On Writing

I sat down to write this blog entry just as the sun floated above the reddening treescape out my window, and before I tapped a single key a black bird sailed into my field of vision and, loudly, right into my window.  From there, it dropped undramatically to the ground where, I assumed, it remained.

There is, in descending order, the novel, the short story, "flash" fiction, Haiku and, finally, the emoji.  Except I thought blog posts must be included somewhere in there, despite the deepening suspicion that blogging is not a respected art form anymore.  Or ever. 

But, irregardless, as they say, I'm wondering how long blog posts are supposed to be. I've looked at most of mine lately, and they seem to hover somewhere just shy of the 500 word mark. Why is that, I'm wondering? They used to be shorter, years ago.  Some have weighed in much longer, but those are not so common. 

The reason I'm worried about this is I don't want to fall into a non-productive habit. I think there may be an expectation of a certain length, and since I am "a writer," and therefore (?) want to be loved and accepted, I may have tuned into that expectation and unconsciously modified my writing accordingly. 

Anyway, I have no idea. But it makes me remember what I thought when I first read an admonition in a memo within the phone company, back in the "early days" of computing. It said something like, remember, when you compose an email, studies have shown you have just 15 seconds to capture the readers attention, and if you fail, they won't read the email. What I thought was: Really?  Well f*ck you. 

And I remembered one of Heinlein's novels where the protagonist killed someone in the first sentence. I tried that tack for awhile until I realized that it causes you to run out of characters somewhere around page 17. Page 3, if you're really good. 

The bird is gone. 

Apocalyptic Near Miss

In the final days, before the Covid-19 virus began its twelfth and final surge, there was a brief moment in history that could only be described as the last Golden Age of North America. The population halved, and there was general prosperity across the nation. Of course, not long after that, the human population on Earth was abruptly reduced to a few hundred healthy, Covid-immune couples in a hunter gatherer tribe in Kenya in East Africa, due to a chance simultaneous mutation of both the virus and a particular subset of the Kenyan tribal members. From there, the human population remained stagnant and the gene pool, having passed through the most stringent of bottlenecks, became very specialized. Homo Sapiens was at last in very real danger of becoming extinct. 

This is when, finally, the UFOs came for real. It may have seemed like they were just waiting for just such an opportune moment, but in reality it was merely a coincidence that they came to our planet at a time when any resistance they would encounter came only from a relatively few young men with spears, and that only because the young men were restless. They were humans, after all, and the instinct for wanderlust and warfare that had been squelched by their culture so effectively for so many generations was beginning to reassert itself, which of course was inevitable. 

The aliens were cocky. They paid about as much attention to the humans they found as they did to the zebras. This wasn’t surprising. On a scale of one to a hundred, the aliens might have had an intellect of 100, the zebras three, the humans five. The only thing that made the aliens nervous was the almost complete lack of predictability among the humans, and when the first alien was killed as a result of a splendid spear throw, the remaining aliens went back to their ships to reassess the situation. They had encountered predators before but never a murderous race, and they judged it was in their own best interest to move on. 

The *Real* Alternate Reality Generator

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being, between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other[s], nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

— Thomas Merton

Grammar Chaos

Headline from  Cleveland Fox8 News:

"Mother of boy abandoned at Goodwill store 

claims he was kidnapped by man who tried to prostitute her"

Will someone please show these people how to diagram a sentence?  

At least it doesn't read, "Progressive, non-gender-specific Mother of boy abandoned at Goodwill store claims they were kidnapped." 

In a Cartoon-like Denouement as Befitting the End of This Particular Era

 Headline: Tiny Trump faction bemoans 'pathetic turnout' at Michigan capitol before Electoral College vote.  (-Mlive.com)

I like "Tiny Trump faction." We should embrace this, as it is all a matter of perception anyway--newspapers can create reality if you let them, but in fact we all create our own reality. So . . . Tiny Trump stands defiant, if impotent, as the camera pans back and we see that there is a big country, after all, before us, full of farmlands and prairie and cities and factories and high tech corporate campuses and people talking and arguing, but still standing, cue the Bugs Bunny after-the-storm music* and the clouds part and golden rays illuminate the landscape. 

*Rossini's Bill Tell Overture

Finish This Story?

 The most Bob ever saw at one time was seven. Or maybe it was eight. He never could remember precisely; only that it was a lot, and it scared the shit out of him. 

[ . . . ]

Perspective

A frequent, or ongoing discussion in our house is about Trump’s motives, methods, game plan, end-game, whatever, and in particular whether or not he is actually sort of dysfunctional due to his runaway narcissism, or if he is “dumb like a fox,” or if it is some combination of the two. 

This ridiculous Texas lawsuit sort of sums it up. It is so incredibly outrageous, I keep thinking he is (successfully) throwing up a smoke screen for something else, at this point, and wondering just what might be behind it. And the usual explanations are starting to sound like rationalizations. 

I'm sitting here in Independence, Missouri, and I can barely figure out what the city council is doing, let alone what might be driving all the fantastical headlines about this season’s national election that are floating to the top of the Internet. And while I’m fighting to maintain what I hope is a sane viewpoint, Trump, it seems, just keeps doing what he’s doing. 

Who is NOT on the radar nowadays?  Who is keeping a very low profile, quietly doing what they do? I wonder if the real story lies there, while we all run around in circles. 

Memento Mori

 "Memento Mori," so the legend goes, is what a slave accompanying a returning victorious general in ancient Rome would whisper in the general's ear as they paraded through the city.  "Remember you will die." Supposedly it was meant to remind the general that he was mortal, and to not get too cocky. Later in history, in a Christian context, memento mori was meant to convey the idea that one should turn one's attention to the afterlife. It became kind of a theme, and carried on into early America and young women's sewing sampler patterns. 

A Thought

 We have all been trying to figure out why in the world Trump and friends are filing all these stupid, hopeless lawsuits regarding voting issues. There are some explanations, like, well, he's a narcissist, or, maybe he has the crazy idea that the Hail Mary pass will work--who knows? And why are so many Republicans backing him, when to do so at this point will surely damage their own credibility. It all really does defy reason, that anybody would be willing to look THAT stupid and pathetic.

What I thought, this morning, is Trump and gang are simply doing what they always do, what they always have done, which is to create the narrative, control the front page headlines (I think we still have those, don't we?) so that ALL we are talking about is how stupid and offensive these challenges to the democratic process are, and NOT . . . something else. 

But, what? 

Psychological Profile

Here is a psychological profile at one time supplied by the CIA:

"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.: (CIA)[8]

Another remark, in regards to the same subject, in a study conducted by Henry A. Murray:

"Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind."

Neither of these statements were about Trump, though they could have been, if only prophetically.  They were referring to Adolph Hitler. 

Phun w/Photoshop

 One of my mindless hobbies is photography, so over the years I've come to use Photoshop to the extent that I finally decided to pay the monthly subscription and always have the latest version. I know--it's a waste of money, but so is bass fishing, which I forego in favor of just about anything.  

One of Photoshop's latest innovations is something called "sky replacement." It is just a menu item, with some options. It is AI powered, so it is fairly capable of working without any human help, though there are myriad options if you want to further mess with it. Otherwise, the whole operation amounts to a couple of mouse clicks. I'm really not a big fan of all the over-photoshopped pictures I see all over the Internet, but this is still kind of fun. 

All that said, I was reading Paula's blog this morning and saw a picture of a sunset behind a hotel that she had posted, with the remarks that there weren't any clouds to make it interesting, and, "Meh." And so to remedy that, (even though the original picture is pretty nice) I submit the following. Adding here that if she took this picture with a cell phone, I'm jealous, because my iPhone 6 doesn't take nearly this good of a picture. 

Here is the original picture: 

The original picture

Here is my first revision:

Palm trees in downtown Kansas City?

Here is another version:

Fake sky.

