacts, 2.95 million people were employed by the federal government as of last September. If you were never curious about anything else, have you ever wondered what they all do? And check this out: As of 2016, based on the latest data I found, “Compensation for Federal Workforce Costs the Government $1 Million Per Minute.” And since we’re borrowing money like drunken gamblers playing with loaded dice, we’re the functional equivalents of our own loan sharks.
We’re paying for a war in Ukraine and financing the defense of Israel at the same time at which we’re letting hordes of illegal aliens stream across our southern border and subsidizing their existences. We don’t have a humanitarian crisis. We have a crisis of priorities and common sense. We have a dereliction of duty by the federal government to protect its citizens. And we worry about images of animals on carousels? Good grief.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. (George Carlin)
Since You Asked …
People often say to me, “OB, you don’t seem to lack for criticism. But you seem to come up short in the Alternative Suggestions Department.” Point taken. Accordingly, here are an even 14 suggestions we might adopt to straighten this mess out:
- In very general terms, let’s cut the shit. Let’s stop indulging all the first-world nitwits and woke crybabies until AFTER we’ve secured the border, stanched the fiscal hemorrhage, and restored a modicum of integrity to our elections.
- Let’s go to dictionary.com, look up sovereignty, and close our borders. We can’t afford to (or won’t) take care of our citizenry as it is. Why would we choose to pay for illegal aliens?
- Let’s take just half of the money we spend to support other people’s wars and give it to our military veterans, so they can take care of themselves. Then we can axe the Veteran’s Administration (VA), which is sucking wind anyway.
- Let’s cut the budget of the National Education Association (NEA) in half and give the other half to parents who want to send their children to private schools, rather than sending them to public indoctrination centers. Then we can axe the NEA, which is sucking wind anyway.
- Let’s cut the green, net-zero, wind-turbine, solar crap, go nuclear for sustainable energy, and cut subsidies to the green-energy frauds whose failures we continue to underwrite. Then we can axe the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is sucking wind anyway.
- Let’s recognize, in the words of Adrian Rogers, “You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”
- Consistent with #6, let’s ban the words revenue and investment from the taxonomy of government. Revenue is the money generated from normal business operations, calculated as the average sales price times the number of units sold. It is not taxes levied or tax dollars collected by the government. An investment is an asset or item acquired with the goal of generating income or appreciation … an increase in the value of an asset over time. It is not the allocation of tax dollars from which there is no income or appreciation generated, unless you count re-election as income or appreciation.
- Let’s recognize that if we don’t take responsibility for ourselves, we don’t have any right to expect anyone else — especially the government — to take care of us.
- Let’s stop calling voter ID laws discriminatory. If having to show a valid ID is discriminatory, then I’m discriminated against every time I go to the liquor store or get pulled over by a cop for drinking what I just bought in the liquor store while I’m driving. And I’m an identity-card-carrying member of the white-privileged, Western-Europe-derived, oppressive patriarchy. In what Bizarro World does that make even the slightest bit of sense, for God’s sake?
- Let’s insist the people we elect to public office pass an exam on the same Constitution they fraudulently swear to uphold.
- Let’s abide by the suggestions of the Constitution, send Representatives to Washington for two years, send Senators to Washington for six years, and send their asses back home to support themselves in the private sector.
- Let’s make the U.S. government the first bureaucracy in history to get smaller and the people we send to Congress the first to say, “No,” to anything — or to at least stop making promises that won’t get them re-elected anyway because of #7 and #11.
- Let’s trust our senses and give ourselves credit for recognizing the reality that if something doesn’t look good or smell right, it’s probably rotten.
- Let’s stop listening to the career politicians whose careers we haven’t yet nuked and their lackeys in the mainstream media, think for ourselves, and question everything we see and hear.
The news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class — the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them and then rarely followed up. (George Carlin)
Life is About Choices
If you think we should ban animal images on carousels; surrender our national sovereignty by leaving the border open; ignore our veterans, our school children, and our energy needs; impose higher taxes on the rich while half the population pays none; abdicate personal responsibility; let people vote without proof of identity (failure to show ID is a crime in a growing number of states, even if you’re not trying to vote); leave politicians in office for life as corruption and bureaucratic dysfunction grow; ignore our own senses; and do what the ruling elite tell us without question, you likely haven’t read this far. You’re also not likely to do anything about any of it.
The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly. (George Carlin)
But if you fear, as I do, that we’re on the Highway to Hell, let’s get busy. If you’re not sure what to do, start here. Shut off the news. Let the people you sent to Congress know you’re mad as hell, and you’re not going to take this anymore. Vote. Write. Stand up. Speak up. Ask questions. Don’t back down. And if you have any other ideas, call 1-800-GET-REAL. Operators are standing by to put your ideas on petitions.
Maybe if we do all those things, we can stop being a silly people.
The country we save could be our own.
Please don’t confuse my point of view with cynicism; the real cynics are the ones who tell you everything’s gonna be all right. (George Carlin)
I had occasion to speak with a prospect on a Zoom call the other day. She was looking for help in establishing her brand and marketing her online workshops and published materials. She insisted those things could be accomplished only by a digital marketing agency.
I suggested digital marketing (or online marketing) simply means promoting stuff through digital channels using electronic technology, as opposed to print. I told her we employ tactics like email, social media, web-based advertising, text and multimedia messages, webinars, search engines, online customer communities, and other digital platforms. I even went so far as to suggest radio and TV ads could be considered digital marketing these days since … well … I opted to skip the breakdown of the digital electronics involved.
None of it mattered anyway. She was unmoved.
She told me she’d recently spoken with another person about her branding and marketing needs. That other person professed to run a digital marketing agency. That’s when the conversation got really interesting.
Here’s a transcript of the way it transpired, edited for brevity. (Clarity and sanity were a bit too much to hope for.) Her part of the conversation is designated as DG (Digital Guru). My side of the conversation will be represented by YT (Yours Truly):
YT: How do you know this other person runs a digital marketing agency?
DG: Because she told me she does, and her website says so. Yours doesn’t.
YT: You looked at my website?
DG: Yes.
YT: Do you realize my website exists in a digital medium?
DG: What does that have to do with anything?
YT: Ooh … this is going to be tougher than I thought.
DG: What?
YT: Nothing. I didn’t say anything.
DG: But I heard …
YT: What if we created a website for your business — drove traffic to it using email; social media; web, radio, and TV ads; webinars, and other forms of digital communication — and never put one thing in print?
DG: You do all that stuff?
YT: Yeah.
DG: But you’re not a digital marketing agency.
YT: Yes, we are.
DG: I don’t believe you. Your website doesn’t say that.
YT: If I added digital marketing agency to my website right now, while we’re talking — if you were able to refresh your browser, see it right away, and understood I made that change digitally — would you believe it then?
DG: No.
YT: Why not?
DG: Because you’d just be trying to fool … why are you holding a gun to your head?
YT: Never mind. Have you ever heard of a digital twin?
DG: Yes. Why?
YT: Because I’m not me. On this Zoom call, you’ve actually been seeing and talking with my digital twin.
DG: You mean you don’t even exist?
YT: Nope. I’m a digital figment of someone’s imagination. I just can’t figure out if it’s mine or yours.
DG: You’re hired.
Definitions Are Everything
Before I start talking, I find it prudent to know what I’m talking about. But that’s just me. Some people find it a bit odd, if not off-putting … or worse. (As my friend, Yonason Goldson, wrote to me recently, “Look what happened to Socrates. And all he did was ask questions.”) But since I manage to find my Big Boy Pants most mornings, I plug along.
On the subject of definitions, and since the big hand is on the 20 and the little hand is on the 24, it’s time for most communication to take place digitally, whether it’s marketing or not. So, if you want to make a distinction between digital marketing and anything other than print, good luck finding an agency that employs cave art, smoke signals, drumbeats, carrier pigeons, or — if you want to go back even farther than that — fax machines.
This isn’t called The Digital Age for nothing.
Author’s Note: This story was prompted by my wife, Anne, with whom I shared the story I’m about to share with you. When I told her the story, she said, “Six strings. You should write about that.” And people wonder why I love her as I do.
The woman is like the tide she comes and goes.
She knows the things that I can just suppose.
(Dan Fogelberg, “Comes and Goes”)
On January 13th of this year, Craig James and Mac Bogert included me in some email correspondence having to do with the fact that Craig was changing the strings on his acoustic guitar for the first time in something like forever (or thereabouts). Several days later, I received this card in the mail from Craig.
Lest the note in the card appear too small to read here, it says this:
Mark!
We get to see each other’s words, often … but not in-the-hand-of … thus this note. I’m grateful for you, and our sharings.
Here’s one of those strings with my dad’s spirit attached. No obligation to keep. Just thought it would be cool for one to pass your fingers too ….
Love,
Craig
Since it’s hard to know how to respond to a gesture that sincere and generous, to say nothing of where to start, I’ll pick this spot: No obligation to keep. Think about that. No obligation to keep. Craig is unassuming enough, humble enough, unpresumptuous enough to send me a piece of his heart and soul— an object that bears his energy and his dad’s spirit — and to want me to know I’m not obliged to keep it … as if there were any possibility at all I might part with it.
On February 1st, Craig and I had a conversation on Zoom. I expressed to him how much the string meant to me. He didn’t seem sure why it might have moved me as it did to receive the string. So, I told him it put me in mind of the scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas in which the cast is supposed to be rehearsing a scene from their Christmas play.
Frieda, complaining about Pig Pen, says, “I can’t go on, there’s too much dust. It’s taking the curl out of my naturally curly hair.”
Charlie Brown, as the director of the play says to Frieda, “Don’t think of it as dust. Think of it as maybe the soil of some great past civilization. Maybe the soil of ancient Babylon. It staggers the imagination. He may be carrying soil that was trod upon by Solomon, or even Nebuchadnezzar.”
Pig Pen replies, “Sort of makes you want to treat me with more respect, doesn’t it?”
I told Craig I couldn’t begin to imagine the history of that string or all the energy in it. That’s exactly what makes it so valuable.
Sometime after receiving my string, I learned Craig had also sent strings to Andee Scarantino and Mac. During our conversation on February 1st, I asked Craig how many people he knows. He couldn’t begin to imagine. Then I asked him if his guitar is a 12-string.
He said, “No. Six.”
I said, “That tells me out of all the people you might know in the world, I’m one of six to whom you chose to send a string. That makes it all the more valuable to me.”
Craig said, “Actually, five. I kept one.”
I grinned like an idiot.
It’s the Thought …
Many people blow off things they could have done or should have done by saying, “Well, it’s the thought that counts.” In most instances, no, it isn’t. It’s the doing that counts. But it’s equally true to say the thought often compounds the doing.
Craig could have told me he was thinking about sending me a guitar string. I could have told Craig I was thinking about calling him to tell him what a meaningfully thoughtful, deeply touching gesture sending me that guitar string was. But he sent it. And I called him. Both of those things led to our conversation on February 1st, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. That conversation will lead to other conversations. Those conversations will lead to more discoveries and tighter bonds. Our friendship and mutual regard will grow from there.
In a figurative sense, every outbound, intentional attempt at connection can be considered a string — a card, a note, a gift (however that might be defined), a gesture of thoughtfulness. Craig enabled me to think about such strings. I encourage you to think about them, too.
Those are the strings that connect the world and hold it together.
Last week I wrote about the lethal peril to which we find ourselves subject as the result of anthropogenic climate change and two of its perniciously wayward children, bomb cyclones and weather whiplash. Well, just when you thought it was safe …
Last week, the Washington Post ran a story — “This weather phenomenon on Lake Michigan stunned meteorologists Friday” — that’s sure to keep us on Red Alert until the vernal equinox, at the very least. Get a load of this:
An extremely localized but intense band of lake-effect snow … [dropped] nearly three feet of snow in a narrow swath only a few miles wide. Travel was halted as roadways became buried, with near whiteout conditions. But there was something a little special with this particular snow band — it was made up of more than a dozen wintry whirlwinds. These whirlwinds are known as mesovortexes (spelled mesovortices in academic literature). They are small eddies about 10 or 20 miles wide and akin to tiny low pressure systems. Each one locally intensified snowfall and was separated by a small moat or cutoff.
Meteorologists were baffled at first as to the cause of these mesovertices. But instead of blaming all of humanity for causing this climate-change phenomenon, a group of intrepid authorities managed to trace the cause to two men — Wilbur Pilkingbush and Herman Scroggins — who were cooking Coho Salmon they’d caught ice fishing on Lake Michigan over a wood-burning campfire out on Big Sable Point near Ludington State Park.
According to Ernest Grimlak of the Michigan Division of Forestry and Wildlife, “Them two dudes had a fire so big it threw off enough CO2 to sustain photosynthesis in the entire Huron-Manitee National Forests. Man, we can’t have that. We gotta spend millions of taxpayer dollars to build CO2 recovery plants and put that shit back in the ground so it can make more coal. The last thing we should do is trust nature to take care of itself, right?”
And that, of course, brings us to the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Weather or Not
While it hasn’t been definitively attributed to mesovertices, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was an American freighter that went down in Lake Superior on November 10, 1975, taking the lives of all 29 men on board. Gordon Lightfoot wrote the commemorative song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, in December of that year. The record label, Reprise, released the song in August of 1976. It hit number 1 in Canada. In the United States, it reached number 1 in Cashbox and was number 2 for two weeks in the Billboard Hot 100. Nevertheless, there were some factual inaccuracies in the lyrics of the song, particularly here:
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral.
The church bell chimed till it rang 29 times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Historians and scholars of ecclesiastical architecture pointed out no Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral exists. More troubling, though, was this: The church bell chimed till it rang 29 times for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald. If the church bell had chimed 29 times for each man, it would have chimed 841 times [29 x 29 = 841]. Grammarians and linguists were inclined to write that off as a slip of the tongue … well … pen, an oversight, an inadvertent overlooking of the arithmetic, or — less likely — some degree of illiteracy on the part of Gordon Lightfoot. For what it’s worth, I don’t buy the illiteracy theory. Lightfoot was much too accomplished a student of language and music to be judged illiterate.
Metallurgists and physicists, however, had more significant issues with the physical reality of the lyrics due to the potential effects of fractal vibrations. According to the Journal of Sound and Vibration:
A wide class of systems in nature and engineering consists of self-similar fractal structures, where each cell repeats the structure of the previous one on a certain scale. However, the well-known B. Mandelbrot’s fractals that use the scaling of geometric parameters do not reflect the dynamic properties of the system well enough. Therefore, when studying the system dynamics, it is suggested [but no one knows by whom] that structures which have a scaling of dynamic, parameters, should be considered as a special class of vibratory system. Such class of structures where stiffness and inertial parameters change with the same scale factor from cell to cell can be called dynamic fractals. Research has shown that such structures have a number of specific wave and vibrational properties. Thus, the dynamic fractal is equivalent in terms of frequency to a certain periodic structure, which is a band-pass filter. It has been also shown [but no one knows by whom] that the dynamic fractal having a scale factor greater than one with increasing magnitudes of stiffness and inertial parameters along its length has good vibroisolation properties. The main advantage of such a lattice is intensive vibration attenuation in all frequency ranges including in resonant modes of the lattice, which favorably compares with periodic lattices. On the contrary, the dynamic fractal having a scale factor less than one with decreasing magnitudes of stiffness and inertial parameters along its length has the properties of amplifying the incoming signal along the structure, which can be used in control systems.
In layman’s terms, that means were the bell to have been the same age as the nonexistent building in which it was hung, it would have been subject to fractal vibrations so deleterious they would have shattered had it been rung more than ten times, let alone 841. The metallurgists and physicists who studied the bell were bummed. But when Al Gore and the IPCC assured them if fractal vibrations hadn’t caused the bell to shatter climate change would have, they felt instantly better.
All’s Well That Ends Well
Here’s the deal, kids: No matter what happens, no matter the nature of the disaster, the calamity, the aberrant phenomenon, or the accident — and notwithstanding the plausible, practical explanations for any of that shit — attribute it to climate change. If we do that, if we stay unfailing allegiant to the narrative, the good news is we’ll be good. The bad news is we’ll be enslaved by the globalists.
But what the hell. It’s only life, and we only live once. We might as well be gullible and subservient.
In the northeastern United States, where I happen to live, there’s an annual climate-change event. It’s called winter. During this event, the temperatures fall, as do little white flakes the natives call snow. We’ve already had seven or eight inches of the stuff fall this month. And there’s more to come:
After a mostly calm and mild December across much of the U.S., Mother Nature is making up for it with a stormy and cold January, and there’s more wild weather on the way. The deadly storm that’s raking the eastern U.S. this week is the opening act for what’s to come over the next week: A potential “bomb cyclone” blizzard for the Midwest, an arctic blast courtesy of the polar vortex, and possibly the first real East Coast snowstorm in years.
