An anniversary to note
It's worth mentioning that Sept. 11, 2001, was actually supposed to have happened 10 years ago this week.

The Natural
I'm well into a "career." As such, I have been trained, taught, honed, sculpted, molded, polished, beaten, shaken, stirred, scattered, smothered, and otherwise whipped into being a good Corporate Man. I spent a the bulk of this week in a "Workforce Development" training session, where I listen to a bunch of catchy phrases and participate in silly role-playing exercises, all of which they tell me will make me an even better Corporate Man.

Then there's The Wife.

Her "career" involves taking three genetic reproductions of ourselves and molding them into decent human beings while simultaneously preventing them from growing up to become menaces to society. She is about 95 percent -- probably closer to 98 percent -- responsible for feeding them, bathing them, making sure they don't leave the house without clothes, making sure they don't hurt themselves or each other.

That's her basic responsiblity. She goes beyond that to inspire each of them, in varying degrees based on their ages (8, 3, and 2) to have a love of life and a love of learning and a love of each other and a love of having fun. She's teaching them to love, basically, and she's teaching them very well.

She's a leader, a teacher, a nurse, a chef and a role model. And she has done all of this for eight years without the benefit of a single "Workforce Development" session. Nobody told her how to do any of this. Nobody peppers her with inspirational catch-phrases and daily affirmations. She does this without getting an annual ego-boost from a performance review. She occasionally gets a nice note from me or one of the kids telling her how great she is, but if she got one on the hour every hour every day, it still wouldn't be enough. Nobody holds an annual Recognition Event for her. Her reward for feeding the 2-year-old is a poopy diaper. Her reward for correctly answering 100 questions from the 3-year-old is Question No. 101. Her reward for giving the 8-year-old a valuable life lesson is hearing "That's not fair!" and the sound of a slamming door.

Number of complaints I have lodged about my job over the last eight years: approximately 2,920, give or take a few hundred. Number of complaints about parenthood she's delivered to me over the last eight years: zero. That's an exact figure.

One of the things I was awake for during my training session today was an exhortation from the speaker to "follow your calling." I was asked if I knew what my calling was. I said, yeah, and it's changed about 14 times in the last 15 years.

It occurs to me that my wife has a calling. She's answering it as well as anybody on the planet -- anybody -- ever has answered a calling.

Right now, it's sunny and 80
Back in Texas, The Wife was bitching and moaning about wanting to go back to Florida. I said, "You know, there's more to life than good weather."

I was wrong.

The antidote
Sunday was a good day to be a Floridian. Taking note of a day of complete atmospheric beauty -- low 70s, not a cloud to be seen -- we packed up the minivan and headed up State Road A1A to beautiful St. Augustine, one of my favorite places on the planet. Yeah, A1A is the long way, but it's well worth it. The tackiness of A1A in Daytona Beach gives way to a clear, unfettered view of the Atlantic out the passenger-side window through most of Flagler County. Then it takes you through some old-Florida overgrowth before taking you over the Bridge of Lions and back into time.

St. Augustine is the United States' oldest continuously inhabited European settlement. It dates back to 1565, when a guy named Pedro Menendez de Aviles claimed La Florida for the Spanish crown and then turned back a French effort to take it. He, of course, thought there was gold and stuff there. Imagine the disappointment at the Spanish royal castle when they received the letter: "Sorry, no gold and stuff here. Just tourist schlock. Couple of citrus stands, an alligator farm. Weather's nice, though, and the fishing's good. Think we'll stick around for a while. Later, Pedro."

Having decided to stick around, they built a big fort in the late 1600s. It's still there, and it's a tremendous antidote to Florida tourist schlock. It's a source of endless fascination for the oldest daughter, who first visited when she was 5. She traces her interest in history to that visit.

We checked out the fort, walked the narrow brick streets of town, had some high-quality ice cream and not-bad seafood. It was a good reminder of why we wanted to come back to Florida in the first place.

For a day, there was no newspaper, no impending war, nobody getting trampled in a nightclub. Just me, the family, a beautiful day and 400-some years of history. Wouldn't dare ask for anything more.

Clean slate
Bad week. Finally over. Must cleanse the head over the next 48 hours. Get ready for a better five-day block next week.

Numbing
This week's headlines:

21 dead in nightclub in Chicago

We are for sure gonna drop the bomb on Iraq, Bush says

26 dead as snow blankets Northeast

Clerical error at hospital might cost girl, 17, her life

Four terrorism suspects arrested in Chicago and Tampa

39 dead in nightclub in Rhode Island

I keep waiting for someone to say, "And now for the good news ... "

I once saw a bumper sticker -- one of my favorites actually, which read, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." I'm learning why so many people simply aren't paying attention.

Catch your breath
The government is taking a day off to celebrate President's Day. I couldn't be happier. Gives the guys who are banging the drums of war a chance to rest their arms.

Life is pretty good, except for all this

I used to complain about work because I didn't have enough to do. Being a man of extremes, I took a job that took me in completely the opposite direction. I had planned to take the week off to complete some home tasks which I had been avoiding, but alas, my vacation was cut short Thursday. Here on the Edge, we have to cover the shuttle disaster like a local story because, well, it is. We're certainly covering it with quantity. I did manage to clean the garage.

Today's weather will be the best since we came back to the Edge of America. Beautiful, sunny, low 80s. Not bad for mid-February. However, all five of us are sick in some fashion. The Boy can barely talk, which is not really a bad thing. The Old Daughter feels yucky. The Wife and I have mild cases of whatever the yuk is, but we're groggy more from lack of sleep. The only person who seems completely healthy is the Young Daughter, but she's 2, so we can't exactly turn control of the house over to her.