Supreme Rant

 I'm thankful for a lot of things, but not for the hi-jacking of the Supreme Court by conservatives. I suppose they are smug now with their latest victory over reason and humanitarianism with the ruling that overrules New York Covid-19 restrictions for "some houses of worship." This bit about freedom is sort of like the motorcycle helmet thing, where I think if people make bad decisions to conduct self-limiting behavior, I don't really care. But it's never like that--not even with the motorcycle helmet question, and here I'll add that to say "it's debatable" only recognizes that anything at all is debatable given that there are enough people willing to take a ridiculous stand (although, yeah, no shortage there.) Allowing some groups to ignore common-sense rules regarding their health and safety amid the spread of a pandemic is just a wonky decision in that it so obviously affects other people outside that group. 

I have no problem with "freedom of religion." Here, the problem is that the broad sweep goes way outside the group in question, and hence is too broad. I don't understand how a reasonable interpretation of the law could fail to account for that, and for the special circumstances, in this case, requiring extreme, if temporary, measures due to the danger to all in a community, even, and especially, those outside the group seeking special consideration. 

End of rant. And though I tried hard to make this a Thanksgiving post, (see leading sentence) I recognize that it's a stretch. None the less, happy Turkey Day, all! 

1st Sentence of Each Paragraph

Every now and then I find it humbling to do this. After writing a long, windy post, I wonder if it could actually be improved by eliminating everything but the first sentence of each paragraph, as someone famous once said. (Maybe.) Here is the modified version of the previous post. Even though it has been rendered incomprehensible, it's a shorter read and therefore much improved. It's possible I learned something. I will now put down the ol' turkey quill and go play the guitar, or something. 

Happy Thanksgiving, in whatever format you can manage. 

Here it is:

While I was a repair technician for the phone company working out of a garage in south Independence, Missouri, I had the good fortune of working with this guy named Roger. 

Possibly you had to be there. 

But Roger was the guy that ran across this weird scenario. 

Trouble was, the Cable TV guy had to pull up on the rod in order to expose enough of it at ground level so he could get his clamp around it. 

Several weird things happened at once. 

The reason this happened so easily is that we were experiencing a drought, and the ground rod was sitting in dry dirt, and so wasn't doing much grounding and the current went all over the place instead of down the ground rod and out, as it was supposed to. 

Roger thought only of alleviating this mess.  

By this time, our supervisor was in on it, because the customer was already escalating the whole thing since their wiring was damaged, and this was, obviously, not their fault. 

So, what about the school bus, I hear you asking.

They stopped to see if anyone needed help.

Roger and the guys wrapped a big chain around the frame on the underside of the bus, attached it to their own line truck, and by driving away at a right angle, they righted the bus so it plopped back up on its four wheels.

I wanted to shrug and ask him if he got any mud on the old prayer bones while removing the chain from the bus. 

Roger and the School Bus

 While I was a repair technician for the phone company working out of a garage in south Independence, Missouri, I had the good fortune of working with this guy named Roger. He was one of the "older guys" who, I believe, hired on as a lineman in south Missouri about the time I was entering third grade. Roger had lots of stories, and he had a funny turn of phrase for many a situation. For example, one rainy day I returned to the garage after working on a buried pedestal, and so I had mud all over the front of my pantlegs. Roger saw that, grinned, and said "I see you've been out working on your old prayer-bones." 

Possibly you had to be there. But he was an accomplished phone man, the casual, politically incorrect gender specific title these guys gave themselves. Me too, really. It was 1988, and certain demographics hadn't quite caught on yet. We got there eventually, but that's another boring story. 

But Roger was the guy that ran across this weird scenario. As he tells it, he got a trouble report assigned to him that said the phone wires in the house were smoking. When he arrived and checked the line where it entered the house, at the side, he saw next to the phone company's lightning/surge protector that a Cable TV tech, apparently, was just there to install their equipment. Needing to attach a ground wire to a ground somewhere, he apparently decided to attach his wire clamp to the phone company's ground rod. This was understandable because a ground rod was about six feet long and had to pounded all the way into the ground with a sledge hammer, and no one wants to do that if there's already one there. 

Trouble was, the Cable TV guy had to pull up on the rod in order to expose enough of it at ground level so he could get his clamp around it. In doing so, he inadvertently rammed the top of the rod up into the electric power meter. 

Several weird things happened at once. First, the ground rod touched one side of the power inside the meter, effectively putting 110 volts onto the ground rod. The AC current then traveled along the phone company's ground wire all the way to the lightning surge protector. There, the sudden surge of current tripped the fuses in the protector. In our system, the "protector's" job was to ground the line in case of a surge of power, NOT to open it up. So, doing what it's supposed to do, the protector blew, and now the 110 volts is flowing through it and onto the phone line. Meaning it flowed onto the wires going inside the house. This is why the phone jacks were smoking. 

The reason this happened so easily is that we were experiencing a drought, and the ground rod was sitting in dry dirt, and so wasn't doing much grounding and the current went all over the place instead of down the ground rod and out, as it was supposed to. This 110v AC current also flowed along the metal sheath around the drop wire, which was buried, and to the green metal pedestal in the back of the lot. It probably also flowed up and down the cable run, down the street, on the ground wires and cable sheaths. Someone could have gotten hurt. Luckily no one did, and just as luckily, the house didn't burn down. 

Roger thought only of alleviating this mess.  The grass and the yard was bone dry, as I said, so he put on the heavy duty rubber gloves we were all issued, and without much risk, grabbed the ground rod and yanked it down so it was no longer touching the 100 volt lug in the power meter.  Problem solved. 

By this time, our supervisor was in on it, because the customer was already escalating the whole thing since their wiring was damaged, and this was, obviously, not their fault. So, we learned, Roger got reprimanded for a safety violation by yanking on the ground rod, even though by doing that he pretty much saved the day. The BSP ("Bell System Practice,") would have been to call the electric company, which then would have dispatched someone out to essentially do the same thing Roger did, only with a few more steps. 

So, what about the school bus, I hear you asking. The next day in the garage we were all ribbing Roger about his adventure in high-tech circuit field modifications of the previous day. This was partly because he got in trouble for it, but that reminded Roger of the time back in '57 or '58 he and some guys were driving a big line truck, towing a telephone pole somewhere in south Missouri and encountered a school bus lying on its side in a shallow ditch at the side of the road. 

They stopped to see if anyone needed help. It had just happened a minute before, and the bus was full of kids. No one was hurt, but they couldn't get out because the bus was lying on its right side, and the door wouldn't open. 

Roger and the guys wrapped a big chain around the frame on the underside of the bus, attached it to their own line truck, and by driving away at a right angle, they righted the bus so it plopped back up on its four wheels. "And the kids weren't hurt?" I asked, somewhat upset about this story. Roger said, "Oh no, just a few bumps and scratches." 

I wanted to shrug and ask him if he got any mud on the old prayer bones while removing the chain from the bus. 

Public Service Announcement

 

I'd like to say just a few words about wearing masks. 

Now, when you wear a pair of jeans, let's say, for sake of argument, you don't stick your head through one leg hole, and one arm through the other. No. If you put jeans on this way, you're not really wearing jeans, are you? Because your underpants are showing. You put your legs in the leg holes, one at a time, please, and then zip 'em up. Easy peezy. 

And so, I submit, is wearing a mask to protect yourselves and others from exposure to floating pathogens. But of course, you have to PUT IT ON PROPERLY. 

Thank you. 

Please Feed the Crocodiles

It's almost like a hobby for a lot of people nowadays, trying to figure out what Trump's motivations are for the things he does, why and how he got elected in the first place, or, maybe we wonder, what secret does he possess to command the allegiance of nearly half of America? Is it the history of reality TV? The cocksure blustering?  The surreal, clown like atmosphere surrounding the Whitehouse, with the flapping flags flanking the big, orange head above the podium?