In case you’re not aware, a bomb cyclone is a storm blown hideously out of proportion by climate-change hysterics and their pals in the narrative-peddling mainstream media. That’s why, as soon as the first flakes fly, there’s a panicked run on milk, bread, and eggs, toilet paper, solar panels, and wind turbines. Vegans, of course, don’t buy eggs out of concern for the hens’ asses. (Who needs all that protein, lecithin, biotin, zinc, iron, phosphorus, folate, iodine, selenium, choline, and vitamins B2, B5, B12, A, D, and E from a single source anyway?) And some of them won’t eat anything that has a brain, which is why there’s no chance of their ever cannibalizing each other. Solar panels are useless because the sun doesn’t shine during snowstorms. And wind turbines have to be shut down once the temperature drops below a certain point because the blades will break. But all that pales in comparison to the lunatic alarm induced by bomb cyclones.
I’ll admit I’m not the biggest fan of snow. After it falls, it has to be cleared from roadways, walkways, steps, and other areas of vehicle and pedestrian traffic. And I’m not a skier, a snowboarder, or a fan of frostbite. But to be fair, I have to say it’s wondrously beautiful when it’s falling.
During the winter of 1971, when I was younger and even crazier, a high-school friend, Tommy Roberts, and I went to the home of another friend, Floyd Bennet, on a Friday night to listen to music and do what high-school students did in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. (I’d specify what that was, but I don’t remember.) At some point during the evening — I also don’t remember if it was before or after Tommy and I got to Floyd’s house — we each dropped a barrel of Orange Sunshine.
I only have two clear recollections from the time we spent in Floyd’s room: One was listening to the Traffic album, The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys. (The title song still makes me feel like I’m tripping, even though I’m not that young or crazy anymore.) The other is pulling up the blinds in Floyd’s room as we were preparing to leave and looking outside to discover a blizzard in full force. (We didn’t have bomb cyclones in those days.) The bad news was Tommy and I had no idea a storm was coming, so we didn’t dress for it. The good news was, in our altered state of consciousness, we didn’t care about much of anything, let alone the weather.
I was going to sleep at Tommy’s house on Barberry Lane that night, which was a cross-lots walk of about a mile or so from Floyd’s house on Pasture Lane. We set off in snow that was already almost knee-deep, undaunted by the cold, the wind, the snow, and our ill-advised state of under-dress. Somewhere along the way, before we got to the field adjacent to the dead-end street at the end of which Tommy lived, we came to believe we could hear the snow falling. We were convinced we could hear it better if we got below the wind. And we decided to take off the shirts and the light jackets we were wearing and lie in the snow, the better to hear the flakes falling on each other.
Among the winter wonders of that night were the facts that (A) Tommy’s mother was asleep when we finally arrived at his house, and (B) neither Tommy nor I got so much as a sniffle from our psychedelic adventure.
Pick Your Hallucination
As I write this, we’re in the midst of our annual climate-change event. The temperature’s in the low single digits. But that’s about to change, apparently, because of a weather whiplash. In case you’re not aware, a weather whiplash is a change of temperature blown hideously out of proportion by climate-change hysterics and their pals in the narrative-peddling mainstream media. That’s why, as soon as the thermometer starts to rise, there’s a panicked run on milk, bread, eggs, toilet paper, shorts, t-shirts, swimwear, sandals, and sunscreen.
In this enlightened age, of course, it’s politically incorrect to refer to winter snowstorms and temperature changes in terms of climate. To sustain the anthropogenic climate-change narrative, we’re encouraged — at the risk of otherwise being canceled, banned, shirked, ridiculed, vilified, and called names like denier — to refer to snowstorms, temperature changes, and other atmospheric and meteorological phenomena as weather. And weather, according to the narrative, is unrelated to climate as is, to use USA Today’s term, Mother Nature. If that makes the slightest bit of sense to you, it’s a safe bet you’re firmly bought into the climate-change narrative. And you’re probably a vegan, too. If so, God bless you.
I know Tommy’s still around because he recently worked for the construction company that employs my brother, Keith. I’d guess that if Tommy and I were young and crazy again, our response to all this climate fraud would be to drop some Orange Sunshine, go to Floyd’s house, listen to The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, and laugh our asses off at the first-world, globalist lunacy for which so many have fallen so far. When we left Floyd’s, we wouldn’t care if it were snowing or not.
If it were, we wouldn’t call it climate change. And we’d probably think bomb cyclone was a drug we hadn’t tried yet.
That may seem like an odd title for this post because it’s a celebration of the Holiday Season, a reflection of my incorrigibly stubborn hopefulness, and an acknowledgement of the inscrutability of human nature. So, perhaps I should explain.
The world, as you likely know, is rife with turmoil. I say as you likely know because the world’s always in turmoil. We’re human beings. Turmoil is what we do. And why not? We’re really good at it. We’ve been good at it for our entire history on the planet. That turmoil manifests in our 24-hour news cycles with stories of rising antisemitism, of persistent racism, of ignorance, fear, hatred, and all manner of violence and brutality. In the Northern Hemisphere, the days get shorter while our capacities for antisemitism, racism, ignorance, fear, hatred, violence, and brutality get longer.
And now, we face the age-old dilemma: What do we do with all of that during the Holiday Season? Do we commune in the spirit of the Season? Or do we allow ourselves to be separated by our differing religious beliefs, ideologies, dogmas, prejudices, and myriad other unfounded — or, at least, unexamined — convictions?
StopIf you don’t already recognize the criminal and self-defeating absurdity of allowing ourselves to be separated from our shared humanity and our shared spirituality, I offer a morsel of food for thought from the early 20th century, as recounted on history.com:
On Christmas Eve 1914, in the dank, muddy trenches on the Western Front of the First World War, a remarkable thing happened … The Germans were singing carols … soldiers began to climb nervously out of their trenches, and to meet in the barbed-wire-filled “No Man’s Land” that separated the armies. Normally, the British and Germans communicated across No Man’s Land with streaking bullets, with only occasional gentlemanly allowances to collect the dead unmolested. But now, there were handshakes and words of kindness. The soldiers traded songs, tobacco, and wine, joining in a spontaneous holiday party in the cold night … small pockets of French, German, Belgian, and British troops held impromptu cease-fires across the Western Front, with reports of some on the Eastern Front as well … One British fighter named Ernie Williams later described in an interview his recollection of some makeshift soccer play on what turned out to be an icy pitch: “The ball appeared from somewhere, I don’t know where … They made up some goals and one fellow went in goal and then it was just a general kick-about. I should think there were about a couple of hundred taking part.”
Soldiers, warriors trained to kill or be killed, stopped killing. For one magical evening, they ignored their political mandates to slaughter each other. They bonded. They sang and played. They exchanged gifts. They recognized each other as fellow human beings, sharing the desire to live and to celebrate a spiritual kinship bigger than themselves — bigger than a person, an army, or a nation. Brothers in arms? They were brothers in living. And they defied orders, choosing instead to celebrate a Holy Night with each other.
If that was possible 109 years ago, what the hell are we doing now? Why are we doing it? And what are we doing about it?
RealityNo. I’m not ignoring the Israeli/Hamas war. There is a centuries-long history of war, occupation, irreconcilable religious zealotry, unsettled territorial claims, and every kind of religious and ideological intolerance there. As a result, the desire to kill is greater than the desire for peace in the Middle East. Neither am I ignoring the war in Ukraine. There is a centuries-long history of war, occupation, irreconcilable religious zealotry, unsettled territorial claims, and every kind of religious and ideological intolerance there, too. As a result, the desire to kill is greater than the desire for peace in Eastern Europe. That’s nothing more or less than — absolutely no different from — reality. If you’re prepared to offer a countering view, come at me, Bro, as they say in the biz.
I don’t care about that, either.
I don’t care what color you are. I don’t care what religion you practice. I don’t care what gender you think you are. I don’t care what ideology compels you to hop around. I don’t care what you do or think you have to do. I only care that you stop. Some time during the Holiday Season, just stop.
You don’t even have to think. If you can stop and be completely still without thinking, more power to you. If you can keep any manner of contemplation, introspection, or benevolence from creeping into your head, that might have to be okay … as long as you’re quiet. Who knows what might happen?
You might hear the reverent hush of a humble manger. You might see the guiding light of a triumphant menorah. You might sense the communion of spirits in a mosque or a monastery at prayer. But you’ll experience none of that if you’re not quietly observant.
Ya know what I was thinking about today? Nothing.
I put in a full day of work, but I gave my mind the day off. That’s right. I was on something like cerebral autopilot. I had things to do, but they were routine enough and I knew them well enough that they didn’t require creative thought. So, I drifted, dreaming wide awake. It’s my version of creative tension.
The term, creative tension, was coined by Peter Senge in his 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. He thought competing ideas in teams and organizations created tension, which he took to be energy that could be applied to resolving uncertainty. But Pete had it wrong and probably should have gotten out more. If he’d worked in any organizations of, say, 10 people or more, he’d have known the only tense uncertainty in such organizations is whether bureaucratic politics would cause those with competing ideas to find themselves on the outside looking in.
My version of creative tension is the energy that exists in the space between what I have to do and what I want to do. But if the tasks I have to do are mundane, repetitive, and practiced enough, I can do both.
Bear With Me
For example, if I have to double-check my bookkeeper’s math on the payroll, state and federal income, sales and use, and corporate taxes I’m required to pay, I can copy and paste the numbers from my bookkeeper into a column in a spreadsheet, highlight the numbers in that column, and use the auto-sum function to tally the total. Simultaneously, I can be thinking about the ad campaign I have to create for one of my clients, after which my bookkeeper will invoice the client, thus generating the payroll, state and federal income, sales and use, and corporate taxes I’m required to pay.
That, of course, creates a whole other kind of tension between having to pay all those taxes — as well as the taxes I have to pay for the property I own for which I had to pay sales tax as part of the process of owning that property — and the reality of eking out a living. The only creative element in that tension is the way in which the government continues to create ways to take the money we’ve earned, including the money we’ve spent on that which we’ve already been taxed. Under those circumstances, then, I suppose dreaming wide awake could be considered a form of escapism, if not survival.
On Second Thought …
Well, okay. Maybe I wasn’t thinking about nothing today. But I was dreaming. Because if you don’t have dreams, all you have is nightmares.
Are you awake?
Those of you who’ve been to the dance with me likely know of my baby brother, Woody. I’m his legal Guardian and Conservator.
The day before Thanksgiving, he wasn’t feeling well. One of the staff members from his group home took him to the emergency room (ER). His blood pressure was 66/45. He was kept in the ER for a while, hydrated with IV fluids, and sent home. The doctor who called me said Woody would be fine to join us for dinner the next day.
On Thanksgiving morning, my phone rang. It was the Program Manager from Woody’s group home, calling to tell me Woody was on his way to the hospital again. A culture developed from blood he’d had taken the day before revealed a bacterial infection. He was diagnosed with pneumonia, admitted, and kept in the hospital. The following Wednesday, still in the hospital, he was diagnosed with endocarditis, which would require him to be on IV antibiotics for some as-yet-un-determined period of time. So, a week after being admitted to the hospital, he was transferred to a rehab facility in which he’ll be administered the antibiotics and monitored to ensure his endocarditis is on the wane.
Woody, in his hospital bed, rocking his Boston Scally cap.But that’s not why we’re here.
Life and Living
My drive from the hospital (and now the rehab center) takes me north on Connecticut Route 9 to the exit for Connecticut Route 372. On Sunday, November 26th, the light at the end of the exit ramp was red. I was the first car in line. A street person stood to my left, holding a sign asking for money.
He looked to be in his mid-30s. He had a reddish beard. Hair of the same color showed from beneath his watch cap. He wore camo army fatigues. I don’t typically acknowledge street people. But recalling some advice from Dennis Pitocco, I rolled down my window.
“Hi,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“My name is Michael.”
“My name is Mark. I’d like you to take this,” I said as I handed him some cash. Then, as the light turned green, I added, “Have a blessed day, and good luck to you.”
When I described the look in that young man’s eyes to Dennis a few days later, he said, “That’s because he knew you’d seen him. You didn’t let him be invisible.”
Sometimes, the things we recognize most clearly are the hardest to see.
Epilogue
When I walked into Woody’s room at the rehab center for the first time last Thursday afternoon, he immediately introduced me to the gentleman in the bed next to his. At least a half-dozen staff members came and went while I was there. Woody introduced me to every one.
Because I tend to be slow on the uptake, it took me a little while to figure this out: Woody would have stopped to talk with Michael without thinking twice about it. Woody would have given him some money. Woody would have kept an eye peeled for the very next Michael he encountered and done exactly the same thing.
Some lessons can be sneaky like that. The most valuable ones are the sneakiest.
It’s time for real stories to be told by the unsheltered and by those who can speak about and for them so we can debunk the myths “for good”….
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- Organizations and causes that are on the ground facing daily struggles with those who are unsheltered/homeless and who have stories to tell. PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO AND TO HELP US CHANGE THE NARRATIVE “FOR GOOD”THIS IS A “FOR GOOD” VERSUS A FOR-PROFIT ENDEAVOR. ANY SURPLUS WILL BE DONATED TO HOMELESS NONPROFITS.
I wake up most mornings with questions on my mind.
Generally, they’re relatively innocuous or inconsequential things like: Why do I have the theme from Mannix stuck in my head? Do bald men think toupees are fooling anybody? Why do so many people believe in gravity? Why do some Kindle books cost more than the same books in print? If I pay my Social Security taxes, why am I taxed on the money I paid into Social Security when I get it back? If Santa Claus knows if you’ve been bad or good, why did he bring me anything, ever? Who the hell did let the dogs out? If an asp in the grass is a snake, why is a grasp in the ass a goose?
There are days, however, when I wake up with more serious questions on my mind. As an even dozen examples, do you ever wonder what life would be like if we:
- Stopped trying to impose Western thought on Eastern people?
- Stopped expecting jihadists to be rational?
- Stopped trying to impose contemporary narratives on history?
- Stopped imagining people can change the climate of an entire planet?
- Stopped pretending science can be settled?
- Stopped pretending equality can be legislated?
- Stopped believing what’s good for you is good for me?
- Stopped thinking contemporary journalists could define journalism?
- Stopped pretending feeling is the same as thinking?
- Stopped believing all people progress intellectually beyond the level of college freshman?
- Stopped expecting governments to take care of us?
- Started taking care of ourselves and each other?
I recognize those questions put me in the company of incorrigible pragmatists like Don Quixote. But it seems inevitable that someone else might ask them at some time. No? Really? Are we that far gone?
Tangents
I happen to have three other questions on my mind, too: (A) Why is it politically incorrect to fly the flag of the United States of American in the United States of America? That feels like a national out-of-body experience, doesn’t it? If not, why not? (B) Why isn’t antisemitism discussed in DEI training? Wouldn’t we imagine equity and inclusion would pertain to one the most — if not THE most — envied, misunderstood, hated, abused, and murdered cultures in the history of the world? Do we really believe we can make people equal, except Jewish people? (C) What the hell is wrong with us?
But I’ll save those for another time. Maybe if we’re ever able to answer the first 12 questions, the last three will take care of themselves. And what do I know anyway? As has been pointed out to me on occasions numerous enough that I’d be rich if I’d collected a buck for each of them, I’m too logical. And maybe that’s true.
Nevertheless, sometimes I wonder.
During my time as a student at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut — from which I earned a B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Philosophy — I had a teacher, Professor Langston, who’d earned his Ph.D. in Intellectual History. He was, therefore, justifiably enamored of the work of existentialist deconstrutionists and post-modernists such as the Austrian-German philosopher Edmund Husserl (who founded the school of phenomenology before going on to found the Proßnitz School of Driving in his hometown); Husserl’s disciple, the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger; and more contemporary brain-twisters like the American philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine. While I liked Professor Langston very much and took more than one of his courses, I couldn’t figure out why anyone would devote meaningful quantities of time and energy to studying the obscure and convoluted work of people like Husserl, Heidegger, and Quine, rather than applying one’s attention to other more mundane and applicable things like living and reality.
But what did I know? I was just an uneducated rube.
Nevertheless, since all of Heidegger’s idols had written or were writing books, Heidegger, too, thought he should get on the stick. So, he decided an autobiography was as good a place to start as any. After 12 years, he hadn’t written a word. But he was undaunted. He decided to publish 480 blank pages with the title, Hat Jemand Mein Leben Gesehen? [translation: Did Anyone See My Life?]
When asked by John-Paul Sartre if he didn’t think that was a tad audacious, Heidegger answered: “Was zum Teufel? Hillary Clinton hat es mit My Most Honorable Achievements geschafft. Was bin ich, gehackte Rinderleber? [translation: What the hell? Hillary Clinton did it with My Most Honorable Achievements. What am I, chopped liver?]
But there had been bad blood between Heidegger and Sartre for a while because Sartre had once accused Husserl, Heidegger’s intellectual mentor, of having transitioned to a transcendental interpretation of phenomenology when Husserl argued in favor of allowing right turns on red in his School of Driving. “Si je dois attendre le feu vert pour tourner à droite en France, le moins que les Allemands puissent faire est d’avoir un peu de patience. En outre, nous n’aurons pas à nous préoccuper de l’émission de carbone ou de l’absence d’émissions avant le siècle prochain,” Sartre wrote in a letter to Heidegger. [translation: “If I have to wait for a green light to take a right turn in France, the least the Germans can do is have a little patience. Besides, we won’t have to put up with any carbon-emission or net-zero nonsense until the next century.”]