And why is he continuing to push back at the election results when it has become obvious, many times over, that he lost?  He lost the popular vote by a hefty margin, and he will lose the Electoral College vote by the same margin that brought him victory in 2016. The barrage of frivolous lawsuits his team launched has fallen flat. Trump continues this strategy at the risk of squandering what tenuous legitimacy he might have had. 

I mean, he's starting to look like an idiot. (Starting . . . ?) What could he possibly be trying to do?  What is his motivation? What's the plan, the strategy? Then it hit me. 

He's addicted to the attention. During his tenure as president, he has managed to keep himself on the virtual "front page" of the news almost every single day. An incredible feat, actually. And now, quite suddenly, it's over. It's over--at least in a normal, reasonable world--because when you lose an election around here, you concede, you congratulate the winner, and you step back. 

There's the rub. 

It's all too sudden. It's like your doctor said your lung function is deteriorated and you have to quit smoking, no other option, but on the way home you realize you still have half a pack of Marlboros in the glove box of your car. Hell, yeah, you smoke them.  And you tell yourself you'll quit after that. This is where Trump is right now, I reckon. 

Oh.  And "Whitehouse aides" have related stories that Trump says he intends to make a come-back, and run in 2024.  OK, the very term come-back says he has, in his mind, at least, conceded defeat. But 2024 is too hard to resist. The tweets, the media coverage, the rallies! 

And the media will feed it--with a sigh of relief at the renewed prospect of all that job security.

Sums it Up

 Who is this person?  Because I'm sold.  And why is all of this just one notch below WWF mania? 

Post Election

 I realize the election was over just a few days ago (or at least, over for those of us who believe our election process is still functioning, and robust) but I am kind of waiting for things to simmer down. It is still evident how intensely divisive and tense this political season was. I see a lot of people on the Internet who seem unwilling to let go of the anger and frustration the Trump administration caused them. One FB post header: NOW can I vote for Bernie??  Then, a thread on FB where contributors seem to be fantasizing about watching Trump defeated and humiliated on their own TVs at home via a new reality TV show featuring a camera in Trump's cell . . . stuff like that. This morning I found myself scouring Google News for anything stupid or outrageous Trump might have said overnight, since I last checked. 

It dawned on me that a considerable percentage of over half (apparently) the people in the United States of America are suffering from a form of PTSD, and will probably continue to do so for quite awhile. 

One of my favorite passages from a book of Eckhart Tolle's is a story about two ducks peacefully floating in a pond, as ducks are often wont to do. So, one duck accidentally bumps into the other, and, startled, a squawking flurry of hostile, angry wing flapping ensues until the ducks finally drift apart. Then, Tolle says, if you watch one duck as it drifts away, the situation now past, it will drift for a moment and then suddenly shudder, loosening its wings and then tucking them back in before returning to peaceful floating mode. The moral of the story is that at some point, you have to let go, experience that involuntary shudder, and then return to your normal life. 

Headline

 Favorite headline today at 11:48 a.m.: 

"The End of an Error"

-New York Magazine

Says it all. 

Counting

 I know that it has been a weird year for a variety of reasons, not the least of which has been the political climate. It's not the first time, nor will it be the last, that there was so much divisiveness, but this time it struck me as particularly bad. Maybe it's just me, here, and now. I have a friend who is one of those people who thinks that neither presidential candidate is any good. This strikes me as wrong, since I think it would be difficult to make an equivalence of any kind between Trump and . . . just about anybody else. 

But, that aside, what happened was in an email exchange I simply stated my particular political perspective. I'm a Democrat, and I explained why.  I did so in a very reasonable manner, I might add, since I am aware that my friend is probably either a Republican or one of those people who thinks the political solution lies in America's version of Che Guevara, or whatever. His response: nothing. A full stop on email exchanges. I find it puzzling that in today's political climate, the response to a variant opinion is met with complete dismissal. It might be marginally more encouraging than if it was anger, which I've also encountered in similar circumstance. 

What I'm thinking, now, is that I can deal with a differing political opinion. My friend can remain a friend if he wants to be a Republican, of course, but what about if he cuts off all contact because my opinion differs from his? I  can only respond by respecting his actions. I mean, seriously, who cares? But it's a little disappointing. 

I could keep going on this post, but that would mean a devolution into the exploration into my failure as a NaNoWriMo "contestant." I lasted two days. Too much going on, too much to do, and I know that for the last third of November I'll have hardly any free time at all. 

What can I say?  

Keep counting. 

Day 1

 Have you ever read something so well-written that you had to stop and read it over and over, first to admire it, and then as if you think you’re going to figure out how they did it?  I once read a passage from “In Cold Blood” that was so good I stopped to re-read it many times like that, then thought, goddammit, I knew all those words! Why couldn't I write something like that?

Tom Wolfe affects me in the same way, quite often. The closest I’ve ever come to figuring it out is that these writers somehow manage to create their own context and then fill things in using pure wit—the kinds of things that just happen, things about which you can only later say, you had to be there. 

It's that NaNoWriMO time again, and here I am, half-way through Day 1 and still trying to decide if I'm willing to commit and face probable failure once again. I want to do something new and different, like, maybe Laslo wakes up in the bed of his pickup parked on the levee and instead of stumbling into the universe of the Busy Bee Cafe he runs across a freshly murdered dead body that has drifted into a tangle of driftwood at the river bank, and realizes it is his foreman at the foundry where he used to work--the job that he was just fired from two days prior. Hilarity ensues, etc., etc., etc. I dunno. 

Rough Draft (pun)

 When I turned eighteen I was compelled legally to register for the draft. It was 1968 (can you say "Tet Offensive?") and I was pretty certain I would wind up in the Army fighting falling dominoes in Southeast Asia. We were all pretty certain. When the so-called National Draft Lottery was later instituted, I drew a high number, but I was still uncertain of being drafted or not--it turns out that my number was very high indeed, and only the first 195 birthdates were selected for service that first year. But we couldn't know that, of course. My friend's birthdate drew a low number, and he joined the Airforce to dodge the Army. 

We weren't unpatriotic, but back then, most information obtainable indicated it was Johnson's war, for nothing, unwinnable, and miserable to boot. I figured I'd go if called, even though my dear mother called me up from California and told me to let her know if I got drafted so she could get enough money for me to go to Canada. I chalk it up to her mother, who was a good woman, and an Osage Indian, which, really, is the definition of radical, if you've ever looked into it. 

Then I got the damn letter. The one that starts with, "Greetings," but it turns out it was only a notice to report for my Army physical, and did not say I was drafted or anything. Still, I was pretty uneasy. I showed up and submitted myself to the various indignities we call the Army physical, and "passed" everything (oh yay.) As a point of information, no one was offered even the slightest temptation or given the opportunity to do that old joke about "spreading our cheeks." The doctor was quite explicit about exactly what to do with what part of the body, having learned early on, I speculated, how to avoid that trap. It was almost all the more funny for it. Especially since by that time of the day, I had already gotten the impression that no one there on the Army medical staff that day was a brain surgeon, or even a rocket scientist. 

However, I note, don't ever try to cheat on a color blindness screening test by saying you don't see any of the numbers on any of the little color spotted cards, like the guy in line in front of me did. You can only have one kind of color blindness at a time, and the Army damn well knows it. And now that guy in front of me knew it, and I knew it.  I saw all the numbers, and I had no intention of cheating anyway. 

A week later I got a phone call from the recruiting sergeant stationed at the town's square. I got a high score on the written test we all took, and the Army Security Agency wanted to interview me. I talked to a few people and was sold on the idea. A few days later I was sitting across the desk from some other recruiting officer, this one from the ASA, I guess. 

The first thing he said to me was if I was accepted into the Army Security Agency, I would be subject to a very thorough background check for my security clearance. He said that their people would be interviewing people I went to high school with, among others, so be totally open and honest, and don't even think about lying. Nod.