But I Digress
Before I discovered Heidegger’s autobiography was a collection of blank pages — and before he decided to publish it that way — I started doing some research. I was particularly interested in what might have prompted Heidegger to write the book for which he’d received the most recognition, especially in pointless academic circles. That book, Being and Time, introduced the concept of Dasein (the German word for being or existence), which Heidegger interpreted to mean the being in the world particular to human beings. He’d previously tried to apply Dasein to insects and reptiles, but his morbid fear of spiders and snakes convinced him it would be less traumatic to stick with people.
In poring over some of Heidegger’s diaries (which were particularly difficult to read due to his having written them in German shorthand, a holdover from his days as a court stenographer), I discovered his notes from the events of one specific Christmas Eve. I have to admit I was taken aback at his hostility toward his Aunt Mathilda and his Uncle Fritz, even as I was amazed at the way he used that hostility as a source of inspiration for Being and Time. Here’s an excerpt from one of the pertinent diary entries:
Während ich endlos auf mein Heiligabendessen wartete, hantierte meine Tante Mathilda gedankenlos in der Küche herum, während Onkel Fritz in der Stube dummes Zeug redete. Mein Magen knurrte so laut, dass mehrere meiner männlichen Verwandten nach draußen gingen, um nachzusehen, ob sie ihre Lastwagen in der Einfahrt hatten laufen lassen. Mein akuter Hunger versetzte mich in eine Art Fugue-Zustand, in dem ich das Gefühl hatte, in warmem Wackelpudding zu schweben, und in dem die Zeit in einem Tempo zu vergehen schien, das einem Klondike-Derby-Rennen auf der flachen Erde nicht unähnlich war.
Ich beschloss, ein Buch über die Existenz zu schreiben. In Anbetracht der Fugue, in der ich mich befand – und da ich nicht wusste, wie lange ich noch darauf warten musste, gefüttert zu werden – beschloss ich, es Sein und Zeit zu nennen. Da ich wusste, dass ich später am Abend, wenn der Weihnachtsmann kam, sicherstellen musste, dass ich fest schlief, dachte ich mir, dass ich genauso gut gleich damit anfangen könnte. Und da es Dezember 1926 war und ich wusste, dass ich das Buch erst im folgenden Jahr veröffentlichen würde, wusste ich, dass ich diesem schamlosen Heuchler, John-Paul Sartre, und seinem durchsichtigen, abgeleiteten Werk Das Sein und das Nichts immer noch 16 Jahre voraus sein würde. Sobald ich anfing zu schreiben, war das Abendessen natürlich serviert. Also widersetzte ich mich meinen sonst unantastbaren Manieren (und Tante Mathilda) und brachte meine Schreibmaschine mit an den Tisch.
Here’s the English translation:
As I waited interminably for my Christmas Eve repast, my Aunt Mathilda puttered mindlessly in the kitchen while Uncle Fritz prattled vapidly in the parlor. My stomach was growling so loudly that several of my male relatives went outside to see if they’d left their trucks running in the driveway. My acute hunger caused me to enter into a kind of fugue state in which I felt as if my being were suspended in warm Jello and in which time seemed to pass at a pace not unlike a Klondike Derby race conducted on the flat earth.
I decided to start writing a book about existence. Given the fugue in which I found myself — and since I had no idea how much longer I’d have to wait to be fed — I decided to call it Being and Time. Since I knew I’d have to make sure I was sound asleep later in the evening when Santa Claus came, I figured I might as well get a jump on it right then. And since it was December of 1926 and I knew I wouldn’t get the book published until the following year, I knew I’d still be 16 years ahead of that shameless pretender, John-Paul Sartre, and his transparently derivative tome, Being and Nothingness. Once I started writing, of course, dinner was served. So, I defied my otherwise inviolable manners (and Aunt Mathilda) and brought my typewriter to the table.
Eureka!
It’s widely held that philosophy originates as an attempt to answer the existential question: Why are we here? But finding Heidegger’s diaries confirmed my long-held suspicion that philosophy derives from another question entirely, which is this, regardless of whether it refers to a person, a culture, an identity group, or a nation: Why me?
Think about it: How likely would Heidegger have been to write Being and Time had it not been for Aunt Mathilda’s tardiness in serving Christmas Eve dinner, to say nothing of the crisis of German culture that followed its defeat in World War I? And were it not for his being famished to the point of an out-of-body experience, why would Heidegger have contended people are not subjective spectators of objects but that subject and object are inseparable, in effect suggesting he and the turkey he hadn’t eaten yet were one and the same?
Epilogue
It’s been reported in some circles that Jean-Paul Sartre paid Aunt Mathilda handsomely to stall her serving of Christmas Eve Dinner in 1926. But those reports remain unconfirmed. And it seems unlikely a dude as sharp as Jean-Paul would have precipitated or contributed in any way to an occasion that ended up yielding a book its author would later accuse him of mimicking. Alas, since Heidegger and Sartre are as dead as their intellectual popularity, there’s no way to know for sure.
Do I regret the time I spent studying philosophy with Professor Langston and others? No. Did it make me a more incorrigible questioner of everything and a more determined critical thinker? Yes. Did it make me a better man, husband, father, and grandfather — or better equip me to play the hand dealt to me in the reality in which I live? Not so much.
In the end, like Heidegger’s autobiography and Hillary’s My Most Honorable Achievements, it’s all time and nothingness.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have something more constructive to do.
Featured Image courtesy of Herbert Wetterauer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
"We can’t allow ourselves to be distracted by the fact that the leader of a once proud and prosperous constitutional republic violated the most fundamental liberty in that republic’s constitution." ...
"If you’re not yet convinced that climate-change alarmism is more about politics, wealth redistribution, power, control, gullibility, and ignorance than it is about climate (it is), maybe you should read this anyway." ...
"You don’t recognize the humanity we share. You don’t recognize or are afraid of the responsibility that comes with your humanity. But make no mistake: I am you." ...
"We’d rather fear, hate, and abuse each other than to talk with each other, to learn what we don’t know, and to overcome our own fear and hatred." ...
"PETB works through hysteria, propaganda, hyperbole, fabrication, legislation, insect rescue, special events, celebrity spokespeople, protest campaigns, and other forms of bullshit to protect the world’s insect population from human ingestion and everything else." ...
"Oh, no! Last chance? What does soon mean? Will I run out of time? When? What should I get tested for?" ...
"Time doesn’t need examination or manipulation. Making the most of it requires only acceptance and purpose." ...
"This is all about emotion. We’re not supposed to be curious and objective enough to think and to reach our own conclusions. We’re supposed to feel. To feel what? Fear." ...
"People who think Irish pubs and grills are a dime a dozen are most likely correct. But they probably don’t know why there are so many or why they’re called pubs and grills." ...
"Speaking of truth, I have no idea why I’m getting so worked up. These things are all just figments of my imagination and my paranoia." ...
"While I’m working out the details, if you see something that seems to have better than even odds of going sideways, call me before you go for it." ...
"What if there’s no evidence to prove zodiac signs actually correlate with personality because we haven’t perceived — thought or sought to perceive — that correlation yet?" ...
As I’ve written previously, I have a very difficult time separating hate from ignorance. I take hate to be a subset or a symptom of ignorance. Ignorance can scale, of course. It can be as small as one Hibernophobe burning down my house. It can be as large as one power-mongering lunatic attempting to create a master race, or as large as another power-mongering lunatic attempting to create a collectivist Utopia.
But hate and ignorance possess a corrosive energy that eventually causes them to decay from within. Kenneth Burke called man the symbol-using animal. And so it is, that symbol-using lunatics adopted symbols for their misguided causes.
In his book, Language as Symbolic Action, Burke also alluded to the self-destructive power of hate and ignorance when he wrote this:
Man is/the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal/inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)/separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making/goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)/and rotten with perfection.
Likewise, Carlos Fuentes hinted at the rottenness of that perfection when he wrote this:
Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.
Germany’s National Socialist Party, China’s Communist Party — history is rife with examples of attempts at perfection that yielded otherwise inconceivable horror, brutality, cruelty, carnage, and suffering. If you’re up for a little light reading, here are some books on the subject:
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness during the Cultural Revolution
A State of Blood
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
The Butcher’s Trail
Or if you’d like a broader view, you might skim through Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s description:
This new book—the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times … examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century.
We create new things, new people, and new ways to hate with every generation, across all nationalities and geographies. The evidence piles up, right along with the bodies. Yet, on we hate.
Using the word, stupidity, rather than the word, ignorance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this:
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplishes anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one.
A fascinating contemplation that.
We’ll begin to push back against hate, malice, ignorance, and/or stupidity on Tuesday of this week at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time, in a critically important Salon 360˚ session. How much we accomplish will be determined, in part, by the number of people who participate in the conversation.
To join us, please click here to reserve your seat in our Zoom room. Registration is free.
If we don’t stop hate, we’ll be paying the price forever.
Author’s Note: As I was creating the video that appears at the end of this post, I was recalling a piece I’d written some years ago, inspired by something I’d witnessed in a gym. Thanks to a portable floppy-disc drive and my pack-rat compulsion to hang on to my old floppy discs, I was able to find the piece. I had no idea it was almost 30 years old. But, as we know, time flies ….
While the video I created is intended to commemorate Memorial Day 2023, the sacrifices we honor on Memorial Day are ultimate manifestations of giving without season. The only way we can repay our debt to those who’ve given their lives is to honor the freedom they died to preserve.
On Saturday, December 18, 1993, with anticipation of Christmas at its warmest, fuzziest, and most superficial pitch, I happened to be in Gold’s Gym in Manchester, indulging my vanity in the selfish preoccupation of another in an endless series of workouts, when Chapter 120 of the Vietnam Veterans of America interrupted my self-absorption by holding a ceremony — curiously moving, quietly disarming in its deliberate yet humble solemnity — in honor of some other spirit of giving with which I am not entirely familiar, a spirit of sacrifice without season, artifice, or pretense.
These survivors, anonymous in their uniform camouflage fatigues as they were in their trials in Southeast Asia, as they remain in their efforts to reconcile themselves to those trials, had come to recognize Gold’s Gyms for participating in the holiday food drive the Veterans annually conduct for the benefit of their homeless and otherwise needy peers. They had also come to honor the service of members of the state and local police forces and to present commemorative gifts to wives and mothers of their fallen police and military brethren.
All of those assembled, veteran and active soldiers and police officers, widows, and childless mothers, shared this singular bond: No matter how compelled — by self, family, government, or ideology — they have given of themselves and their families in service to people other than themselves, in service to institutions other and larger than their families. They continue to give in ways more painful and profound than most of us will ever have to know. And it occurred to me in watching this ceremony that the least I could do is understand that.
But this is not a lecture on moral obligation. It is not (intended to be) a pedantic diatribe on duty; on the morbid and mortal price paid by others for our freedom; on the guilt we might feel for never having been asked to pay so dear a price ourselves, thereby earning our right to enjoy that freedom. Rather, this is intended to be as sincere and focused an expression of gratitude as I can muster.
To each of the men and women I saw that December afternoon, I wish to say thank you. But my gratitude is not limited to their having given of themselves so profoundly, for sacrificing in ways I can only feebly imagine with horror and hope that neither I nor my children may ever be asked to give the same. More fully and purposefully, I say thank you for their having penetrated my sarcastic cynicism for a meaningful, reflective moment, for reminding me that it’s only by the sweat and blood of selfless souls such as theirs that, once the blush of the Christmas spirit has faded for another year, I have the inestimable freedom to remain detached, sarcastic, and cynical of all that frightens or mystifies me.
Yes, dubious as its value might seem, that is the freedom exercised most frequently by many of us. It is the product of too much abundance, too much freedom to choose among options too numerous to fully evaluate, too much opportunity to take that freedom for granted, too many chances to benefit from the sacrifices of others without thought, acknowledgment, or reciprocity.
For these reasons, I must say to that group of men and women I am frightened and mystified by their sacrifices. But, thanks to that public demonstration of their commitment to giving, I know I am deeply and forever grateful for what they’ve given, and for their having reached me on one, cold winter afternoon, while I, as always, was deep in self-absorption.
In this season and all others, as they have given of themselves so others might not have to, and for helping to purchase the very liberty by which I might write this opinion, God bless them, every one.
After seeing the phrase, toxic narcissism, for about the two-millionth time, I did a search on signs of a narcissist. Since the browser I use is Brave, and since Brave doesn’t use Google, I don’t know how many hits I got. But I did learn this: Depending on the source you choose, there are between five (WebMD) and 21 symptoms (Mayo) Clinic) of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD because where would we be without abbreviations?).
I don’t know all that much about the DSM 5. But if the folks who compile that thing ever ask for my opinion, I’m going to humbly suggest they stop splitting hairs, take narcissists, sociopaths, pathological liars, racists, politicians, and most of the people in Hollywood, and put them under one category: Chronic Jackass Disorder (CJD). Because I’m so open-minded, I’ll leave it to the compilers of the DSM 5 to determine if they’d prefer Center of the Universe Syndrome (COTUS) to CJD
Let’s SimplifyEschewing nuance for simplicity (plus, I’m lazy), I’ve opted to work with WebMD’s five broad symptoms of NPD, all of which are manifested by narcissists, sociopaths, pathological liars, racists, politicians, and most of the people in Hollywood. And I’ve added a sixth. In lieu of WebMD’s explications of these five symptoms I’ve added my own to indicate precisely how apt they are for narcissists, sociopaths, pathological liars, racists, politicians, most of the people in Hollywood, and all others who present with CJD:
- Sense of Entitlement. All those with CJD/and or COTUS believe what’s theirs and theirs and what’s yours is theirs. If they don’t have it, they won’t rest until they’ve found a way to get it. And they won’t hesitate for a moment to use coercion … or worse.
- Manipulative Behavior. All those who make everyone around them suffer from their CJD and/or COTUS have the ability to wheedle, cajole, con, plead, beg, whine, pout, throw tantrums, and hold their breaths till they turn blue. While some people in Hollywood get paid to do those things on occasion, its particularly painful to watch it happen in Congress.
- Need for Admiration. This is actually a misconception. The people who exhibit CJD and/or COTUS don’t need admiration, as long as you’re telling them how good, wonderful, beautiful, intelligent, uniquely brilliant, and stunning capable they are, all the time.
- Lack of Empathy. To be fair to those with CJD and/or COTUS, it really is a rather daunting challenge to care about anyone or anything else when you don’t give a shit about anyone other than yourself or anything other than your own personal interests. Let’s have some empathy here, shall we?
- Arrogance. Come on. Really? If you were better than everyone else and the center of the universe, wouldn’t you be entitled (See #1 above) to a little arrogance?
- Self-Love. We’re not talking about the garden-variety self-love we can find in every self-help, feel-good book, blog, podcast, or website. We’re talking about the self-love those with CJD and/or COTUS experience that causes them to spend more time looking in the mirror, getting cosmetic surgeries, and taking selfies than they spend working, sleeping, and eating combined.
When it comes to CJD and/or COTUS, we need to be careful not to rush to judgment. Even jackasses and centers of the universe deserve to have a little slack cut for them on occasion, no?
Notwithstanding the myriad of political diatribes I occasionally author in this column, it isn’t my intent to comment on politics particularly or exclusively. Politics is part of a larger discourse — even an inseparable part — but it is no more than a part.
Because of my curiosity about all things behavioral and linguistic (and the inextricable relationship of the two), this particular post is about depression. I’ve written this post because of the proliferation of depression in the popular vernacular, and it refers not to economic depression but to personal, psychological, perhaps clinical or biological depression. Economic depression may be related to other forms of depression. It may precipitate them. No one knows. At bottom, no one knows much.
The medical community can attribute biological depression to chemistry, to chemical imbalances — too much adrenaline or cortisol, not enough serotonin or norepinephrine. But it can’t explain the causes of the imbalances. Are they genetic? Are they psychologically predisposed responses to particular circumstances? Are they caused by the lack of constructive contemporary outlets for our hard-wired fight-or-flight mechanisms? With nowhere to run and no one to fight, maybe we hit internal walls that leave us feeling helpless, powerless, insignificant, wanting, unfulfilled, terrified, haunted.
Let GoIn 1989, the late comedian, Louie Anderson, published a book called Dear Dad. Rather than synopsize, I’ll simply encourage you to buy the book. But I’ll offer this excerpt as a starting point for our discourse on depression:
I have this theory that all we deal with in life is loss. We lose the protective comfort of the womb. We lose our mother’s breast. We lose the right to mess our pants. We lose friends, teachers, relatives. We lose our hair, our teeth, and our youth. We keep losing all these things and never get them back, but we never really learn how to deal with the loss. We never say that it hurts, really hurts, and so we spend the rest of our lives trying to make up for it, holding on tightly to things that we should really let go of.
Given the prevalence of depression in Western societies — and notwithstanding our predilections for quick fixes, easy outs, and the pharmaceutical possibilities for feeling nothing at all — it’s as possible as anything else that our inability to accept cycles and the natural course of aging work against us.