First question: have you ever smoked marijuana. (Yeah, the very first question, no doubt placed their for purposes of efficiency, which will become apparent in a sec.)  The answer was yes. Second question: how many times? Now, this was problematic, and when I started hemming and hawing, the guy said, "More than twice?"  Well, I said, yeah. Then he said, interview over. Hard and fast rule, and all that. Two times was considered experimental, and allowed, but more than that meant that I was a "user." 

I said, not anymore.  That was back in high school. Because Sixties/Bay Area/etc. So, now remember, I got a high score on that test, especially the language part, which made me qualified for "language training."  Meaning I was kind of a smart ass. I asked him if I had never smoked pot, would I have been considered? He said yes. I pointed out that then I could hypothetically be in the ASA, but I might decide to "experiment" with pot, out of curiosity, which they admit is allowed, or at least understandable, because, well, everyone is curious. Then, I said, what if I liked it?  Now, I'm in the ASA and I really am a user. Whereas I, a previous user, was not, and unlikely to become one. 

He seemed to be impressed; at least he said I was the kind of person they would like, and said he would make a phone call. He did, and I was still sent away. Kind of disappointed, but not really. A week went by and I got another phone call. The recruiting sergeant at the square said he heard about my interview with the ASA, but now he wanted me to talk to another guy downtown about joining up for Army Intelligence, who, I assumed, had lower standards. I was flattered, but dubious.  I expressed some interest and he said he would set me up for an interview downtown the next morning at 7:00 a.m. 

Now, I'm thinking, ahh, this is another I.Q. test. And I passed it, because I slept in the next morning, and for awhile felt pretty damn free. 

The rest of the year passed by and I had such a high draft lottery number that I wasn't even near getting drafted. And it was highly unlikely for the following year, or years, so that was the end of that era, for me.

 I have nothing but respect and admiration for service members, then and now. I might have been one, but I evaded it, you might say, simply by inaction combined with the deleterious social impact of reefer. Later in life, one of my supervisors at the phone company was an ex-Army Security Agency guy, and he was a total asshole. Just thought I'd throw that in there. 

Medicine Bottle Caps

 Just a brief observation. I take seven (7) things each morning, (some meds and some supplements) and of the seven bottles they are in, there six (6) different cap designs, requiring six (6) different strategies for opening them, some easier than others. 

The easiest one is the vitamin bottle. It has a great big cap and it operates in the normal way--unscrew counter clockwise to open, screw clockwise to close. Tightly or loosely, you decide. The most difficult one is not even a bottle. It is a blister pack, requiring, and I'm not lyin', a pair of scissors to cut around the blister, say, roughly, 270 degrees, and then a good, working thumbnail to pry the two layers aside so that the tiny pill can flip out onto the counter and bounce onto the floor and land underneath any small, handy object, ideally a bottle cap, or a dead spider. 

I just realized that in my dreams, I never take medicine. I also run. Like the wind. 

Post Columbus Day Thoughts

Columbus Day has come and gone again, and no one I know mentioned anything about it. Admittedly, the idea of a three-day weekend nowadays is not all that exciting. In the Trump era, it brings up the idea of instilling youngsters with thrilling tales of heroic explorers who ultimately helped create the United States, according to Trump's promotion of "real" history, when real history is about greed and cruelty and politics--in other words, just like it is right now, and always. 

But the cat's out of the bag. If we want to teach children fairy tales about how our country was founded, fine, I guess, but there will come a time when kids growing up will ask each other, just like they do now, of Santa Claus, "so when did you find out that the motive for founding our country was about money and greed and power?"  And the answer might still be, I heard my parents in the living room talking when they thought I was in bed asleep. 

Notice

 Busy Bee Cafe installments can be viewed by clicking on the "Busy Bee Interlude" label link at right, (top of right hand side-bar of this page.) 

They are not necessarily in the book's internal chronological order, and edits are ongoing. (e.g. there is at least one name change.) 

I welcome feedback regarding grammar, confusing sequences, inconsistencies, (but not anachronisms, because time travel,) irrelevant and/or exquisitely boring passages, and places where there are two spaces after a period. 

Picture from the web site

of the Busy Bee Cafe, in 

Ventura, California.

Visit their web site, at least,

at: busybee.cafe

Phraseology

 Nowadays it's more and more common to think and talk about politics. I try to "maintain an even strain," as the test pilots used to say, but the outrage is seductive in its own way, and you don't have to look very hard to find "outrage porn" in any and all corners of the Internet. (Except, I would hope, on my Facebook page.) 

I noted there, however, a few phrases that seem to have entered the lexicon during Trump's administration, specifically "double down," and "walk back." English, like any spoken language, is very efficient in some ways, and one is that we don't just invent words for the hell of it. If there's a strong enough need to communicate something, then someone will eventually coin a phrase. "Double down" is one such phrase. It's as if my dedication and loyalty to my previous dumb/outrageous statement will somehow shore up its integrity. Trump does this a lot, since he never admits to being wrong. 

But sometimes, when you're wrong, you just have to resign yourself to "walking back" the thing. Best done by a third party. No admission of guilt or error. Simply a reality splice in the matrix. Nothing to see here. 

A Post-Debate Political Interlude

 OMFG

In a Non-Related Story

 

My imagination is sore--hiding, licking its wounds as reality trumps it with every headline. So here is a picture that could represent autumn in suburbia, anytown, USA. It is the view from my front porch. Nowhere to be seen is there any indication of the world that Google News presents to me this morning. 

To wit: 

Trump, Biden first debate: Everything you need to know

Trump denies New York Times report on his taxes ahead of first presidential debate

California wildfire burns through Napa Valley wineries

'Multiple' people dead following 'hostage situation' in Salem, Oregon State Police investigating

Don't install this Windows 10 update Microsoft just pushed out

Grand juror claims Ky. attorney general misled public on Breonna Taylor

Coronavirus: Global Covid-19 death toll passes one million

Cyberattack hobbles major hospital chain's US facilities

. . . and so on. 

There is some good news. They found underground liquid water on Mars. Today is Coffee Day, I guess, and there are places that are offering free coffee!

I guess that's it for the good news, if you skip the "entertainment" section, which is mostly incomprehensible to me. Well, I guess the Kansas City Chiefs won their ball game, despite their politically incorrect name and mascot. 

I'm going outside. 

Get Your Kicks . . .

 I graduated high school in Palo Alto, California, in 1968, and in the following late September I drove to Independence, Missouri.  I did it just for the hell of it at first, but decided to stay. I returned to Palo Alto a couple years later but retreated back to Missouri about the time rents and real estate costs in the Bay Area made it too difficult to live there. (I believe the vast majority of my school mates no longer live in the area, having scattered to more liveable areas around the West Coast. Mostly Oregon, I suspect.) 

But in 1968, about the time Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, and my generation were burning their bras and their draft cards and some Americans flew around the moon and most Americans were wondering who shot J.R., hopping in my 1957 Chevrolet "Sedan Delivery" wagon to drive half-way across the country on the already legendary U.S. Route 66 was a great adventure. 

I wasn't quite eighteen yet so that was even better. I quit my job at a Texaco gas station on El Camino Real and hit the open road with no particular ETA, no job, and no place to live, in particular. For the rest of my life so far I have never duplicated the feeling of freedom that gave me. 

At the time, construction on the new Interstate Highway system had barely begun, so almost all of Route 66 was two-lane blacktop. It went right through the middle of every little town it served, so that one minute you would be cruising along a seemingly endless ribbon of desolate highway, and the next, idling at a stop sign at a four-way intersection flanked by a diner and a hardware store. As the song goes, you might see a flatbed Ford in Winslow, Arizona--though today the Interstate skirts around it so you hardly know you're there. 

I was there in 1968, but to be honest I may not have noticed anyway. It was about a two-thousand mile drive from Palo Alto to Kansas City, and it might be more accurate to say it has its exciting moments than to say it has its boring moments. The first half of that journey is desert, once you get out of California's Great Valley and before you reach Albuquerque.  One could be forgiven for being less than totally alert the whole way. 