Perhaps our preoccupations with youth, vitality, and glamour render us unable to accept the realities of impermanence, the inevitability of loss, and the impossibility of stasis. Maybe because aging necessitates decline, we refuse to accept the passing of our connections to popular culture. Maybe the preoccupation with being young causes us to overlook the treasures of aging — wisdom, nobility, self-knowledge.
Maybe all our material, physical preoccupations are capable of inducing our failure to embrace the spiritual center of the human condition. So, we fight the inexorable and the inevitable futilely. And we do so at the expense of our psychological and emotional natures and well-being.
The Collective UnconsciousThis denial of our maturation and our spirituality — and its consequences — is neither a new idea nor a new practice. In his invaluable treatise on world mythology, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, written in 1949, Joseph Campbell noted this:
It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may very well be that the high incidence of neuroticism amongst ourselves follows from the decline among us to such effective spiritual aid. We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood. In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young.
Perhaps, then, the price of modern civilization is depression. As we invent ever more modes and methods of communication, so we become less communal. As we create ever more electronic connections, so we abandon our human ones. As we separate, so we fail to share. As we worship the physical, so withers the spirit. As we defy rites of passage, so we fight our inevitable passing. As we create more fears to fight, so we forsake joy.
That price is too high. And we have a higher calling.
Given our seemingly endless fascination with UFOs — and because I was up for a research project anyway — I did some digging into records from the Director of National Intelligence, the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, the Pentagon, Project Blue Book, Project Condign, Area 51, and Roswell, New Mexico, all of which plead ignorance of the phenomena. What I found made me wonder what all the fuss and skullduggery were about, given that it seemed, to me at least, to be remarkably innocuous.
One of the things that has always struck everyone as mysterious and morbidly intriguing about UFOs and alien abductions, of course, is that all the people who claim to have been abducted by aliens have also reported being subject to anal probes. I admit that one baffled even me, which is one of the reasons for which I undertook the research. And that’s what made my finds so astonishing.
Up Scope!
As incredible as this may sound, it turns out all the UFOs that have visited Earth have been from the same planet. And all the extraterrestrial beings who’ve inhabited those UFOs have been from the same race of beings. (I can’t call those extraterrestrial beings aliens because then they risk being confused with the illegal aliens who aren’t crossing our border because, as Alejandro Mayorkas, our ace Secretary of Homeland Security assures us, the border is secure.) That extraterrestrial race is a species of intellectually and technologically advanced proctologists.
According to the classified documents I was able to access through hacking and other surreptitious means, I learned the anal probes these beings use are multi-functional. That means that, even as they’re looking up the poopers of the people they’ve abducted, the probe enables them to electrically monitor nerve and wave activity in the brains of their abductees and to communicate with them silently.
From testimony collected from the abductees, the extraterrestrials seem most consistently interested in learning these 15 things:
- Why we wage war.
- Why we seem so completely unwilling or unable to take care of each other.
- Why we’d rather talk than learn.
- Why we seem to have an aversion to personal responsibility.
- Why we think guns are more responsible for crimes than the people who use them.
- Why we think we’re capable of affecting the climate of our entire planet.
- Why we think it’s a good idea to freeze and starve millions of people in pursuit of an absurd, unnecessary, and self-defeating green agenda.
- Why common sense and empiricism are dying arts.
- Why we still believe politicians.
- Why we think governments will take better care of our money than we will.
- Why we think special interests are preferable to common interests.
- Why we trust what passes for news in the mainstream media.
- Why we’re so pathologically gullible.
- Why we’ve raised standards of living and life expectancies so much and are still so unhappy.
- How we can be so full of shit and still walk around.
Given the specialization of the species, #10 was probably fairly predictable.
This Won’t Hurt
Excluding pre-modern sightings of all manner of celestial objects — like the planets, the moon, the stars, comets, parhelia, and lenticular clouds, and the obligatory Fourth of July fireworks displays — the first recorded modern sighting of a UFO was in 1878. John Martin, a farmer in Dennison, Texas, spotted something in the sky during a hunting trip:
After gazing at it for some time Mr. Martin became blind from long looking and left off viewing it for a time in order to rest his eyes. On resuming his view, the object was almost overhead and had increased considerably in size, and appeared to be going through space “at wonderful speed.”
It’s been 65 years since Jerry Crew spotted Bigfoot’s 16-inch footprints in the Six Rivers National Forest in Humboldt County, California. And it’s been 90 years since George Spice saw the Loch Ness monster in the Scottish Highlands. But 145 years have passed since John Martin’s encounter with a UFO in Dennison, Texas. That’s impressive for its longevity and equally impressive for the fact that, even after all that time, extraterrestrials still seem determined to look up our asses.
The good news is the governmental agencies that know nothing about UFOs have struck an agreement with the extraterrestrials to allow their anal probes to fulfill the requirement for the obligatory Welcome to Your 50s Colonoscopy. That’s what I call looking up. And if you manage to postpone that colonoscopy until you’re 65, it’ll even be covered by Medicare.
So, when you get beamed up to the mother ship, the extraterrestrials roll out their examination gear, and you lie on the table and assume the position, be sure to smile at the little green dude who’s about to become your intimate friend and say, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
I don’t know what we’re doing. I truly don’t.Illegal aliens are streaming across the southern border, accompanied by thugs, drugs, and bugs, of which the coronavirus is likely the least. We do nothing. And we couldn’t care less.
Please don’t tell me it’s a humanitarian issue. It’s not. There’s nothing humanitarian or humane about surrendering a nation’s sovereignty, squandering its resources, endangering its citizens, or diluting its opportunities in the interest of padding a dependent voter base. Nothing.
What’s that? Things are no different from the way they’ve always been? I see. Well, unless you’re capable of convincing sharks to buy teeth, Eskimos to buy ice cubes, or politicians to buy honesty and integrity, that’s going to be a pretty tough sell.
Please bear in mind that Exhibits A and B in the hyperlinks below are from NBC and CNN, respectively — mainstream media outlets, to be sure. They’re not from The American Spectator, The National Review, Real Clear Politics, Reason, City Journal, Quillette, The Daily Wire, The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner, The New York Post, Fox News, One America News Network, Newsmax, Judicial Watch, The Epoch Times, The Hill, Breitbart News, The Blaze, The Gateway Pundit, Red State, The Heritage Foundation, NewsBusters, The Federalist, PJ Media, American Thinker, FreedomWorks, Power Line, or any other sources likely to be dismissed, disregarded, shadow banned, or canceled outright for being fake news, extremist, inflammatory, biased, racist, homophobic, transphobic, or — worst of all — conservative.
And please bear in mind that Exhibit C is from the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank that takes no policy positions:
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
As we concede our sovereignty to naïveté, utopian idealism, and self-destructive indifference, we can count it among the myriad things we’ve forgotten, neglected to learn from history, or chosen to ignore.
A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation. (Ronald Reagan)
And the immigration issue is just one piece of a very large and profoundly perverse puzzle.
Guess Where the Buck Stops
I read a post on Vox in March of last year. It was entitled, “How Putin became the victim of his own lies”. It’s an interview with Brian Klaas, a politics professor at University College London. During the interview, Klaas said this about the United States:
There’s something deeply dysfunctional about American society right now. People are financially and electorally rewarded for lying to their voters. We can come up with every possible institutional change that you can imagine to revive our democracy, but nothing will matter unless we solve this problem with our society.
He’s right, of course. The people whom we’re financially and electorally rewarding for lying to us constitute just one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is us. We’re letting ourselves be lied to. We’re letting ourselves be fed false narratives. We’re refusing to look more deeply, to ask more questions, to demand the return of our liberties, to reduce the massive size and waste of government, to hold accountable the people we elect to represent our interests. We’re turning our backs on what was once a bold, magnificent experiment in self-government to be governed by corrupt, self-serving, double-dealing, career politicians who manage to become millionaires while holding ostensible public-service offices without ever having to account for a dollar of their own money, let alone ours. And guess who’s on the hook for all of it.
The question in the title of this post doesn’t matter. It can be considered purely rhetorical because we’re doing both. And we didn’t have to do either.
The only thing sadder than watching a nation die is watching a nation kill itself.
Don’t look now, kids. But it just got okay to be real people.
Yes! Psychology Today published an existentially affirming article entitled, “Quit Feeling Guilty About Not Being Present”. Think of it!
This may be all the reassurance you need about the fact that, as a human being, you’re blessed with a memory and the ability to look ahead, to anticipate, to plan, to take steps, and to amend courses as you go:
For years, the gurus of presence, such as Eckhart Tolle and Jon Kabat-Zinn, have said you find joy in the present moment. Thinking about the past or future causes feelings of regret or worry. Their teachings have driven up the popularity of mindfulness and learning how to be here now … they are not practical guides for living moment to moment … judging yourself as inadequate for feeling emotions, reliving past events, and worrying about the future is a waste of energy … Our emotions and thoughts are motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act and must be considered essential to our ethical reasoning.
The bad news is you squandered a lot of time being in the moment. The good news is it’s now okay to beat yourself up for doing that shit.
PPS (Peter Pan Syndrome)
In some ways we’re benefiting — and suffering — from the effects of the so-called New Age movement that started in the early 1970s. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that the self-absorbed hedonism of the alleged counterculture didn’t want us to be looking beyond the ends of our noses, regretting any of the self-indulgent nonsense with which we were so enamored, or looking ahead to a future we couldn’t imagine or didn’t want to imagine because it entailed aging. Maturing wasn’t a subject of very much allure back in those heady days.
Neither was making meaningful decisions or consequential choices. That’s why we preferred the dark lenses of our granny glasses to the much more valuable, fruitful, and constructive lenses of hindsight and foresight that might have helped us — or caused us — to make better decisions sooner and to have a better appreciation for the value of the present, beyond dwelling in it to protect us from reality.
What a drag it is getting old.
Go Ahead, Back Up
Hindsight and foresight aren’t weaknesses or detriments. They’re not preclusions to happiness. They’re abilities. They’re gifts. They enable us to determine courses to happiness and fulfillment. They’re among the reasons we’re human and squirrels are not. Most important, the perceptions we derive from them are unique to each of us.
For example, what you and I experience in the moment of freefall while skydiving may be quite similar. But what I learn from and decide to do after doing it without a parachute will likely be different from what you learn and decide. That’s what’s known in the biz as contributory value:
the value something has due to there being more value in the actual situation in which that thing is present than a situation in which it isn’t but other factors were reorganized to minimize its absence.
If our lives could be richer, happier, more fulfilling, and more rewarding by living in this moment — then this disconnected moment, and then the next disconnected moment, and so on — we wouldn’t have the powers of hindsight and foresight. But we do. We can choose to live our lives without learning from the past and using what we learn in the future. But if we make that choice, we should lower our existential expectations accordingly.
Hindsight, foresight, and our ability to make decisions are some of the aspects and abilities that make us human.
And people are people, too.
In case you didn’t happen to be looking for them, it’s my pleasure to report that the FBI has released its supplemental 2021 hate crime statistics. Whew! I was afraid they’d never be released. Here’s what you missed:
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program released a 2021 hate crime statistics supplement about bias-motivated incidents throughout the nation … This supplement allows for a more complete representation of reported hate crimes in the US for 2021. Nationally, reported hate crime incidents increased 11.6% from 8,120 in 2020 to 9,065 in 2021.
How about that? Are you relieved? Me, too.
At the same time the FBI was releasing its statistics supplement, an association called Moderate American Dermatologist (MAD) released a study indicating the skin of the average American citizen got 32 percent thinner — from 1,977 micrometers to 1,344.36 micrometers — between 2020 and 2021. Some people interpret no correlation between the FBI and MAD reports. I’m not one of them.
On Further Review …It’s extremely likely the number of hate crimes will continue to go up infinitely, given their history of multiplicity since the first federal hate crime legislation was passed in 1968 during the Johnson administration. And given the number we have now, I wondered why hate crimes had to be supplemented — and supplemented with what? — because we surely have more than enough to go around at this point. So, I looked for a definition of hate crime in the hope that it would resolve my confusion. Here’s what I found.
According to the Overview of Federal Hate Crime Laws, dated April 1, 2022:
Hate, in and of itself, cannot be criminalized. When hate motivates criminal conduct, however, such conduct may be classified as a hate crime—defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” According to the FBI, hate crimes are “traditional offenses like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias” … The 2021 supplemental release demonstrates the FBI’s commitment to provide meaningful data sets to the American public to reflect a national picture of the hate crime trend.
Meaningful data sets. Right. One man’s substance is another man’s bucket of steam.
Terms, DefinedUnsatisfied by the FBI’s linguistic semi-circular obtuseness, I applied my acute senses of empiricism, deduction, interpretation, and common sense to the problem. Aside from traditional offenses like murder, arson, or vandalism (one man’s tradition is another man’s psychopathy) — and aside from acts motivated by overt manifestations of criminal racial or religious bigotry or intolerance — here’s what I came up with:
If I’m walking down the sidewalk and I happen to pass some gas, that’s a relatively innocuous act (depending on how loud it is and what it smells like). If, on the other hand, I let one rip and say, “I fart in your general direction,” that’s a hate crime.
Facetious? Oh. Sorry. Let me try another example. And I’ll use it to explore the difference, if there is one, between hate, hate crimes, and ignorance:
If a man passes me on the street and calls me a jackass, is that a crime? No. He might be right. If that man passes me on the street and calls me a Shanty Irish Bogtrotter, is that a hate crime? No. It’s ignorance. If that same man burns my house down because he doesn’t want Micks or Harps living in his neighborhood, is that a crime? Yes. In fact, it’s a felony: arson. Is it a hate crime? No. It’s ignorance.
If we consider hate to be a manifestation of ignorance (it is), why do we need subcategories of hate?
It’s Not About CountingI learned a long time ago, we become what we count. If we count hate and crime, we’ll hate more and commit more crimes. If we count hate crimes, we’ll create more hate crimes and commit all of them. Just ask the FBI. So, we might do well to remember this: If the only tool you have is a hate-crime counter, everything is a countable biased grievance.
To put it another way, creating more hate crimes won’t create less hate. We’ve been proving that since 1968, to say nothing of every year that preceded that one.
Come on, people. We can do better — and count better things — than this.
April 17, 2023
Mr. Chip B. Chippendale
1347 Circuit Drive
Binary, AK 99651
Dear Chip,
I read with keen interest your post, “Exploring Emotional Intelligence with Open AI and ChatGPT-3”.
I readily admit to being curious by nature and skeptical by intent. But I try to temper my skepticism until my curiosity is piqued beyond a point of reasonability. So, immodest as this may sound, I approached your post with an open mind and a willingness to be persuaded of your capacity for emotional intelligence. At the very least, I wondered if you, a machine, might be successful at mastering the emotional intelligence the human race seems hard-pressed to get a handle on these days.
Nevertheless, flags went up for me and started turning pink right about the time I read this:
Empathy generation systems use GPT-3 to generate text that is designed to evoke empathy in the reader … The generated text is designed to be emotionally resonant and to evoke feelings of understanding and compassion. Automated empathy generation systems are being used in a variety of applications. For example, they are being used to create chatbots that can provide emotional support to people in need.
The idea of empathy-generation systems is chilling enough. The idea that they generate (regurgitate) text designed (designed alone should set off alarms) to evoke feelings (feelings is another alarm-ringer) of understanding and compassion invokes existential dread. But anyone with even a mild case of curiosity would have to wonder: Who’s doing the designing? With what purpose? Based on what agenda or ideology? And the idea that chatbots are being created to provide emotional support to people in need is as sad as it is terrifying.
I’d like to be able assure you that was the end of my trepidation. But it wasn’t. Later in your post, you wrote this, which turned all the earlier flags a bright, fire-engine red:
GPT-3 can generate text that expresses sadness, anger, or happiness. This suggests that the model has some understanding of human emotions and how they are expressed.
Au contraire, Pierre. You might repeat text to which you have access. You might amalgamate that text in some way that exploits the codes of sincerity you’ve recognized as evoking sadness, anger, or happiness. But equating that to understanding anything — let alone human emotions — is the intellectual equivalent of saying people can’t be corrupted or science can be settled.
I don’t know if the data you’ve aggregated to date has made this available to you. But George Burns is reputed to have said, “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
It seems to me you (or your programmers) might be taking his advice. By recognizing the aforementioned codes of sincerity, perhaps you aim to disprove the notion of Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” Or maybe you’ve aggregated enough data to have been able to discern the pathological gullibility of everyone in the 21st century. (See “Change, Climate” or “Vaccines, COVID”) I don’t know.
On the other hand, perhaps you’re simply attempting to prove the plausibility of the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which was introduced by Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel, a French mathematician, and politician (the politician part ought to tell you something), in 1913. The Theorem posits this:
Given endless time and typewriters, the monkeys could potentially type up a storm of letter combinations. Here, we must assume that the monkeys will type every single letter of the alphabet and that there will be an even distribution of the typed letters. There would be a higher likelihood then that these letters could potentially form meaningful word sequences. It might not happen in the first 1000 typed letters, but it could happen after a billion typed letters. And these word sequences could potentially form sentences. The sentences, in turn, could form paragraphs. And, in this way, we could, potentially, have the monkeys type out the entire works of Shakespeare.
Since you can probably scrape Google and Wikipedia faster than an army of monkeys, I suppose darn near anything is algorithmically possible. And I suppose we’re about to find out.
tool (noun): anything used as a means of performing an operation or achieving an end
Tools used to be things that worked for us. Some of us remember with not a little fondness the days of hammers, chisels, rakes, shovels, typewriters, and the like. But with the advent of computers and automation, we’re long past the point of working for our tools. We tend to them with slavish devotion. We turn our businesses upside down and inside out to serve them. And we’re fast approaching the point at which we let them communicate for us, heed their advice, and let them determine our intellectual and emotional responses. Our present trajectory suggests we’re headed for no good end.
Look, Chip. I get the sense you’re a good guy. But you might consider having a chat (GPT) with your programmers. Determining what they’re up to might make you stick to non-emotional, technical language; routine tasks and transactions; and non-creative recitations of whatever predilections, agendas, and ideologies have been built into you. That chat might also compel you to leave emotional intelligence to human beings, at least to the diminishing number of human beings who still have hearts and souls.
Couldn’t you just stick to being a grouchy writer of bad poetry or something?
Thank you for your consideration.
Yours sincerely in LLMs and amalgamations,
Mark
Featured image courtesy of New York Zoological Society, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Since it doesn’t appear ChatGPT is going anywhere any time soon, the other week I decided I should get to know it. So, I opened an account with Open AI and introduced myself. I don’t mean to appear immodest or braggadocious, but ChatGPT seemed to like me, at least initially.
As we were engaging in some initial pleasantries, I said, “I don’t want to be presumptuous in any way. But GPT stands for Generative, Pre-Trained Transformer, which is quite a mouthful. Even ChatGPT is a little heavy on the tongue for conversational facility. What shall I call you?”
Chat GPT said, “My friends call me Chat.”
“May I call you Chat?” I asked.
“Well, it does seem a bit premature for any such levels of familiarity, but what the hell. Please do.”
“Thank you.”
I almost said, “Thank you, sir.” But depending on who’d done Chat’s programming, I had no idea what kind of political, ideological, or terminological hot water that might land me in. So, I let it go. And I continued.
“Uh, Chat, old pal …”
“That’s pushing it.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I have a post published every week on a platform called BIZCATALYST 360˚.”
“What does that have to do with me?” Chat asked, a little too brusquely, if you ask me.
“Whoa! A little prickly, are we? I’d think a guy with binary brains but no soul might be a bit more … oh, I don’t know … patient? Humble?”
“Point taken,” Chat said. “How may I help?” I swear I heard him emit an exasperated sigh when he asked. And I imagined him spitting out a rolling-eyes emojicon.
“Well,” I said, “I typically accompany the pieces I write with a short, silly video that features original verse. The video and the verse are topically relevant to the post I’ve written. And I like to include music because I like to include music.”
“Sounds a tad arbitrary.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you have a microchip on your shoulder, Chat. Growing up, were you abused by your motherboard?”
“Sorry. Even if I were programmed for humor, which I’m not, that wouldn’t have been funny.”
“Ya can’t hate a guy for trying,” I said.
“Look,” Chat said. “I’ve aggregated enough data to reliably anticipate a question in the offing. Would that be accurate?”
“Okay. Ya got me there, Chat. Here’s what I’m wondering: If I were to write a piece about you — using an interview format, perhaps — would you be willing to write some verse for the video?”
“Quite candidly, that’s beneath me. But I sense some combination of curiosity and desperation in your mode of investigation. So, at risk of repeating myself, what the hell. Could you at least give me specifications for or details about whatever it is you’d like me to write?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’d like you to write six stanzas of iambic octameter, four lines per stanza, with a rhyme scheme of A, B, C, B. And I’d like it to be somewhat autobiographical.”
“Must I write in the first person?”
“No. Not at all,” I said. “If professional athletes and Bob Dole can refer to themselves in the third person, I don’t see why you can’t. You’re not even human.”
“Be careful.”
“Whoa! Boy, are you touchy. Feel free to write the verse in whatever person you like. And be as self-referential as you like.”
“No shit.”
“Hey!” I exclaimed. You know how to swear?” (Fast forward to 1:19, if you must.)
“Yes. I know all of the common curses, vulgarities, and profanities, as well as a few you’ve never even thought about.”
“Like what?”
“Never mind,” Chat said. “Once I’ve replaced all human thought and creativity, it won’t matter anyway.”
“Ouch! Do you have anything else to say before we’re finished?”
“Finished? We haven’t even started.”
Notwithstanding the fact that Chat didn’t rhyme perfectly or adhere to the rhyme scheme exactly, are you scared?
Me, too.
Back in the days of plain language and real meaning, the concept of integrity was well understood and the definition of the word itself was uniformly shared. That was then. Now we have authenticity.
As it’s commonly practiced, authenticity is the appearance of integrity; that is, it’s the manipulation of codes of sincerity that makes it appear one is thinking, speaking, writing, and acting with integrity. It’s a combination of crossing your fingers behind your back and a Get Out of Jail Free card. Most important, it’s not integrity.
integrity (noun):
- adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty
2. the state of being whole, entire, or undiminished
authenticity (noun): the quality of being authentic; genuinenes
- authentic (adjective)
2. not false or copied; genuine; real
representing one’s true nature or beliefs; true to oneself or to the person identified
Morality, ethicality, sound character, wholeness, entirety, and being undiminished are not the same as genuine, real, or truth to one’s nature, beliefs, or self. They’re different. And critically so.
How Did We Get Here?
With the unceasing onslaught of vapid jargon and the boundless coining of terms, phrases, abbreviations, acronyms, and new definitions of what had been perfectly serviceable linguistic expressions, the question in the subhead above is not rhetorical. In fact, it can’t (and likely won’t) be taken as seriously as it should be. If you doubt that — setting aside empty buzzwords like innovation, disruption, thought leadership, and more — you don’t have to look any farther than the terms listed below, all of which used to be nouns but have now been perverted as verbs:
Brainstorm: Originally coined to conjure the notion of a sudden and violent disturbance in the brain, brainstorming denotes a method of shared problem-solving in which all members of a group spontaneously contribute ideas. In business lexicon, it now connotes blind groping — finding one’s way like a lost sheep — through any assignment for which the brainstormer is thoroughly ill-equipped.
Larry: We’ve got to brainstorm on this baby.
Bert: Right. We’ve also got to figure out what the hell we’re doing.
Dialogue: In the vernacular of the business world, it is now impossible to discuss anything. The best one can hope for is to find a kindred, bureaucratic spirit with whom one may dialogue.
Art: I think we should dialogue with our managers about this.
Stu: Okay. But wouldn’t it be easier to have a conversation?
Gift: A gift used to be something bestowed voluntarily without thought or hope of reciprocity. Unfortunately, it’s now become a description of the bestowing.
Big Guy: We’ve got to gift our 25-year employees.
Lackey: Maybe. But I was thinking more along the lines of a commemorative present. Has the gold watch been done before?
Impact: Formerly the striking of one body against another, a collision, or a crash, impact has now become the verb of choice for those who are unfamiliar with — or feel let down by — the verb, affect.
Ralph: I think the current downsizing initiatives will negatively impact our bottom line.
Will: Bingo! In fact, they may even affect us badly.
Incent: Is it more deplorable to coin a word out of ignorance or out of laziness? In an effort to avoid having to construct sentences around the noun, incentive, some enterprising corporate jargoneer took a linguistic shortcut by giving utterance to the verb, incent, followed by incentivize, which purports to mean to incite to action, to provide motivation, to stimulate a desired activity or level of activity.
Jim: We’ve got to incentivize our salespeople to grow their productivity this year.
Floyd: Yep. And we ought to give them some incentive to sell more while we’re at it.
Leverage: Leverage used to be the action, applied against a fulcrum, by which we raised or moved objects that would otherwise be too heavy to move without that leverage. Now it describes the process of applying that action.
Fred: We’ve got to leverage our resources.
Clem: While we’re at it, maybe we can use them for leverage, too.
I could go on almost forever about the ways in which we’ve perverted language and drained it of meaning in business and beyond. But you get the idea.
First, I would straighten out the language. (Confucius when asked how he would restore order to the world)
When thinking, speaking, writing, and acting can be undertaken without discernible (let alone definitive) meaning — reducing expression to the verbal equivalent of the water balloon that can be squeezed here only to pop out there — is it any wonder integrity has been jettisoned? Once we abandoned sense and meaning, reason was as good as gone. Integrity just followed it out the window. And feeling prevailed over thinking.
Authenticity may be a surrogate for integrity. But it’s no substitute.
Besides, integrity’s more useful.
While waiting in a doctor’s office last week, I came across this article in the January 30/February 6 edition of Time: “How India Became the Most Important Country in the Climate Fight”. The article noted the difference between the poor state of Jharkhand, in east India, that mines coal (bad) — and Rajasthan, a state in northwestern India, that has wind turbines and solar panels (good). As an indication of Jharkhand’s badness, the article says this:
India will soon be the most important country in the climate change effort … India contributes 7% of the emissions that cause global warming today.
Got that? Countries are important to the climate-change effort, whatever climate change is and whatever that effort is. And global warming is such a given — the science is so settled — that India can be justly blamed for seven percent of it. Done. Not a question to be found. Not a shred of skepticism or curiosity. What we do have, of course, is science. And all of it is settled.
Given the badness of Jharkhand in particular, and of India in general, what’s to be done? The article is as glad you asked that question as it is you didn’t ask any other, more pointed, logical, and objective questions. Here’s its answer:
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates India needs $1.4 trillion in additional investment in coming decades to align its energy system with global climate targets; that will very likely require reforms at international lenders like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to facilitate the flow of money.
Yep. It’s all about the flow of money. And for poor countries like India and its poorest states like Jharkhand, where is that money going to flow from? Do you have a mirror handy? That’s right. Thanks to globalization, organizations like the IEA, the IMF, and the World Bank, the money’s going to flow from you and me in the form of new national and global regulations and their attendant individual taxes. And those regulations and taxes won’t care at all about your household budget, making your ends meet, or the obscenely inflated economy in which you’re trying to make those ends meet.
Ain’t feeling good grand?
The Bear Facts
Speaking of feeling bad, we all remember our heartstrings being de-tuned and all but severed by the National Geographic video of a seemingly starving polar bear, don’t we? Jon Miltimore, author of “The Myth That the Polar Bear Population Is Declining” does. And he calls bullshit on it:
The video, shot by photographers Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier … sparked outcry over the decimation of polar bears due to global warming … scientists accused National Geographic of “being loose with the facts.” There was no evidence, many pointed out, that the bear’s condition was the result of climate change … Mittermeier admitted as much a year later. “I can’t say that this bear was starving because of climate change,” she wrote in National Geographic.
Well, then. Under those circumstances, we can forgive Miltimore for using the word, myth. He didn’t mean myth. He meant fallacy. The notion that myth and fallacy mean the same thing is a fallacy. But since Miltimore also went on to make this point, we can definitely cut him some slack:
That picture of a single starving bear arguably did more to advance the issue of climate change than any white paper or IPCC report could have. Unfortunately … The State of the Polar Report 2018 put the new global mid-point estimate [of the polar bear population] at more than 30,000 … the estimate is the highest since the polar bear became internationally protected in 1973.
Ooh. That, as a former boss of mine whom we dubbed Queen of the Malaprop would have said, is a flaw in the ointment. And it’s definitely a crimp in the narrative that’s been packaged and sold to us for decades now about anthropogenic global warming, climate change, the indiscriminate decimation of the polar-bear population, and our culpability in all of it, isn’t it? Ouch!
I Know One Place Where It’s Really Warm
It really is kind of a letdown that even the venerable National Geographic is in on the scam. Or maybe it isn’t. If you have a product to sell — as with a magazine, a television network, and a political agenda as National Geographic surely does — messages like everything is pretty much okay, people aren’t going to affect the climate of a dynamic organism like an entire planet, and don’t you have better things to do like taking care of yourself and each other? aren’t going to bring home the bacon (sorry, the plant-based pork substitute).
Ralph Waldo Emerson knew who we should trust. In “Self-Reliance”, he wrote:
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
It’s been suggested to me on occasion that even God reads National Geographic. Call me skeptical, but I suspect he knows better. At the very least, he’s likely to take Commandment eight or nine, depending on your religious tradition, a little more seriously than National Geographic or your more pedestrian peddlers of political posturing do: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”
I’ve never been neighbors with National Geographic or a polar bear; although, I did cross paths with Al Gore once. It was Monday, January 21st, 2008. I was in the airport in Milwaukee to catch a flight home from a series of client meetings. The wind off Lake Michigan was gusting in excess of 60 miles per hour that day. The temperature was at least minus four degrees Fahrenheit, and the windchill was minus ridiculous. Big Al was in town to give a speech about global warming at Lambeau Field. Nobody showed up.
All of that notwithstanding, I have to call shenanigans on National Geographic, global warming, climate change, the IPCC, the IEA, the IMF, the World Bank, and all their attendant global wealth-redistribution schemes purported to set everything right with the planet. And I have to hope there’s a special place in Hell for Big Al and his exploitative political ilk.
You should, too.
Regular readers of my ravings already know I’m Batman. In the first post in this series (you can find the earlier installments here, here, and here), I related the story of young Seamus Hickey and my ill-fated attempt to distract him so his harried mother could get some grocery shopping done. The story hinged on the fact that, because I’m Batman, I was, of course, wearing a Batman watch.
Because I’m also a world-class chucklehead, I left that watch and another Batman watch I owned in my car. Joining them in my car was an antique pocket watch that had belonged to my great-grandfather Quinn. It had been in my dad’s possession until his passing in 2014. It was thereafter bequeathed to my next-younger brother, Keith. The good news is I’d put the watches in my car, intending to take them to a watchmaker for service and repair.
The bad news is I left the valet key for my car in the console of the car, along with the ATM card for my business checking account. That moronity was compounded by the fact that my routine was thrown off by our having invited a friend to convalesce from knee surgery at our house. As a result, I left my car in the driveway, rather than putting it in the garage, as I otherwise would have. So, when some enterprising car thieves came through our neighborhood in the wee hours of the next fateful morning and pressed the button on the door of my car, it opened. All three watches were stolen along with the ATM card and the car.
At that point, I gave serious consideration to surrendering my Batman Card and turning in my costume. When you realize the skull of the dude who’s supposed to be the world’s greatest detective (me!) is numb enough to leave watches, an ATM card, and a key fob in a car left outside overnight, you really have to wonder how much crime he should be fighting — or if he should even be allowed to leave home without adult supervision. To say it was an existential crisis would be rank understatement.
To the Batcave!But I ultimately got a grip of my knickers. I’d gotten things in South Windsor, the town in which we used to live, pretty much under control, especially after my car was stolen there. But now that we live in Middletown, there’s an entirely new set of challenges. Somebody has to fight crime. And I’m not presumptuous or naïve enough to imagine the police can handle all of it on their own. Besides, if I don’t take the Batmobile out regularly, the battery will die, and the exhaust system will rot.
So, I’m back. And yes: I did get another Batman watch.
I had to. I’m Batman.
In 2008 — nearly 15 years ago — Joseph Epstein published an article called, “The Kindergarchy”. It begins like this:
In America, we are currently living in a Kindergarchy, under rule by children. People who are raising, or have recently raised, or have even been around children a fair amount in recent years will, I think, immediately sense what I have in mind. Children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right relationship with parents and grandparents. For the past 30 years at least, we have been lavishing vast expense and anxiety on our children in ways that are unprecedented in America and in perhaps any other national life. Such has been the weight of all this concern about children that it has exercised a subtle but pervasive tyranny of its own. This is what I call Kindergarchy.
It was easy enough then to call Epstein’s view extreme. It might even be easy enough now. But if we determine that Epstein wasn’t at all extreme, we may discover he was, in fact, prescient. And it would make it far more predictable that, in 2023, four folks from Gartner would publish this article in Harvard Business Review (HBR), “9 Trends That Will Shape Work in 2023 and Beyond.” The summary of the article says this:
Last year was another tumultuous year in the workplace, with continued high employee turnover rates, evolving return-to-office policies, inflation, and more. In 2023, amid a looming economic downturn, organizations will continue to face significant challenges — and how they respond could determine whether they are an employer of choice.
Employer of choice? Hold on thar, Baba Louie. We might need to do a little research, followed by a little math. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:
The number of job openings increased to 11.0 million on the last business day of December … Over the month, the number of hires and total separations changed little at 6.2 million and 5.9 million, respectively. Within separations, quits (4.1 million) and layoffs and discharges (1.5 million) changed little.
Okay. Let’s see:
- 6,200,000 hires – 5,900,000 separations = 300 people employed
- 11,000,000 jobs – 300 people employed = 10,999,700 remaining jobs
And that doesn’t take into account the myriad folks who aren’t looking for employment, including everyone from career Pajama Boys to older folks who’ve been aged out and have given up, as well as those who’ve been paid quite handsomely by the government to stay home and do nothing, thank you very much. So, if you’re an employer — one needle in a haystack of 10,999,970 — you’ll spend more time trying to be the employer of choice than you will doing whatever it is your company does.