For most of my life I thought of this trip as a high point of my life, but in truth, it was just the interstice between two things, my life as a Californian and the rest of my life as a Missourian. It took twelve years after that to figure out what I wanted to do with myself, when I finally got a "real" job and got married and all the rest. I have to say that I'm a slow learner. 

Since my wife died about five years ago, I've come to think of those two eras as two lives. Actually, I've always felt that way, a perspective perhaps facilitated by the geographic separation of them. It must be very strange, I'm thinking, to be an adult in the same place you went to Kindergarten. As it is, I feel well insulated from that life that ended with the completion of high school in 1968--well insulated by a buffer of two thousand miles of desert and farmland, connected only by the memory of a thin ribbon of highway that doesn't even exist anymore. 

On to life 3.0.  So far, so good. 

The New, Perhaps More Narrowly Defined Normal

It's a couple of weeks before my birthday. I have no expectations, good or bad. Jo and I have made it so far without catching the Coronavirus, or Covid-19. I have no expectations there, either, except a dim hope that someday there will be a vaccine for it and we can all return to something that reminds us of normalcy at a time when it might just be that there is no such thing anymore. 

For lunch we drove to a Wendy's and got take-out. At the drive-through, the disembodied voice from the speaker belonged to a young woman, I think. She was little help in clarifying the usual cryptic billboard that seemed to only reluctantly reveal the various ordering options. Did "small," "medium," and "large" refer to the combo's drink size, french-fry size, or both? There was no clue, so I mumbled something and let the young lady follow her heart. 

We then drove to a park to eat in the car. South of the Truman Presidential Library is a park with a playground, tennis courts, and trees and some pleasant scenery, so we opted for the latter and I parked my car accordingly. My thought as we sat there and looked around at the neighboring tree lined streets and small, well-kept houses, was that Independence might be one of those places where being "poor" doesn't mean you are white trash. Everybody's poor. (hyperbolic statement) It makes a difference. I explained to Jo that possibly the reason for this was that Independence has been here for a very long time, and has experience only very slow growth. Nowadays, there is really nowhere for it to grow anymore, except to its east where development only occurs when there is farmland for sale, and then, again, only slowly. 

After we ate we walked around the Independence Courthouse Square, which is a modest, barely-alive business district around an old, stately courthouse building that looks much like it did when Harry Truman returned from Washington D.C. for good and took walks in the afternoons. The square was a little more vital, back then. Nowadays over half the stores are closed, since the only activity around seems to be those few things involved in county government, some courthouse activity and associated lawyers. Shops that are still in business are run sporadically--meaning when you arrive they may or may not be open. Maybe business was so slow that day so they closed up and went home. Restaurants seemed to be still cautiously closed due to the Corona virus. To be fair, we were there around 2:30 in the afternoon, a slow time in any era. 

The most striking thing to me was that even though I first arrived in Independence when I drove out here from California in 1968, the year when Americans had just learned how to send a manned spacecraft around the moon and back, Sixty Minutes first aired on television and the Tet Offensive was launched in Viet Nam, little has changed.

My Week

 This is getting awkward. At this point I have no intention of letting up on either masks or social distancing until after I’ve gotten vaccinated (if indeed that comes about,) but more and more people I know have given up and are socializing “normally.”  This makes me look and feel like I’m being overly paranoid—in a liberal sort of way—and I’m sure at least some people I know have given up on me.

I used to go to a breakfast on Wednesdays with a bunch of guys I worked with at the phone company. We had stopped, and now it is back on again, but I won’t go sit in a restaurant for two hours with either no mask on while eating, or a mask on while trying to talk across a table.

Some friends invited us over, assuring us that there is room in their living room for us to keep our distance, but since I have no idea if or how often “the kids” come over with the grandchildren, we are hesitant. We invited them over to our place where we can sit on the deck, where at least it’s outside and so a little “safer.”  (He says their patio has mosquitoes.) No word back, so they don’t want to, I assume.

So, it’s all kind of annoying.

Sorry. I just needed to ventilate.

OK, not quite done yet. Since I live with another person, it is NOT up to me, as an individual, to decide how careful or not careful I want to be. It has to be a unanimous decision between the two of us.

Now I’m done. 

In further stunning developments, I whirled some grass seed onto the lawn, followed by fertilizer, and then some sort of substance meant to hold in moisture and keep the seed from slipping down the slope on the side of the house.  Another project involves a drainage problem by the back basement door, so I started digging that out so I can rake it out in a way that will allow rain water to drain away. However, now that we are running the lawn sprinklers three (3!) times a day so the new grass seeds will grow, I have had to put aside work on that. Slowly, the number of rakes, shovels and various implements of destruction is building up along the inside walls of the garage. This is something I hoped to avoid, but apparently it is my fate. I don’t actually have to mow, as we have an HOA that manages that, along with leaf and snow removal, and trash pickup. So, sort of a bonus there, except they perform that service on giant riding mowers that zoom back and forth among the trees and buildings, leaving tire tracks and grass that was cut so high and at such speed that it looks more like a bad haircut. 

But it's not ALL bad. Amongst all this negative doom and gloom are some good things. 

I'll get back to you on that. 

Fall

The sunlight slants farther now

Cold is creeping    

Trees are sleeping

leaves are dreaming

of summer sun.

Free Floating

I am just going to have to resort to free association in order to come up with a bog post. (Oops, sorry, Freud, I mean BLOG post.)  Just on GP, as we used to say. (general principles)  When I was in grade school, somewhere between 3rd and 5th grade we were given a spelling test and for the words it was ultimately revealed that we misspelled we were each to come up with a mnemonic to help us remember the correct spelling. Our school principal was in the classroom, and he explained how the word principle meant one thing, but his title, principal, meant something else. He explained that he was the "princi pal" of all of us kids. So, I never forgot that, silly as it was. My misspelled word was knowledge. Yeah, I know. Can't believe I misspelled that.  The company, GE, was failing, and they called upon the mysterious but well educated Mr. K to come in to save it. So, because of his knowledge,  K now led GE. Don't judge me. A girl misspelled captain, so her mnemonic was, the captain "eats out of a tin." Yikes.

I'm having so much trouble working on either one of my two books that I set it all aside in order to do some reading. My high school alumni web page (Palo Alto High School) has a list of authors who came from my graduating class, so I went there and peeked at some novels using Amazon's "see inside" feature, and I bought a couple written by Keith Raffel, one about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and one about a character whose Rabbi grandfather requested he continue his search for the Ark of the Covenant. Pretty juicy stuff, right? Reading the Ark book first (Temple Mount) and it's kind of good. It is a real page-turner, which means, for me, I am actually able to progress through it normally without having such long gaps between reading sessions that I have to back up a page or two to remind me where I am. I have said before that this sometimes means I work backwards through books if I don't read beyond my previous stopping point. As I read, I am always asking myself, could I do this well? I think maybe not, in this case, but then, maybe.