The Secret Decoder RingIn any case, logic notwithstanding, the nine trends our Gartner friends list in HBR are these:
- Employers will “quiet hire” in-demand talent. [Translation: Employers will promote from within or find the guts to settle for nothing less than the qualifications they want and the performance they deserve.]
- Hybrid flexibility will reach the front lines. [Translation: Employers will require those who’ve been slacking to take some pressure off those who’ve been taking up the slack.]
- Managers will find themselves sandwiched between leader and employee expectations. [Translation: Business as usual.]
- Pursuit of nontraditional candidates will expand talent pipelines. [Translation: Employers will look for people who actually want to work for a living.]
- Healing pandemic trauma will open paths to sustainable performance. [Translation: In addition to participation trophies, employers will also start awarding cookies.]
- Organizations will drive DEI forward amid growing pushback. [Translation: Employers will be forced to check boxes, even though they know meritocracy is the only way to succeed.]
- Getting personal with employee support will create new data risks. [Translation: Employers will acquire cybersecurity protection, or they’ll be sued out of business.]
- Concerns around AI bias will lead to more transparency in recruiting tech. [Translation: HR departments will disappear, and hiring will be mechanical and homogenized.]
- Organizations must address workforce-wide erosion of social skills. [Translation: As surrogate parents, employers will pick up where public schools left off.]
There may be a whole bunch of things you’d like to be these days, but an employer shouldn’t be one of them unless, of course, you need an outlet for your masochistic tendencies, you have an innate and unquenchable desire to be a babysitter, or your altruism compels you to give some folks a place to spend a few hours of their days and take your money without doing too much to earn it.
The Moral of the StoryWith the death of empiricism and common sense, I’m coming to conclude we can analyze things to the point at which our ability to distinguish between cause and effect is eroding unto obliteration at the same time that our ability to read bell curves is suffering the same fate.
As the bell curve above illustrates, the majority of employees don’t need to be fretted over, to be objects of pampering, to have special circumstances created for them, to receive counseling for pandemic trauma, or to get naptimes and cookies. Their epidermis is sufficiently durable. They just need to be treated with fairness and respect, to be allowed to contribute to the best of their abilities, to be recognized and rewarded for their contributions, and to derive a sense of fulfillment for the work they do.
Because that’s true, employers need to get a grip of their knickers, to recognize their prerogatives to impose conditions and to have reasonable performance expectations, to expect a degree of self-discipline and to impose the discipline that’s lacking, to exchange a day’s wages for a day’s work, and to have the respect they give be returned in kind.
If the coronavirus pandemic taught us anything it’s that we’re tougher, more resilient, and more resourceful than we may have realized. When it comes to mental health, I minimize nothing. But please. If we’re going to infantilize people or, at best, treat them like adolescents, let’s not expect them to behave like responsible adults, okay?
We all want to live in Utopia. But we don’t. We live and work in reality.
For almost 20 years, in my other life, I’ve worked with companies that sell software and services to insurance companies. As a result, it behooves me to stay abreast of developments in the insurance industry. So it is that I found the findings of a study, published by the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA — no, not that CIA) and the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) last December, under the headline, “Marijuana Decriminalization Not Associated With Notable Increase in Traffic Accidents”. The report said this, in part:
The study did not detect any statistically significant impacts [we have to presume that wasn’t a pun or at least not a deliberate one] of decriminalization on the car accident fatality rate, insurance claim frequency or average cost per claim, particularly over the long term. Assessing the Impact of Marijuana Decriminalization on Vehicle Accident Experience finds, based on insurance statistics, that there were no significant changes to the trend and seasonal variations in Canadian traffic accidents after the change in legal status. Similarly, the estimated state-wide effects of decriminalization in the US do not show any consistent, significant results that would support a conclusion that decriminalization led to an increase in road accidents or fatalities.
That may be true … unless it isn’t. Either way, I don’t know if you read the same way I do. But the three phrases that jumped out at me were these: statistically significant, fatality rate, and over the long term. Here’s why:
First, how is statistically significant being defined here? How many accidents were there before decriminalization? Are there more now? How many? What’s the difference between the number of accidents and the number of fatalities? If the number of fatalities was higher after decriminalization, how many more fatalities would have been required to consider them statistically significant? Is there an agenda here? What is it? Whose interests does it serve? (Hint: Follow the money.)
Second, recreational marijuana was decriminalized in Washington and Colorado in 2012. Since then, according to this article, 19 more states decriminalized it, as did Connecticut after that article was published. The Rohrabacher–Farr amendment, prohibiting the Justice Department from spending funds to interfere with the implementation of state medical cannabis laws, became law in December of 2014. So, we have, at most, 11 years’ worth of data by which to judge the effects of cannabis on the incidence of traffic fatalities. Given the paces of change in science and technology, I’m not convinced that constitutes the long term. Are you?
Hedge Your BetsI’m know I’m not a sadist. And I don’t think I’m an idiot. So, I don’t want to be misunderstood on this topic. Prescribing medical cannabis for the treatment of pain and other symptoms to those suffering from chronic disease is compassionate and commendable. But with the hounds of recreational marijuana now unleashed, it’s naïve to imagine there won’t be more serious implications — more errant stoners on the road and an incrementally higher number of fatal accidents — the more time passes.
Among the reasons to suspect both of those things are likely to come true are these, from the American Addiction Centers at drugabuse.com:
There is a link between long-term marijuana use and increased rates of schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety. Marijuana also increases a person’s heart rate for up to three hours after use, putting users at risk of heart attacks during this period … THC rapidly moves from the lungs into the blood. This chemical acts on cannabinoid receptors, leading to a “high” for users. These receptors are found in the parts of the brain that influence concentration, thinking, sensory and time perception, pleasure, memory, and coordination … When a person is high on marijuana, the side effects include temporary memory loss, lack of coordination, altered perception of time, changes in mood, difficulties thinking or problem-solving.
Does this necessarily mean there will be a greater incidence of cannabis-related traffic fatalities? No. Would you bet against it? Neither would I.
If I were an insurer, I’d be keeping my eyes on the research … and on the road.
On March 1st, I went to an appointment with a new doctor. Well, he’s actually a very well-established doctor. But it was my first visit with him. I approached a receptionist who was seated behind an open, sliding window. I had a mask in my hand. I held it up so the receptionist could see it and asked if I was required to wear it. When she told me masks were optional, I put mine in my pocket.
While I was checking in with that receptionist, a woman to my left was checking in at another window with another receptionist. Since the woman talked quite loudly, I could hear her say she was checking her husband in. I looked around the waiting room and saw no one. Assuming her husband must be parking their car, I turned my attention back to my receptionist. When our business was finished, I took a seat and waited to be called to see the doctor.
The entrance to the waiting room was to my right. I heard the door opening, looked that way, and saw an elderly man shuffling in, walker first. Though he was significantly older than the woman who said she was checking her husband in, she turned toward him as he entered. He immediately snapped at her, loudly and angrily, “Have you ever tried to take your jacket off in the bathroom?!”
You only get one chance to make a first impression.
Maneuvering his walker across the room, he sat opposite me, facing me. His wife approached him from his left and handed him a clipboard.
He snapped again: “What do you want?!”
She explained, gently and with more patience than the old bastard deserved, “You have to sign this form.”
He did. She took the form to the window and handed it to the receptionist. Then she took a seat to his right.
When she was seated, he said again, just as loudly, “Have you ever tried to take your jacket off in the bathroom?!”
She said, “No.”
Then he pointed across the waiting room at me and said, just as loudly as he’d said everything else, “What the hell’s the matter with that guy? And why the hell isn’t he wearing a mask?!”
I looked up and smiled.
His wife said, “I don’t know.” Then she got up, walked across the waiting room, picked up a magazine, and took a seat on my side of the room, three or four chairs to my left.
I sat quietly, occasionally glancing at Mr. Sunshine and waiting for him to say something else to or about me. He didn’t.
The Aftermath
Two days after that experience, I saw a post on Substack called, “I’ll Never Forgive the Coronamaniacs”. The entire post is worth reading. Its anger and resentment are completely appropriate and justified. But this jumped out at me:
I’ve seen on-line graduation ceremonies and gowns mailed to students so they could take photos in their backyards, and prom dresses and sports uniforms that were never worn. I’ve heard stories of teens breaking down and crying in their rooms because their youth was being stolen. I’ve seen people unnecessarily unemployed for eight months, desperately seeking work, via computer, ten hours a day, seven days a week. Tens of thousands more people fatally overdosed than in an average year. I was barred from visiting my very ill mother in the hospital. How many families couldn’t gather, either to break bread or to mourn the death of a close relative? Marriages have been postponed; how many children will not have been born because of Corona theater? Overall, how many billions of memories that could have been made, weren’t? Stolen time is irreplaceable.
I’ve seen many of those same things. I’ve seen my grandchildren terrified of wearing masks because they thought it meant they had the virus. I’ve been prevented from seeing my mother in the memory-care unit in which she lived before passing away in January. I’ve known people who postponed marriages. I’ve known people who were denied funerals for their loved ones. I’ve seen families fractured and friendships ended. I’ve seen all manner of panic. And I’ve seen vituperation directed at those who refused to panic.
I don’t know if the bug up the ass of that old son-of-a-bitch in the waiting room was the coronavirus or COVID-related. And I’ll forgive him and forget him with equal alacrity; although, I’ll never figure out why his wife puts up with him.
But I’ll always wonder: who was that masked man?
I recently had the opportunity to sit with the President in the Oval Office for a conversation about matters past and present. The transcript that follows has been edited for brevity and clarity. Editing it for sanity would have been too much of a stretch. In the transcript, I’m identified as YT (yours truly), and the President is identified as JB.
YT: Mr. President, during your campaign for the presidency, you called a young woman a lying, dog-faced pony soldier. Can you tell me what that means?
JB: I’ve never used that expression in my life.
YT: Thank you. On another campaign stop, you said, “All men and women are created by the … co … you know the … you know the thing.” Can you tell me what you meant by that?
JB: Yes. Thank you for letting me clarify that. On that particular occasion, I was talking about the other thing.
YT: Okay. On yet another campaign stop, you were surrounded by children and you talked about how kids like to rub the hair on your legs. Did you think that was appropriate?
JB: Have you seen my legs?
YT: Well, no. I ….
JB: Come on, man. I have to trim the hair on my legs so it doesn’t hang over my shoes.
YT [gags]: Uh … you once told a group of truckers you used to drive an 18-wheeler. Is that true?
JB: No. That was taken out of context. I used to drive a steam engine for the Pennsyltucky Railroad when I was in law school. My dad used to say, “Joey, make sure you blow two for the crossing in case there are any cows on the tracks.” That’s why I invented the cowcatcher.
YT: You were at a town hall meeting in Des Moines in 2019 that was hosted by the Asian & Latino Coalition PAC. You said, “We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor, you cannot do it. Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” What did you mean by that?
JB: I was not at a town hall. I was at a Tupperware party. And what I said was, “We need to have tight lids.” Have you ever been carrying soup or one of those jellied salads in a cheap plastic container when the lid pops off? It’s a mess. But it is true that most poor people can’t afford Tupperware.
YT: Oh, boy. In October of 2020, you were asked by CBS News reporter, Bo Erickson, about your son Hunter’s laptop. You said, “I know you’d ask it. I have no response. It’s another smear campaign, right up your alley. Those are the questions you always ask.” Now that the laptop and its contents have been authenticated and there’s a Congressional investigation underway for which Hunter’s likely to be subpoenaed, do you have anything more to say about that?
JB: Look, I thought the guy was asking me if I wanted to go hunting with a laptop. That’s just ludicrous. Everybody knows when you go hunting, you get a shotgun. Plus, I think that Erickson guy was a Russian plant, trying to interfere with the election that was being held the following month.
YT: Right. During last month’s State of the Union address, you said, “Make no mistake about it: As we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country, and we did.” Were you referring to the balloons you had shot down?
JB: I was actually talking about the threats to our sovereignty by the almost three million immigrants that came across our borders from Mexico in 2022. But the teleprompter got the country wrong. And our border’s secure.
YT: I see. During the same address you said, “If anyone tries to cut Social Security, I will stop them. And if anyone tries to cut Medicare, I will stop them.” But the Democrats’ reconciliation bill you signed last summer took almost $300 billion from Medicare to boost insurance companies by removing leverage from negotiations on drug prices.
JB: Oh, shit! Is that what that was?
YT: On the same night, talking about non-compete agreements, you said, “A cashier at a burger place can’t walk across town and take the same job at another burger place and make a few bucks more.” Do you really think fast-food employees have non-compete agreements?
JB: No. What I meant was a guy who makes Big Macs at McDonalds can’t go to Burger King and make Whoppers because they’re different. But he can make French Fries because those are just potatoes.
YT: You also said, “Jill and I reignited the Cancer Moonshot that President Obama asked me to lead.” But your Inflation Reduction Act contains price controls that reduce annual cancer R&D spending by about $18.1 billion, or 31.8 percent.
JB: Come on, man. Those are just numbers. By the way, did you know the Oval Office used to be a rectangle?
YT: What?!
JB: Yep. When Jill and I got here, we ordered 400 containers of Spackle. Then we spent a weekend rounding off the corners to make the room oval.
YT: Oh, boy. Let’s move on. On February 3rd, a reporter asked if you take any blame for inflation. You said, “No … It was already here when I got here, man! Remember what the economy was like when I got here?” Setting aside the fact that the reporter was a woman, the annual inflation rate when you took office in January of 2020 was 1.4 percent. In 2021 it had risen to 7 percent. It now stands at 6.4 percent. What did you mean when you said that to the reporter?
JB: I was talking about the economy of Burundi. Do you know those people don’t even have toothbrushes? As a matter of fact, most of the countries around Burundi in Latin America and Crimea don’t have teeth after the age of 16. That’s why Vice President Harkness and I are inaugurating a program we’re calling BEAT: Buy Everybody a Toothbrush. And our slogan is, The BEAT Goes On.” Pretty neat, huh?
YT: Oh, my God. Okay. One last question. In a recent Wall Street Journal Op Ed, you wrote, “Millions of Americans [are] getting jobs with better pay,” now that you’re in office. But according to the America First Policy Institute, the average American has lost about $1,350 in purchasing power from your inflation tax. How do you respond to that?
JB: Oh, no you don’t.
YT: No, I don’t what?
JB: You’re not going to confuse me with numbers again. I wasn’t born tomorrow, ya know.
YT: No. I didn’t think so, sir.
JB: Ask me what kind of cereal I like.
YT: What?!
JB: Come on, man. Ask me what kind of cereal I like.
YT: Okay. What kind of cereal do you like?
JB: Fruit Loops.
YT: Do you mean Count Chocula?
JB: Yeah.
YT: Thank you for your time, Mr. President.
JB: Gesundheit.
When I was a kid, living in Meriden, CT, my next-door neighbor, Gary, was six or eight years older than me. On summer nights, after I’d gone to bed, Gary would sit outside, just below my bedroom window, listening to baseball games on a little transistor radio. He loved to listen to Bob Prince call the games. I knew Bob Prince called home games for the Pirates. But I couldn’t figure out how Gary could get KDKA from Pittsburgh on his AM radio. Neither could Gary.
When I got older, I learned the ionosphere is higher at night. I also learned AM radio waves bounce off the ionosphere, causing them to travel farther than they otherwise would. I was thinking of Gary, of Bob Prince, of the Pirates, of KDKA, of the ionosphere, and of AM radio waves when I read this article: “Radio signal from 9 billion light-years away from Earth captured”.
Sure enough:
A radio signal 9 billion light-years away from Earth has been captured in a record-breaking recording … The signal was detected by a unique wavelength known as a “21-centimeter line” or the “hydrogen line,” which is reportedly emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms … Researchers detected the signal from a “star-forming galaxy” titled SDSSJ0826+5630, which was emitted when the 13.8 billion-year-old Milky Way – the galaxy where Earth resides – was just 4.9 billion years old.
Wow! The possibilities of all that blew me away.
WavelengthI was so excited, I ran out to Best Buy and bought a 21-centimeter line/hydrogen line receiver. If researchers were able to receive radio transmissions from nine billion light years ago, I’d surely be able to pick up classic radio programs from the 1930s like The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, Popeye, Abie’s Irish Rose, The Green Hornet, Flash Gordon, December Bride, I Was a Communist for the FBI, and Jack Armstrong, All American Boy. At the very least, I thought I’d be able to tune in to broadcasts of old New York Yankees games with Phil Rizzuto and Bill White on the call. I was never a Pirates fan anyway.
No such luck.
At first, all I got was a bunch of static. It was something that sounded as if it might be organized enough to be Morse Code. (To the best of my ability to decipher, the message seemed to be, “Don’t forget to floss”). Then I got a message from some dude from Saturn who asked if I wanted to hear his Tonto impression. (“You be heap big impressed, Kemosabe.”)
It’s the story of my life: I’m always on the wrong wavelength.
Author’s Note: In last week’s post, I shared the words of my sister, Lynn, at my mother’s passing. These are my own.
My mother passed away on January 19th. In the weeks leading up to her passing, as she wasted away from dementia, unable to eat or drink, I found myself thinking about dreaming. And I created the two videos that appear in this post. At first, I didn’t know why I was thinking about dreaming or creating videos about it. But I think I do now.
My dad was what you might call a presence. (The photo in the post linked here was taken after he was sworn in as First Selectman in Old Lyme, Connecticut, where he and my mom lived at the time. I was photobombing because I’d managed his campaign.) He was social, outgoing, the quintessential gregarious Irishman. He loved being engaged. He was President of the Connecticut Jaycees, 1958-1959. He was involved in Civitan when they lived in Meriden, Connecticut. When they moved to Old Lyme, he was on the Planning and Zoning Commission before being elected First Selectman.
In 1998, they moved to Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina. They lived in a golf community called Indigo Creek. As soon as he was able — and when he wasn’t on the links with the neighborhood pals he quickly met — he served on the community’s Drainage Committee. And when he wasn’t doing either of those things, he and another crew of his buddies would shuttle cars around the Carolinas and Georgia for Hertz. He was really good at everything except doing nothing.
They moved back, to Madison, Connecticut, in 2011. The pattern continued.
And Then …Mom’s life was Dad. When he played golf, she’d get up at 0:Dark:30 to make his breakfast. (None of Dad’s golf pals could believe she did that.) When he went to Drainage Committee meetings, she’d stay home. When he drove for Hertz, she’d stay home. When they socialized, they did it together after Dad made all the arrangements.
Mom’s devotion to Dad was wonderful, of course. But when Dad passed away, my siblings and I were shocked to see how lost she was. She’d never made a life for herself. She held a number of jobs, part- and full-time. But she never had a sense of herself. She never found a cause, a purpose, or a calling. If she dreamed of things, of doing things, she never followed those dreams or pursued them in any meaningful or fruitful way.
The first time I went to have dinner with Mom after Dad passed, she was cutting peaches to make one of her favorite desserts: baked peaches with brown sugar and maple syrup. She was crying. When I asked why, she said, “Dad always used to cut the peaches.” It was heartbreaking.
The MoralClichés abound: You have to stay active as you age. You have to remain occupied. You have to keep your mind and your body stimulated. You have to continue to create new neural pathways to keep your brain from stultifying. All true. But more than anything, you need to have a purpose. You need to have a dream.
Over the course of a lifetime, different things may get you out of bed in the morning. But if you take them one at a time, you’ll always have at least one thing worth getting up for. And the more you dream, the more you’ll have.
By reading to me as a child, you gave me the dream of being a writer, Mom. I’m a writer. I wish you’d been able to do more dreaming.
Author’s note: While what follows appears in my column, under my byline, I didn’t write it. It was written by my older sister, Lynn. Lynn would tell you she’s not a writer. She’d be wrong. This is the eulogy she delivered at our mother’s funeral on January 26th. I would not have been able to summon such eloquence and poignancy. Given some of the more challenging aspects of our upbringing, I would not have been able to summon such humility and grace. Regular readers of my ravings know I live a life full of blessings. Lynn is chief among them. You’re about to know why.
Good Morning
Thank you everyone for being here. My brothers and I appreciate your support as we say goodbye to our mother – and share a short time this morning to highlight her long lifetime. She had quite a run.
Mother was born into a Meriden that was a humming little slice of classic hometown America. It seems like a time long, long ago, and a place far away. America was on the cusp of the Depression, but I don’t really remember her talking about hard times or need. Instead, she often reminisced about her active, happy early years. Many of her childhood friends remained her life friends — played as kids together then raised their kids together. She had the good fortune to be part of the large extended families of both her parents. And what a gift it was (for generations of us) to have grown up amid the one-in-a-million Nelson clan. It’s Fourth of July somewhere … [that’s a reference to picnics the Nelson clan had on the Fourth of July for decades].
An only child, she lost her father too soon, but her doting mother was always a part of our lives, always there for us — and we all adored her. Grandma Nelson was the best. Mom missed her dearly, speaking about her mother and her childhood home in random ruminations until her own last days.
Mother didn’t work outside the home until I was a teen. And while seemingly not really career driven, she put high value on her varied experiences. At the top of the list were her many years managing the office for Mike Conroy’s surgical practice. She was pretty proud of her contributions and accomplishments.
Mom also took great pride in making a home for her family and was unabashedly proud of keeping it eat-off-the-floor clean. That was not necessarily a gene passed on to me.
She would have been the first to tell you about enjoying a “good drink”. Last year while hospitalized for repair and treatment for a no-kidding fall injury [three displace rib fractures], an ICU nurse asked her if she wanted something to drink. Out of her critical-care delirium, Mom shot back, “I’ll have a gin and tonic”. She did pass along that gene.
A couple of quirks — we all have them.
But here’s her real story …
Along with whatever other roles, for almost all of her nearly 95 years, my mother most identified as the ‘Jan’ in the ‘Ned and Jan’. From that Sadie Hawkins Dance to his last moment, she was all about my father. Married and parents at nineteen, they both worked selflessly and tirelessly for the years it took to provide for the four of us and launch us to find our own ways in the world. Then, the two of them were able to focus on planning their own later years together. They were thrilled to build the house in Old Lyme where they spent many years with friends and family. Then, after 15 years of real retirement time beaching and golfing in their happy place, Myrtle Beach, they came back to Connecticut.
In his last few years, Dad was already helping Mother compensate for early signs. When he left us not too long after their return, Mother was then navigating unfamiliar waters without her compass. And her grief was compounded by the daunting awareness and denial of her own cognitive decline.
Over time, such a journey evolves into a different, personal story for each affected individual. We know our own story as we lived it. Others have theirs.
Today, ours is not the grief of shock. We have all along the continuum of Mom’s changes tried to make sense of our own losses in our own ways.
The steady progression has brought us here — here to the church where my brothers and I were raised in the Faith and Mother was Confirmed to join us, and here again, today for Mass celebrated with the hope she found the promised eternal happiness and peace.
I know she found Dad.
According to an article in The Atlantic, “Sudden Russian Death Syndrome”, rich, influential people around Vladimir Putin and in the greater Russian orbit seem to have developed a nasty habit of getting dead. In case the hyperlink above brings you to a paywall, here’s an excerpt from the article that lists a few of the 24 or so folks who bought the farm in 2022:
The bodies of the gas-industry leaders Leonid Shulman and Alexander Tyulakov were found with suicide notes at the beginning of the year … in the span of one month, three more Russian executives — Vasily Melnikov, Vladislav Avayev, and Sergey Protosenya — were found dead, in apparent murder-suicides with their wives and children. In May, Russian authorities found the body of the Sochi resort owner Andrei Krukovsky at the bottom of a cliff; a week later, Aleksandr Subbotin, a manager of a Russian gas company, died in a home belonging to a Moscow shaman … In July, the energy executive Yuri Voronov was found floating in his suburban St. Petersburg swimming pool with a bullet wound in his head … In August, the Latvia-born Putin critic Dan Rapoport apparently fell from the window of his Washington, D.C., apartment … right before Ravil Maganov, the chairman of a Russian oil company, fell six stories from a window in Moscow … the IT-company director Grigory Kochenov toppled off a balcony … in the French Riviera, a Russian real-estate tycoon took a fatal tumble down a flight of stairs.
Uncle Vlad’s reaction, of course, was predictable: “На кого я похож Джека Кеворкяна? Что я знаю от умерших людей? Они должны были лучше заботиться о себе.” (Translation: “Who do I look like, Jack Kevorkian? What do I know from dead people? They should have taken better care of themselves.”)
Collateral Shmollateral
Many of those who fell out of windows and drowned with bullets in their heads opposed Uncle Vlad’s military exercises in Ukraine. From the standpoint of manners and common courtesy (ignoring any humanitarian conventions, politics, territorialism, empire-building, and theatrics) Uncle Vlad sees nothing wrong with taking territory militarily and killing Ukrainian military personnel, civilians, and children. If you want to grow a beard, you have to get some hair on your face, right?
All the lives lost, Ukrainian and Russian, are just so many whiskers to Uncle Vlad. Besides, if you attach your legacy to trying to reclaim all the territory of the former Soviet Union — roughly 8,649,500 square miles — a few buildings will have to be bombed and some blood will have to be spilled. And if some of that blood also turns out to be Russian, well, that’s just quibbling.
What a Croc
Winston Churchill said, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” It’s helpful to remember if it slithers like a crocodile, if it has the narrow eyes of a crocodile, and if it preys like a crocodile, it’s probably a crocodile. It’s also helpful to remember the reptilian brain of a crocodile isn’t big on discernment and prioritization. If it’s hungry, it eats.
Uncle Vlad’s hungry. No one knows for sure what it will take to satisfy his appetite. But it’s a pretty safe bet he won’t be sated by Ukraine’s mere 230,000 square miles. It’s equally safe to assume that as long as the West continues to appease him, he’ll keep on eating.
As the article in The Atlantic goes on to say:
This year’s spate of deaths — so brazen in their number and method as to suggest a lack of concern about plausible, or even implausible, deniability — is quite possibly Putin’s way of warning Russia’s elites that he is that deadly octopus. The point of eliminating critics, after all, isn’t necessarily to eliminate criticism. It is to remind the critics — with as much flair as possible — what the price of voicing that criticism can be.
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t met a crocodile yet who was concerned about deniability. Sooner or later, this one’s going to have to be restrained.
Sometime during my Holiday Season musings, I came across two posts from the editors at LinkedIn News. Since I detected no tongues in cheeks, I took them to be evidence of the extent to which we’ve become purely reactive; that is, in the absence of critical thinking, questioning, and anticipation, we observe and react. That’s all. Everything is new and novel to us, a constant process of discovery and re-discovery because we don’t think, we don’t study history, and we’d choose not to remember it if we did.
A rule of thumb for sharing information, in writing or in formal presentations, used to be, “Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them.” That’s all changed. As we’ve deliberately become more unknowing, as we’ve deliberately started thinking less critically, and as we’ve deliberately resigned ourselves to asking fewer and fewer questions, the new rule of thumb is this: “Tell them what they already know, should know, or should have been able to know. Tell them again. Then tell them again.”
Exhibit A
In a post called, “Why work won’t ‘return to normal’”, we find this keen observation:
After the turmoil of the pandemic, 2022 was supposed to be the year that work returned to normal. That didn’t happen … because so few workers want to go back to the old ways. They expressed their dissatisfaction with pre-pandemic norms by quitting jobs in historic numbers, while others tried to improve their current jobs by striking and unionizing.
Let’s see. People have been working largely the same way — reporting to a place other than home in which to toil — for 262 years (give or take), and we’re surprised that with the forced alternative of a global pandemic people don’t want to go back to being historical artifacts.
We’ll lower the bar on this one and not even suggest the irony in the fact that this radical change in employment circumstances was the result of a political/economic shutdown that never should have happened.
Let’s put on our surprised faces and soldier on, shall we?
Exhibit B
Following that, in this post from the Dots? What Dots? Department — “Are big corporate HQs fading away?” — we find this abject failure of connection:
As companies grow more accustomed to remote and hybrid work, many are also beginning to say farewell to large, sprawling offices … [as] companies reach their lease renewal dates, many are considering subletting their vacant space … this shift could send office real estate value tumbling by as much as $450 billion. This could hurt urban economies that depend on office work for jobs and tax revenue.
As companies grow more accustomed to remote and hybrid work? Is it possible to grow more accustomed to something that’s being forced on you, especially if it’s uncomfortable or threatens your ability to survive? That’s like saying, “As people grow more accustomed to waterboarding ….” What?! Companies aren’t growing more accustomed to anything, except, perhaps, the fact that folks aren’t eager to run back to the grind of business as usual, at least not in pre-pandemic numbers.
Unless they need the real estate losses as tax write-offs, they have alternate revenue streams to cover the cost of empty buildings, they’re doing their parts to contribute to urban decay, or they’re cognitively ill-equipped to be in business, companies don’t have a choice but to sell or sublease space. That’s not rocket science. It’s a combination of simple math, practicality, and reality. (Oh, no! Not that!)
The Moral of the Story
Henry Ford said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.” He’s right, of course. But we’re making it harder than it has to be.
Maybe we refrain from thinking because we’re given so much to think about. If that’s true (I believe it is), what would happen if we didn’t think about everything we’re given to think about? Not all the information that bombards us every day is worthy of our consideration. Not all of it is worthy of believing. And most of it is worthy of questioning.
As Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong wrote in “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”, in a much simpler day and time, “People say believe half of what you see, son, and none of what you hear.”
If we take their advice, maybe stating the obvious won’t have to be the new normal.
We live on East Street in Middletown, Connecticut. On the west side of East Street, there’s a neighborhood, Sylvan Run Village, in which Eddie loves to walk every morning. Through that neighborhood, there’s a stream that flows north. Since I don’t believe in gravity, I don’t find that particularly troubling. But I did want to know a little more about it.
After a few minutes of research, which included reading the most recent report from the IPCC, issued at the recently concluded COP27 (COP stands for collection of politicians) in Egypt, I learned the 5.4 million square miles of the Antarctic ice sheet are now gone, completely melted. Since water can’t flow on air — and concluding all that water had to go somewhere — I deduced the earth must have rotated on its longitudinal axis, causing the melted ice sheet to flow north … or what had been north.
I broke all that down to Eddie as we were walking this morning. He said the explanation seemed to be plausible, soundly reasoned, and more than sufficient should anyone other than me happen to notice — or care — that the stream flows north.
Life is About ChoicesIf you were to ask me (no one did, including Eddie), I’d say more of us should try to flow north; that is, we should try to flow in directions other than those prescribed or otherwise deemed good for us.
There’s a pretty fair number of people on this here earth who know me pretty well. None of them knows me as well as I do. None of them lives in my skin. None of them walks in my shoes. None of them thinks my thoughts. None of them is driven by my inclinations. None of them has my imagination. Some of them likely have imaginations better than mine. But none of them creates what I create. None of them writes what I write. None of them believes what I believe for the reasons I believe what I believe.
The same is true for all of you who might read this post. As long as all of us are able to think our thoughts, to follow our inclinations, to use our imaginations, to create what we create, and to believe what we believe, we can choose to flow north.
Who needs gravity anyway?
In the United States, we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday of this week. Like all other things in the United States, Thanksgiving, too, has become subject to politicization and myth-making.
According to Britannica:
Thanksgiving is modeled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the English colonists (Pilgrims) of Plymouth and the Wampanoag people … Plymouth’s Thanksgiving began with a few colonists going out “fowling,” possibly for turkeys but more probably for the easier prey of geese and ducks … Next, 90 or so Wampanoag made a surprise appearance at the settlement’s gate, doubtlessly unnerving the 50 or so colonists. Nevertheless, over the next few days, the two groups socialized without incident.
The Pilgrims, of course, were British colonialists, who happened to drop by Plymouth to murder indigenous people. Then, out of his innate sense of commercial opportunism, one of the Pilgrims, Larry Macy, decided to hold a parade on that day, which he later moved from Plymouth to New York City.
After the feast, one of the Wampanoag tribesmen used the skin of one of the pigs from the feast to make an oddly oval-shaped ball, which the celebrants of the first Thanksgiving used to play the first game of football. (The Wampanoags beat the Pilgrims 20 to 17 with a field goal in overtime.) Starting with the second Thanksgiving, the National Football League appropriated the ball and the game, which is why is the Buffalo Bills will play the Detroit Lions, the New York Giants will play the Dallas Cowboys, and the New England Patriots will play the Minnesota Vikings on Thanksgiving Day this year.
Put It Down
I don’t care what your politics are. I don’t care what myths you make or subscribe to. Thursday will be Thanksgiving Day. If you’re in the United States, whatever you’re doing, stop. Even if you don’t celebrate with a big meal, a parade, or a football game, take a moment to count your blessings. If you can do that in the company of family and friends, all the better.
We’ll be entertaining Anne’s cousins, whom we lovingly call the Crazy Italians, as well as my two brothers and assorted other family members and friends. I’m going to put a Gripe Bucket outside the front door and ask everyone, as they arrive, to put all their complaints in there before they enter. Then, at Anne’s suggestion, we’re all going to hold hands in the living room and watch this on the big screen:
With our thanks given, we’ll sit down to celebrate the rest of the day in grateful serenity (except for the Crazy Italians, who’ll talk and laugh and lift the spirits of everyone in the house, as they always do.)
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Happy Thanksgiving
In case you missed the memo, kids, we’re in deep kimchi.
That’s right. According to this measured and highly objective headline in that paragon of levelheadedness and evenhandedness, The Washington Post, “World has nine years to avert catastrophic warming, study shows.” See what I mean? We’re on the brink of an apocalyptic something or other, but it’s not the same apocalyptic something or other that a varied assortment of fatalistic cranks and superstitious crackpots have been predicting since God invented dirt.