Wires in Oklahoma City

In 1983 I transferred from my job at the phone company employment office in Kansas City, Missouri, to a repair garage in Oklahoma City. I spent my first day on the job there as an "Exchange Repair Technician" riding with one of the crew members. Gene was a little older than the rest of us, and the most experienced. In the morning, he phoned into Dispatch and picked up a repair ticket and we drove over to it in his phone truck.
Gene was a wiry, slender guy, and he had a kind of slow, old school, polite demeanor typical of a lot of the native Oklahomans I ran into in the two years I lived down there. I had no experience with any of this, so as he drove, he started out my education.
"Around here," he said, "we don't talk about wires. We talk about pairs. Pairs of wires."
OK, I'm listening.
"All we really got to do is figure out what can go wrong with two wires, and fix it."
Which is about the most accurate, straightforward description of what was to be my job for the next two years that I ever heard.
A telephone circuit is a loop of wire, one side grounded, and one side with DC current on it. That's your pair of wires. They are called tip (ground) and ring (battery,) so named after their position on the typical cord board plug, that is, either the tip of the plug, or the ring, the circular band of metal below the tip, and insulated from it. I confess it was a long time before I understood that. What can go wrong is the two wires might be touching, which is a short, or either one might be broken, which we called an open, or either side might be touching the ground, as in the metal sheath surrounding phone cables.  Also, one of the wires might be touching one of the wires on a different pair. A telephone cable has a lot of pairs of wires in it--the amount varies, from, say, 25, or 50, or 100, and so on, up to hundreds. You might say, "the houses on that street are fed by a 25 pair cable."
So, that was my world, at work.  Fixing wires in cable, or in house wiring. That and fixing broken telephones, replacing cords--this was back when the phone companies, the Baby Bells, owned the telephones.
Some of the work was inside houses, some of it outside. People were glad to see us on their door step.  We were heroes. Actually it was kind of fun, and I liked thinking that each evening when I went home after a day at work, the town was a little bit better than it was when I woke up that morning. That was about the only job I ever had where I could say that.

A Slow Afternoon

Laslo enlisted Snorri's help in building his ornithopter. He planned to use the flathead six engine from the '52 Dodge pickup, which otherwise had been rendered non-operational the last time "the Agents," as they were called, had lobbed a grenade--or something--over the wooden fence that defined the back lot behind the cafe. Laslo built a winch over the resultant crater in order to pull the engine out--it was the only recognizable part of the truck--and was pleased when Snorri, who had been watching from the kitchen's back window, came out and performed an impromptu design change that reinforced the strength of the wooden beams.

"Where did you learn to make a winch like that?" asked Laslo.

"It's like boats," Snorri said by way of explanation. He thought of a home far away and long ago where he built boats and sailed them. He never thought he would go this far. The two men pulled on the ropes, taking turns, until the engine was raised above ground level, and they swung it around and landed it on the rim of the crater. Laslo smiled down on it, beaming.

"I think this thing could run all day at about 3,000 RPM," he said to the slender man who stood next to him peering down on the greasy iron lump of an engine at their feet. "Do you know what an RPM is?" he asked.

"No."

"No matter," Laslo replied. "You're in charge of wing construction."

Snorri frowned as he nodded assent. He liked Laslo, and thought he would have made an excellent Dane.  "I'll go ask Denise to help me . . . Google? . . . wings."  He went back into the kitchen. As the screen door slammed and bounced behind him, Laslo glanced again at the engine and then went down into the basement to look for a battery and a gas can.

Enforcement

I'm here to tell you.  You kids get OFF my GOTTdamm lawn.

I am not photogenic

Just kidding.  I don't care.

A Clash of Cultures and Subsequent Bureaucratic Nonsense

When I was eighteen years old and first moved to the town of Independence, Missouri, I got here in my '57 Chevy. I had recently bought it from a guy who lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains, just west of Los Altos, (if I recall correctly) for $300.  It was a rare model, something called a Sedan Delivery, which was more or less a two-door station wagon, only with panel sides rather than the rear windows, and a rear tail gate that was one piece, hinging from the top. It had a blown engine, though I was assured it was just a blown head gasket and would be repairable.

That turned out not to be the case--it was not repairable--but I put another engine in it and eventually drove it from the Bay Area to Kansas City.

But the problem was I never registered the car in California. Per law, I had the "pink slip," which was the title, and it was signed over to me, but for much of the time I had the car while in California, it didn't run. Therefore, I couldn't get it inspected, and I couldn't get it titled. Instead, I got a 60-day emergency operating permit, and planned on getting a certificate of non-operation for the period that I was working on it. Bottom line, I never got it registered by the time I left the state, and I had planned on simply getting it registered in Missouri once I established residency there. So, off I go, with a bunch of documentation and DMV forms and assorted crap jammed into the glove box.

I got to Independence and pretty much forgot about all that stuff. I had the idea vaguely in mind that I would take care of it, but time passes differently when you're eighteen, I suppose. At any rate, one fine day I was driving through the town of Raytown, which was adjacent to Independence and known for its strict law enforcement. Let's say, to be polite, that I knew a few people who told me that they "never go through Raytown." Just avoid it. But, anyway, I'm eighteen, like I said. So, I had expired California license plates on my car, of course. They were the originals from when the car was new, as a matter of fact, that being how it worked in California. So here's a long haired kid driving this sort of "hippy wagon" looking vehicle, with expired tags, from California, no less, therefore probably jam packed in the back with smuggled marijuana. A Raytown police officer pulls me over, and in the ensuing conversation I point out that I have this here "emergency operating permit," as well as this here California driver's license, and he points out that both are expired.

Oops.

Later that same day, I'm in a holding cell at the Raytown police station, staring blankly through the black iron bars out at the small room where three policemen stand around a wooden desk with all my paperwork spread out over it, and they can't figure it out.  No one can. Not even in California, not in Missouri, and certainly not in Raytown. As I watch, phone calls are made, and quiet whispered discussions take place until finally, after about two hours, I am released and given a ticket. It is something called an "equipment violation," so, technically, I just have to correct the problem and show up at a highway patrol station to have it checked off and then I am all set.

Never mind that it's not really equipment we're talking about, but, whatever.  I am to go and get my car inspected and registered in ten days and show the highway patrol.

This is where the fun begins. I do get the car inspected, and I get my Independence City Sticker, which is a little sticker they sell you for $25 that signifies nothing, and does nothing, get my property tax waiver and then I go to the DMV. I produce the California title, the "pink slip" with the seller's signature. So far so good.

I am told it needs to be notarized. In Missouri, a title signed over like that needs to be notarized.  I point out that in California, that was not required, that all I needed was the signature. I'm told that it still needs to be notarized. There are two problems here. 1.) A notary needs to witness the document being signed, which of course means it's too late--already signed, 1,500 miles away, and 2.) the guy I bought the car from is now in the army, in Viet Nam, 8,000 miles away.

But, I didn't know about the notary procedure, so off I go to find a notary. Soon I am educated, and I return to the DMV office. I wait in line. I get to speak to a nice lady, and I explain that no one would notarize the title because, as I said, it's already been signed. She says to me, in a hushed tone, "There's a guy down on 23rd street, behind the laundry right down there . . . he'll notarize anything."

I go there. I see the guy, ask him to notarize my title, and he says, hell no, he can't do that. It's already been signed! I am too young and dumb to understand what I was supposed to do next, so I storm out of there and return to the DMV office. I stand in the middle of the room, and ask in a loud voice to speak to whoever the highest authority in the building was, that I am wondering if I should just push my car off a cliff, or what. Yeah I really did say that. They were probably all just a little frightened.

The nice lady quickly motions me over to her desk. "Let me see the title." she says. I hand it to her. She takes out a blank sheet of paper and writes out a bill of sale. She studies the signature of my seller on the pink slip, then does a fair job of forging it onto the bill of sale. She folds the paper up again and again until it is a small square, rubs it against her leg so it looks aged, unfolds it, then opens her desk drawer, looks to her left and to her right, takes out a notary stamp and notarized both the bill of sale and the title, and then processes it all and registers my car.

I take my new Missouri license plates and quickly screw them onto the front and back of my car, sort of victorious, I think, but only conditionally.

Sunday Search for Inspiration

It's always tempting to start out telling cockroach stories. Every telephone company repair tech has them--stories, that is--if they ever worked in the residential side of the business. You got your tool belt on and you knock on the door and when it swings open, you say, hi, I'm here to fix your phone line.  And they let you inside and you check the line and maybe you have to work on the inside wiring, or the jacks, or the telephone set itself. Of course, this was back before the customers supplied their own telephones.