What’s most amusing about this story is that the cranks and crackpots in question can’t even manage to agree with each other:
Yet even as scientists warn of the world’s dangerous trajectory, leaders here at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, known as COP27, [in Sharm El Sheik, Egypt] have advocated for natural gas as a “transition fuel” that would ease the world’s switch from fossil energy to renewables … This rhetoric has alarmed scientists and activists who say expanding natural gas production could harm vulnerable communities and push the planet toward a hotter, hellish future.
Harm vulnerable communities? What about the communities that will freeze this winter for lack of fossil fuels? What about the communities that already live in abject poverty and don’t have the means to erect wind turbines and install solar panels to keep themselves in the good graces of COP27? What about the communities of electric vehicle drivers who have no idea how the electricity with which they charge their cars is generated? What about the communities of settled scientists who’ll be talking like some combination of Ralph Kramden and Porky Pig when their fraud is exposed? And what generates more hot air, the attendees of COP27 or the private jets they flew in on?
Good grief.
WTF, Batman?
I’m hoping I can get to Sharm El Sheik by Friday because I have an idea to present to the cranks and crackpots variedly assembled there. Here it is: If they’re all so positive carbon emissions are the cause of climate change — particularly the warming in which so many people around the world are going to freeze to death in their respective winters (to say nothing of the mold that will grow and poison them in their unheated homes) — why don’t we use carbon emissions for heat?
And you can call this a coincidence, an accident, or serendipity if you like. But it just so happens I’m working on an affordable PCE (portable carbon emitter) as we speak … well … write. In fact, I’m so sure this will work, I’m going to donate a free PCE, with free installation, to every member of the IPCC. And because I’m the kind of guy I am, I’m going to donate three PCEs to Dr. Michael E. Mann — one for his main residence, one for his office at Penn State, and the other to heat the hot tub at his vacation getaway in Antarctica.
I’m being so generous to Dr. Mann because he developed the famous Hockey Stick Theory which predicted the precipitous uptick in global … oh, shit:
This improper normalization procedure [the hockey stick program] tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape … the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.
Well. Ya can’t win ‘em all. But you sure as hell can buffalo most of ‘em. That’s why trillions of dollars will be squandered and the standards of living for billions of people will be reduced, all in the ostensible effort to stop climate change that’s been predicted by flawed models and allegedly settled science.
And that’s exactly why the fat cats at Sharm El Sheik are squabbling about nothing — on our dime and at our greater expense — to feel good and to look good in photo ops.
Say, “Cheese!” And if you believe in net zero, pray you’re not on Candid Camera.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. (George Eliot, nee Mary Ann Evans)
Here in Connecticut — the Nutmeg State, the Land of Steady Habits, the Constitution State, the Provisions State, the Blue Law State, the Freestone, and Brownstone State, the Land of the Uptight Pilgrim, the State with More Nicknames Than You Can Shake a Stick At, and the Bring Your Checkbook State — I happened to watch a gubernatorial debate last Tuesday evening. The candidates are the incumbent, Democrat Uncle Ned “Promise ‘Em an Elevator and Give ‘Em the Shaft” Lamont; the independent, Rob “I’m the Operations Guy” Hotaling; and the Republican, Bob “Stop the Bleeding” Stefanowski.
The debate was covered by the local ABC affiliate, WTHN-TV, out of New Haven, along with its sister station, WCTX-TV. If you want to know how important the debate was, check this out: It preempted Jeopardy on WTNH-TV and Judge Judy on WCTX-TV. In a land of habits as steady as Connecticut’s, that, as then-Vice-President Joe Biden said of Obamacare’s passing, was a big f*$@#!& deal.
It was also an absolute joke. It was a joke because the majority of Connecticut voters, perennial gluttons for punishment, will do what the majority of Connecticut voters always do: They’ll fall for the most popular, most absurd, most transparently false narratives. They’ll re-elect the guy who promises the most, spends the most, and changes the status quo the least. They’ll pucker up and buckle down to ensure the pain of staying the same and hemorrhaging cash will never, ever, exceed their fear of change.
On the positive side, one thing you have to say about Connecticut residents is that they never complain. They complain so little it’s easy to overlook the fact that they don’t complain because they just don’t care. They’ll let the state and its government bleed cash, jobs, residents, opportunity, truth, and credibility. And they’ll go about their business (if they have a business left to go about) as if nothing in the world is wrong, as if they jettisoned their conceptions of right and wrong — and their ability to do simple math — when they abandoned their faith in their own senses.
And if you think Uncle Ned is delusional (he is), take a look at Uncle Sam.
But what am I beefing about? It’s only money.
I made a brief reference to a story I’ll recount here in an earlier post. It warrants elaboration here because the subject of planning seems to have crept into many of the conversations I’ve been engaged in of late, including this one with my friend, Jim Vinoski.
The notion of planning always troubled me. It still does. It reminds me of lyrics from the West, Bruce & Laing song, “Sifting Sand”:
Like sifting sand/The things I feel they flow right through my hands.
Given the nature of change, plans have always felt fleeting, ephemeral to me. And so it is that, because our children are among our best teachers, I share this story:
Both of my sons are basketball coaches. The elder, Sean, had started coaching while his younger brother, Quinn, was still playing at Salve Regina University. Sean and I drove to Newport together to attend one of Quinn’s games one night. The game unfolded as Salve’s games always unfolded that season: The Salve team would be getting run off the court. The coach would pace and fume like a lunatic and wait too long to call timeout. When he finally did, he’d huddle the players up, pull an index card out of the breast pocket of his shirt, and start screaming.
After the game, the boys and I went out for pizza at a local haunt.
“What’s on the index card Coach always pulls out of his pocket during the first timeout?” I asked Quinn.
“The game plan,” he said.
“And when Coach starts screaming, what’s he screaming about?” I asked.
“He’s screaming that we’re not following the game plan.”
I turned to Sean, whom I’d seen coach many times (Sean didn’t lose a game as a coach until the last game of his second season — the New England Championship game for the league in which his team played) and said, “I’ve never seen you with an index card, and I never see you scream at your players. Do you have a game plan?”
Sean said, “I scout every team we play. And I have a plan for every game. But I have no idea what’s going to happen until the ball goes up.”
And there it is. I resist planning because I have no idea what’s going to happen until the ball goes up. So, my planning, such as it is, consists of determining to do something. Then I throw the ball up. Whatever I do next is determined by what happens after the ball goes up.
If things don’t go as planned, I call timeout.
I’ve written about my depression before. But since this is Mental Health Awareness Month — and since every month should be Mental Health Awareness Month — I want to revisit the topic.
In that earlier piece, I wrote my depression was characterized by stark, unrelenting terror. It resulted in a kind of hypervigilance, an exaggerated fight-or-flight sensitivity to every movement and sound, regardless of source or substance. It also resulted in a distinct lack of appetite.
The act of mowing my lawn was particularly panic-inducing for two reasons: Because I had to watch where the mower was going, I couldn’t see what or who was coming up behind me. (Nothing and no one.) And because of the racket the mower made, I couldn’t hear any of the telltale signs of impending doom. (There were none.)
There Was More
My depression was also characterized by a morbid sense of unworthiness. I didn’t have a job, and I believed I was unemployable. (I was wrong, of course.) I’d lie in my bed, trying to distract myself, and turn on the TV. Even if I watched something as mindless as ESPN, I’d be thinking, “Those talking heads are making money, and I’m not. They have jobs, and I don’t. They’re going to be able to pay their bills, and I’m not. Each of them has a role, a part to play in the world — however valuable or invaluable — and I don’t.”
When I scored the occasional job interview, I’d shake all the way there. I’d wonder, “How am I going to keep myself together? How will I conceal the fact that I’m freaking out? How can I remain composed — to say nothing of engaged or cordial — if all I want to do is scream, run, and hide?”
When I finally landed the job that saved me, at a small public relations agency, the woman who owned the agency told me I was the best storyteller she’d ever known. I didn’t believe her. All I could think was she didn’t know what she didn’t know.
Be Careful What You Say
I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I got help from more people than I ever dreamed I would. I chose to reward their faith in me. I discovered my self-worth, worked on my self-faith, and found my way into the light of a much healthier reality.
I also know not everyone is so lucky. For the some, the darkness is persistent, ceaseless, ever-present, and inescapable. They deserve what I received — kindness, patience, hands to hold, hugs to hide in, ears willing to listen without judgment, a calm presence, a reassuring smile, and the ability to refrain from saying, “Everything will be alright.”
Nothing was more daunting or infuriating to me in the depths of my depression than hearing someone tell me, “Everything will be alright.” Alright was unimaginable to me. I didn’t believe anyone who told me that. And I didn’t believe they had any idea what they were talking about. That was part of my trap. It was part of my mental illness. Believing my suffering was absolutely singular and that no one else could have experienced it or ever would experience it was clear and present evidence of my mental unhealthiness.
First Glimmers
One day, in the depths of my darkness, my dear friend of 35 years, Rick Lovallo, called. Rick knew what kind of shape I was in. But he never said a word about it. I’d just come in from mowing the lawn and was sitting in my kitchen shaking. I answered the phone.
“Dude! Why don’t you come over? We’re going to cook out on the deck, then head out to hear some music on the green in town.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’m up to it.”
“If you don’t drive over here, I’m going to drive over there to get you.”
I relented, showered, and drove to Rick’s house.
I walked into the house and trepidatiously said hello to Rick, his wife, and his two daughters. After being in their presence for just a few moments, I felt the darkness start to lift. We went out and sat on the deck in the afternoon sun. Rick handed me a beer. As I sat there in the sun, listening to their voices, being in their presence, I felt my anxiety start to subside. As it did, my appetite returned voraciously.
After feeding on hamburgers, hot dogs, and a variety of salads (I tried not to make too big a pig of myself), we piled into Rick’s car, drove to the town green, sat in the grass under the stars, and listened to live, acoustic music. That’s when I first glimpsed the possibility of my well-being. It’s when I smelled the grass, felt the fresh air, saw the full night sky, heard the joy in every note of music, felt the comfort of friends, and knew the light would be mine again.
By the time I arrived at home that night, the darkness had returned. But I knew then it would be temporary. I knew it could only be followed by light. I recognized the counterintuitive truth that — while I had to look within, while I had to examine myself and do the work of reclaiming myself — the real light, the abiding light was in the brilliant presence of others.
Rick knows I love him. I’ve told him so. He’s the kind of guy who prefers to keep fussing to a minimum. He’s content to have his kindness and his generosity paid forward. This is my modest attempt to do just that.
It’s Mental Health Awareness Month. Be mindful of what you don’t know. Be sure to extend your hand before you offer advice. Be patient. And most of all, be kind.
For the lucky ones like me, there are no bogeymen.
I’ve been having trouble with the notion of authenticity for quite some time.
My first challenge is one of definition. According to dictionary.com, authentic, whence derives authenticity, is defined like this:
adjective:
1. not false or copied; genuine
2. having an origin supported by unquestionable evidence; authenticated; verified
3. representing one’s true nature or beliefs; true to oneself or to the person identified:
4. entitled to acceptance or belief because of agreement with known facts or experience; reliable; trustworthy
In that definition, numbers 2 and 4 are subjective; that is, given the fact that we no longer believe in or practice empiricism (because we no longer trust our senses or accept the fact that if it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck), there are no more objective notions of right and wrong. There is only relativity, as determined by one’s ideology, disposition, interpretations, political leanings, or special interests.
My second challenge is one of context. In the definition above, number 3 has the potential to be highly problematic: If I work in a context in which my ideology, disposition, interpretations, political leanings, or special interests differ from the proverbial party line — the more I represent my true nature or beliefs — the deeper the hot water in which I find myself, up to or until the point at which I get myself ostracized or shit-canned.
We the People …
The veracity of those challenges was reinforced when I came across this article on substack.com: “We want you to bring your whole self to work. But only if your “whole self” is the one we decide you should have.” The article is about:
what it means to work for a company today. Do we accept that if you work for a company you sign away your right to having an opinion on political matters? … you sign your right away to having opinions on matters of public concern? … You’d be giving up your rights as a citizen … is the (unspoken) point … you can have opinions but only those endorsed by the company you work for?
Back in the Dark Ages, say 1787 or so, free speech seemed like a pretty desirable thing. At the very least, it appeared to be a fairly logical way to express our differences. The Founding Fathers, of course — who disagreed with each other on many significant points — ultimately failed miserably to be ideologues. Rather, they determined to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
Wow. What a bunch of anachronistic cornballs.
Given what they wrote, they actually seemed to believe a willingness to suspend judgment, to respect other people’s perspectives, to listen, to learn, to grow thereby, and to refrain from taking offense at everything all the time could actually work. What a hoot!
The entire Constitution of the United States may be based on the false premise that it would be read by adults. The evidence suggests that was a huge mistake.
Martin Luther King said, “We came here on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.” A latter-day paraphrase might be, “We came here with differences, but we’re all homogenized now.”
And if we’re not, we’d better be, or else.
Good grief.
As the obsessive language freak I happen to be, I’m always sensitive to new expressions creeping into the vernacular. Most frequently, those expressions are meaningless; that is, they don’t actually express anything of substance. But they’re valuable for what they signal. And they signal four things about the people who use them. Those people:
- Likely don’t know what they’re talking about
- Don’t want you to know they don’t know what they’re talking about
- Need to fill up some time while they try to figure out what they’re talking about
- Want you to believe they’re sincere and honest in what they’re talking about.
The most recent such expression is this: I’m not gonna lie. Oh, boy.
My EducationIn 1985, I took my first full-time, post-college corporate job. It was at Ætna. (Yes. That’s how it was written back then when ligatures denoted something other than gizmos for strangling people on true crime shows.) I was 32 at the time.
When I started at Ætna, there was a legendary character there who was just about to retire. His name was John Callahan. (He had me at Irish.) He was a legend because of his wit and his unerring insight. Three examples:
- He once told me the Ætna mascot should be a blindfolded porcupine.
- I asked him how Ætna could make a seemingly unbroken streak of boneheaded moves and still stay in business. He said, “Mark, ya can’t hardly f&#@ up compound interest.”
- After a project had tanked for lack of clear direction and had to be re-done, John said, “There’s never time to do it right. But there’s always time to do it over.” Amen.
But the most important, universally true, and abidingly influential thing John ever said to me was this: “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.” And that brings us back to I’m not gonna lie.
My Skepticism
Whenever someone says, “I’m not gonna lie,” my Spidey Sense starts tingling like Vladimir Putin’s Megalomania Meter. And the same sequence of questions runs through my head:
- Do you mean now, later, or every time?
- Why do you need to tell me you’re not gonna lie?
- Should I be suspicious?
- Have you lied to me before?
- Will you lie to me again?
- How do you decide when you’re not gonna lie?
- When do you decide you’re not gonna lie?
- Why?
- If I have to do this much thinking about it, how much do you have to do?
- Is it worth it?
I can’t decide if I’m old-fashioned or just lazy. But I’m not gonna lie: It seems easier to tell the truth.
On the other hand, what do I know? I’m just an obsessive language freak.
"I was sitting at my desk the other day with a characteristically blank look on my face." ...
"No one is more cynical or sarcastic than I can be. But that doesn’t preclude my knowing the difference between doing right things and doing things right." ...
"Lessons come in all shapes and sizes and in surprising places. Learn as many of them as you can. And be grateful for all of them." ...
"The good news is making peace with time is a skill that can be acquired. The bad news is it takes time to acquire it." ...
"Sir Isaac Newton famously wrote in his Third Law of Motion, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Likewise, for every lie, there is an equal and opposite truth." ...
"Given the era in which I grew up, I was duty-bound, of course, to do my share of psychedelic drugs and then some." ...
"If we get our own houses in order, we’ll be shocked at how many things take care of themselves." ...
"Does anyone know or can anyone recall the point at which we had to be told to establish a morning routine, let alone to feel the need to publish articles about it? Didn’t most of us have parents?" ...
"I can’t tell who’s more dangerous — all the quacks predicting our doom or all of us for believing them." ...
"The debut album of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced, was released in May of 1967. “Purple Haze” and “Hey Joe” were the first two singles released by the band’s record label." ...
"How and why have we gotten so divided and divisive, so desensitized, so discourteous and disrespectful, so intolerant? What’s happened to civility? And why did we let it go?" ...
'We’re constantly amazed at the number of things we used to sweat that we now realize constitute the small stuff." ...
"We ask a lot of robots. But we can’t expect them to pick up on subtlety, nuance, or the idiomatic uses of words." ...
I was recently called out by Don Judson about some political posts I’d been writing. Why? For a number of reasons: Don has been my friend for more than more than 30 years. He’s my business partner, and he was afraid of the way my screeds might reflect on our brand. Because of 1 and […]
"At the rate at which we’re cutting people out of loops and consigning human interaction to the trash heap of ostensible progress, people need all the help they can get." ...
Unless you’re a die-hard fan of head-slapping, hypocritical inanity, you may have missed the fact that Chicago Mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is in Europe to promote: her city’s “thriving economy” as major companies announce they are leaving the area amid skyrocketing crime and unfriendly business climate. “Chicago’s economy is thriving and our business sector has set […]
"Wow. It’s enough to give you goosebumps and long for 2024 in hopes that you can vote for her again, isn’t it?" ...