But, cockroaches don't care who owns the phones. They like to crawl inside dark, enclosed places, and they love company. If a household has a cockroach problem, then there will be cockroaches inside the phones--almost every time--or inside the little box-like phone jacks that we used to put on baseboards. Any little hiding place. For us telco repair people, it was a routine job hazard, just as wasps were when we opened up telephone terminals that were mounted on telephone poles in backyards and alleys.

I never thought about it before, but maybe you would be surprised at this. Maybe not. Telephone lines, and most of the related equipment, were not that complicated. I think we were paid--pretty well--in part for our willingness to subject ourselves to the rigors of outdoor work in a Midwest climate, as well as this whole insect thing. When I was a land surveyor, it was snakes and poison ivy. It's always somethin'.

Political Rant Which You May Skip if So Desired

I had a thought about voting as I read through yesterday's news. The media, call it fake news or lamestream or, alternatively, Faux News, all of which, even sprinkled throughout as they are with the occasional actual journalistic effort, have got us all perceiving current politics as confrontational, hostile, dangerous, crazy, infuriating, or outrageous, and the issue of voting has been covered similarly. The very act of voting is front and center now, voting is the equivalent of a soldier going "over the top," risking immune system and well-being to resist the oppressive opposition (whoever that might be) and it has all somehow come to this: voting is a negative act--we vote against the other guy almost more than for our guy.
Just sayin'. Everyone should vote, but I hope not just the ignited, furious anti-whatevers. If you're not sure, or if you are upset and have decided to withhold your vote, or just turned off by the negative politicking, just ask yourself, if the election results came in, which result would make you say to yourself, oh good, glad that guy got it? You must have an opinion. So vote for that guy.  Voting is not like going into battle. It's just the opposite, in fact. It's meant to be the peaceable way to resolve conflicts, or come to decisions.
Just vote.  It's what we democracies do.  It's no big deal. Until someone tries to stop you.

Another Week Passes

Friday again. I struggle to find meaning, for myself and for this blog, and it is just a little alarming whenever another week passes without my having made any progress on that. You might think it is from getting old, but the truth is that when young, it's not that we actually have meaning, it is that we're too busy to realize or worry about the fact that we don't. It's nice to be needed.

One time a few years back as my son was lecturing me (as he is sometimes wont to do) about thinking of myself as "getting old," he said I was "still relevant." This made me laugh. Not because I know that I am not necessarily relevant, but because he sounded so much like a Sixties Baby Boomer. I suppose we can't help but transmit some of that stuff.  I guess as transmitted rhetoric goes, this was pretty benign. Anyway, he was probably talking about my continued willingness to loan him money from time to time.  No--that's not fair.  He's a good man.

So, as the years go by, dreams and aspirations become hobbies, which can be defined as stuff you like to do but no one else cares. One advantage is it takes a lot less energy to do anything when you're not trying to draw a crowd.

Meanwhile, while much can be said about my two years spent as a clerk at the phone company, back in the early 80s, the thing that I remember the most vividly was how, as the only guy in an office full of women, it would sometimes be tough to navigate all the office politics. I was often held to a different set of rules and standards when it suited the other clerks. It so happened that the last two guys who were clerks in that office wound up getting promoted to management pretty quickly, and of course leaving all of them behind. No doubt this bothered some of them, or it seemed to me that it did, and I eventually learned from an ally that some of them had actually gotten together and decided that they weren't going to let this latest guy (me) get promoted this time--not if they could help it.

They were very effective at this, even though it was moot, even though they failed to understand that I wasn't there to work my way into management--my plan, which was no secret, was to put in my two years to be eligible for a transfer, and get a job as an outside repair technician. Yes, and leave them all behind. So, I was treated OK, but only provisionally. I didn't care, that much, but the whole thing was sort of un-fun.

No matter. At about the two year mark, I figured out a way to get my transfer, even if it meant moving to Oklahoma; there was an oil boom going on down there, and much more work so that it was easier to get into the type of job I wanted. I submitted my transfer request, and it took about a month or so to get it. I was told one Friday that I was to report to work in Oklahoma City in a week. Luckily for me, the short notice wasn't a problem, and I got everything I owned into a '72 Oldsmobile Cutlass and drove down the Saturday before my start date. 

I'll give you the spoiler.   At that moment I had no reason to believe that Oklahoma City, a five hour drive to the south of Kansas City, would be anything other than a fine place to live.   I saw this as a permanent move.  I'd have to stay there for two years before I could put in another transfer, anyway. As it turned out, I was anxious to get back to KC some months before the two years were up, for a handful of reasons, and I managed to do so pretty much right after I had the two years in.

But that first day on the job, that was something. You might say a harbinger, but you might not if, like me, you weren't sure what that means. I found the work location, a long, low cinder block building next to a large, brick telephone central office, and I walked in and found the smallish room where my new crew was. I was a little early of course.  The phone company was very big on punctuality, and this was my first day and all. It was a medium sized beige room with a cluttered wooden desk in one corner--the boss's, I assumed, though no one was seated there--and a couple of long tables in the middle of the room, lined with chairs, with a scattered array of telephones on them.  A handful of guys were already sitting around, and they all looked up at me. Someone asked if I was the new guy, to which I answered yes and asked where the manager of the crew was.

"He's not here today," someone said. "He said you'd be here.  You're supposed to ride with Gene."

OK, so my first day was to be spent riding along with one of the techs.  Too bad I was so stupid I wasn't dressed for December weather in Oklahoma. I ascertained that Gene wasn't there yet. Then someone, who for the life of me for the next two weeks I thought was called "Little Phil" but whose name was actually Littlefield, (Oakie accents) looked up and asked me if I had ever done outside tech work before. They had no idea where I came from, or from what job. I said, no.

Littlefield just lowered his head and blurted "God DAMMIT!  They were supposed to get somebody in here who could start working right away!" 

"I'll learn as fast as I can," I said.

Welcome to Oklahoma.

In Dogged Conscientious Pursuit of 500 Words (The title counts!)

I am not sure if I will get my 500 words in today. This is because I allowed myself to get distracted at every turn as the day went by. Something good: I was able to walk a mile and a third after lunch, which is something I should try to do every day as well. There is an Arby's on a busy highway not far from my house, so we went there, to the drive-thru, and got food. Very close by is a walking track, and along the street in front of it are maybe five trees, spaced out, that provide good shade at that time of day, at this time of year. So, we parked in the shade, ate lunch, and listened to NPR news and then walked around the track four times.  (X 0.33 mile)

In another lifetime, it seems, I lived in another house that was fairly close to this track, and I walked there after dinner.  Sometimes my son, who was a little kid then, would come with me and play on the play apparatus while I walked. Very happy memories, so I enjoy going there nowadays.  Just in much different circumstance.

I just had a thought--just now--you thought you smelled something burning--about what I wrote about my first job at the phone company. It was at the Southwestern Bell administration office building in downtown Kansas City. The employment office was on the ground floor of it. My last job with the company was also in that building, but on the 10th floor. Just thought it was odd to have that happen, because in-between, I worked at several different locations in two different states and three different towns.

This building, by the way, was the one we theorized they built on an old Indian burial ground, but during construction, they just moved the headstones. (!!!) But that's a long story--possibly way over 500 words--for another day.

Stay safe. Keep flossing.

Self Assessment

 I just read yesterday's post, and I think I sounded just a bit narcissistic. I didn't mean to. I got the idea to write about my career at the phone company, thinking there were a few juicy bits in there, and you must know that, at least in my experience at blue collar type jobs, most of us think we're good at what we do and, who knows, probably just a little bit better than some, and maybe, on a good day, just a little better than most.  Well, just walk into a work place and tell someone they do shitty work, and see what happens.  No matter how much that particular person might have just been bad-mouthing the company or saying how much he hates his job, he thinks he's good at what he does.

The truth is that, in general, I regard my overall "career," (if you want to call it that) at the phone company as sort of a lukewarm failure. I showed up, I got paid--that was the actual motivation, to be clear--and over the years some jobs were good, some bad, some I was good at, some not so good.  The last place I worked at, as a matter of fact, was the latter. I could list reasons and everything, if I wanted to preserve the ego, but no, I was in a type of job I was no good at. Not even close. Was it all bad?  No. Like I said, I got paid.  Was it all good?  Well, no.

But, my point, I think it's worth the effort to possess an accurate self-assessment. If you're bad at something, learn from it--either get better at it, or better at avoiding it, or better at enduring it--whatever. But it probably wouldn't do much good to get better at lying about it. And, if you're good at something, might as well own it.  Why not?  If you got it, flaunt it. As Elmore James, the American Blues guitarist sang, "You got to shake your moneymaker." Of course tooting your own horn might best be reserved for resumes,  or classic, ground-breaking autobiographies, or possibly anything after the third date--or possibly before the third date. I'm not sure.

I'm never going to make 500 words, but I went way over yesterday, so there. And, I give this post 3 out of 5 stars, mainly for impeccable punctuation.

The Early Days

 I've given myself the assignment of writing 500 words, at least, every day. Since my life doesn't have 500 words in it each day, this is liable to make this blog pretty boring. You have been warned.
I retired from the phone company, which, here, was Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. (at first) in 2009. As a matter of fact it was about two weeks before the stock market bottomed out. I had worked at Ma Bell for about 29 years. The round number of 30 years had no meaning, in my case, as my retirement was the same no matter what, as long as I was old enough and had enough service--which I did.
I started there in 1980, therefore. A friend told me I should apply for a job as either a clerk or an operator and I would stand a good chance of getting hired because of Affirmative Action, which in its fine print recognized something called "non-traditional jobs," which meant that as a white male, I should go to the head of the line so that more men could be operators or clerks. This worked, especially since I passed a typing test that required I type more than 50 words per minute, and do so relatively error-free. Since not too many men could do that, apparently, I was hired in a couple of weeks, as a matter of fact.
The plan was to hire on, as I did, and then after the obligatory two-year period had passed, submit a request to something called the Placement Bureau for a transfer to the job that I really wanted, which was either installer or repair technician. That's what I had in mind, but there were lots of technical, or "craft," jobs in the company to choose from. The trick was to think of one that was needing people in my area.
I put my transfer in but nothing came up. They were doing no hiring in the departments I wanted into. I continued clerking--I worked at the Employment Office either filing, or answering the phones, or standing at the front desk handing out applications to people who wandered in (very busy back then) or administering tests to people who were actually being considered for hire.
For every job category, there was a specific test applicants must pass in order to be hired into it. The tests were theoretically applicable to the job duties.  There was an "Operator/Clerical" test for either of those jobs that tested some language abilities as well as math abilities, as well as one weird section testing one's ability to follow instructions and then make marks on a graph with some degree of accuracy. There was a "Craft" test, for the jobs I wanted, meant to determine if you could perform math and English problems with a little bit more complexity, as well as demonstrate some spatial relationships understanding--that was the classic one with the pictures of boxes with patterns all over them, then several "unfolded" boxes (sort of like a hopscotch layout) with patterns that may or may not match the regular boxes, which you had to identify. Not sure how that applied to the job, but I suppose it helped weed out applicants with no mechanical aptitude whatsoever.
There were more tests--five or six, in all.
So, administering these tests was the fun part of the job. We all took turns on different weeks.  Testing was done three days a week, a few times a day, with groups ranging in size from 15 or so to maybe 30. It was an interesting experience being in charge of such large groups (relatively speaking!) and moving them to a testing room on the next floor up, and then seating everyone and giving instructions, and everything else that testing entailed. It was a good learning experience for me.  I was very hesitant and shy at first, which DOES NOT WORK in a setting like that, and I learned to be a little more assertive and, most importantly, learned how to communicate in general terms and still make sense.
Imagine, say, thirty people whose names you have all called, and they are all standing up in the smallish employment office seating area, and they are all trying to be on their best behavior, they want to impress, and they want of course to pass this test they are about to take.  They are nervous. I am a twenty-nine year old man wearing "business casual" clothing, (though not real good stuff, as I was only making $168.00 a week) and I must move this pulsating, amoeba-like collection of people into the elevator lobby, into two elevator cars (at least) and make sure they arrive at the 2nd floor, which was very important since the building had 13 floors and these people weren't employees and should not be wandering around without supervision! From the elevator lobby on the second floor, I have to direct the group down a hall and into a room, which looks very much like a classroom, with desks in rows, and two long table at the front.
But here I am with all these people and the first few times I had to do this, it was very awkward, very halting and no doubt very confusing to the group of applicants. Then, one day, I was walking toward the elevators after leaving the employment office, this crowd behind me, walking slowly to match my speed, and I stopped and turned around. And they all stopped, too! In that instant I understood that it was, in fact, very easy to control them to the degree I needed to.  At that moment, I was important--I was how they were going to get hired.  I just had to tell them what we were going to do, then do it, wash, rinse, repeat. From then on, for weeks, months, after, I learned to speak loudly, clearly, and with confidence, and at some point just before I transferred out of that job, I was told that among all the testers, and I was one of a group of about six or seven of us, MY groups always got higher scores, on average, for that whole time. Since I wasn't helping them cheat, this told me that I was just better at giving tests, putting people at ease, and communicating clearly with them. I was sort of proud of that.

The Environment

 First, I have to say that every time I see the word, environment, I remember an incident that happened with my wife at the grocery store where she worked some years ago. She told me this. She was walking with the store manager and pointed out to him that a huge banner on the wall behind the customer service desk read:

ENVIROMENTALLY SAFE DRY CLEANING SERVICE

She said to him that "environmentally" was misspelled. He said that was OK, that he'd leave it like that so people could feel good about themselves when they spotted the error. To which my wife replied that she wasn't particularly proud of remembering something she learned in the fifth grade. 

That has nothing to do with anything, but I enjoy thinking of it. Personally, I didn't like the store manager, but I didn't have to work with him, so that was OK. 

Today, the environment we're talking about is the one in which I do my writing. It's in the finished basement, and not all that well lit--there is one east-facing window--but, you, know--lamps.

I spend a lot of time here--too much probably--because the S.O. works on her book in the spare bedroom upstairs and I have this free time, so . . . 

The nerve center of the basement.

Yeah I know.  Who has a big stupid computer tower anymore? At least it doesn't have a noisy fan although when the power goes out, it does suddenly feel eerily quiet. And I got this great big screen so I can maintain denial of needing reading glasses. 

Hatch Act Being So Unfair

Trump has hinted that he might make his Republican nomination speech from the White House. He says it will beneficial because 1.) it’s safer for him not to travel, 2.) it’s easy, 3) it will save a lot of money. Nancy Pelosi and others, including many Republicans, are pushing back. They say it is not legal for most who will be involved, and that it goes against tradition and respect for the White House--the idea that you shouldn’t use the White House for political functions. Since, like, forever. 

 I have an idea. Trump could make everybody happy, including, I am guessing, even himself, by making his speech from the golf course--that is, any one of the golf courses he has used, combined, about 268 times in just this year. 

 Why is this good? Well, 1.) he must have determined that going golfing is safe, else he wouldn’t have done it so much, 2.) it’s easy. Seriously, everything is easy for Trump. He just walks around, or rides around, and everybody else does all the work. It’s part of being President. Then 3.) it will save money, probably. Trump is obviously worried about saving taxpayer money, and since he has gone golfing 268 times in just this year, I think we can assume he has determined it doesn’t cost a lot of money.

 Except according to the web site www.trumpgolfcount.com, his golf trips, combined, have cost the American taxpayers $138,000,000. But, you know, what’s one more golf trip? Plus, he can get in a few holes before or after the speech. Actually, since he’s going to do that some time soon anyway, if past behavior is any indication of future behavior, that means the speech will cost zero dollars over the normal amount of taxpayer money Trump spends. Win-win.