United Nations to world: "We haven't seen any bad weapons here in Iraq, but that doesn't mean they're not there. We'd like to keep looking." United States to United Nations: "We're bored with the inspections. We want to drop bombs. Besides, for Pete's sake, don't you guys watch CNN? The freakin' terrorists are coming to get us. Clearly, they must be stopped, and we'll stop them by torching Baghdad." Again, a quandary: Clearly the inspections are a sham. Clearly, the U.S. has little, if any, justification to start a war with Iraq. See how clear everything is?

More wisdom from the wife
The Wife reacts to our government urging us to stock up on duct tape, plastic sheeting and food. "This is the ultimate redneck war," she says. "We're defending ourselves with duct tape."

I'm a pacifist. Cross this line and come do something about it
Sometime in 2003, in the sands somewhere north of Baghdad:

Look, Mr. Iraqi, it turns out that I'm duty bound to kill you. Despite the fact that it goes against the Ten Commandments, international law, my own instincts and everything that I've been taught, I have to pull this trigger and fill you full of .50-caliber. Despite the fact that I don't fully know why I'm supposed to kill you, and that I don't fully believe the cause for which I've been sent to fight, I have to do it.

My country's leader, several of his high-ranking employees and several fat, balding, 50-ish radio talk show hosts who have spent as much time in the military as Sean Penn told me that this is not only necessary, it's a moral imperative. By me killing you -- a guy I don't even know and don't personally have a beef with -- I will be saving my family from the horrors of terrorism. I'm sorry that your leader decided that your family should be relocated to live next door to a bomb factory as a "human shield," or whatever they're calling them on CNN. I sincerely hope that when we drop the megaton, it'll miss them and hit the factory. They've done nothing to bother me, either.

It's entirely possible that you're bothered by the fact that your religion has been hijacked in the name of some kind all-out right vs. wrong battle. It's entirely possible you haven't been to the mosque in some time; I know how hard it is to get three kids ready to go anywhere. That's one of the many reasons I haven't personally participated in organized religion for a while. But I have a duty. I have to preserve my honor. To preserve my honor, I have to kill you.

Yeah, I know, wars were a hell of a lot easier to fight back in the day, back before all this psychobabble, back before we were so, um, enlightened. It was a lot easier to kill in the name of a government that could do no wrong. But that little problem in the late '60s and early '70s with that Nixon guy exposed an awful lot. I'm not sure our way is always right anymore. I do know it's better than any other way that's been discovered so far, and I truly wish your countrymen will figure that out, too. But if they don't want to, as a sovereign nation, that's probably their business.

I know my grandfathers had no problem killing all those Japanese babies and German wives. Their newspapers told them what awful, terrible things were going on in Germany, and the Japanese, why, hell, they were practically on our shores. Better to exterminate that generation of tyrants and sub-humans before they came over and exterminated us. History shows that on the right-and-wrong scale, my grandfathers tipped more toward right.

Our government tells us that's what you're planning to do to us, and not with bombs and guns and stuff, but things like anthrax and sarin and VX and other chemistry-set concoctions. My wife opens all the mail at our house. I don't want her dying because of it.

Meanwhile, there's some guy on the other side of the world, somewhere north of the 38th parallel, likely pointing a big something or another at our west coast. I'm not over there trying to kill him because if I was, he might actually launch the thing.

So, you see, Mr. Iraqi, I have to kill you. Either that, or you're going to kill me. You have your orders, too. I understand that. Only one of us will survive this meeting to see our children again. Only one of us will walk away from this meeting.

But we'll both carry away the scars.

The question was posed in song in 1970: "What is it good for?"

When you're speaking of war, the answer is simple:

Absolutely fucking nothing.

Say it again.

Everybody's doing it
Dave Barry, cited elsewhere in this forum as one of the few remaining reasons to read a newspaper, has a blog. This guy is funnier in one sentence than any of the rest of us are in 4,000 words.

Half my life
I just noticed today's date: Feb. 9. On this date in 1986 was the first appearance of a story under my byline in a professional newspaper.

I was hired by the Anytown Daily Bugle in early February 1986 to take sports scores on the phone part-time. My job was to answer the phone, transcribe results from area sporting events and put them in the newspaper, in the small type called "agate." My second day on the job was a Friday night, the busiest night of the week, when all the high school basketball teams are playing. Because I hit the wrong button -- I "copied" my scores into a computer queue instead of "transferring" them -- every result I took that night wound up in the paper twice. Oops.

Also that night, the sports editor assigned me a story. I was to cover the conference high school wrestling tournament the next afternoon. Another sports writer told me, "They just want to get an idea of how you write." I took that to mean the assignment was just for practice, not for publication. Feeling no pressure, I went to a tournament -- the first time I had ever watched wrestling -- interviewed a friend of mine who won his weight class, went back to the office and wrote the story.

"Nice job," said the sports editor. "Thanks."

Imagine my surprise the next morning when my stepmother's father, in town visiting from St. Louis, looked up from the paper and said, "Hey, nice story on that wrestling tournament."

I ran over and grabbed the paper from him, and there it was -- my "practice" story. To this day, I remember that the typo "dowmplayed" made it into the paper.

I ended up writing a lot more stories and doing a lot less "agate" than the other agate clerks. I was too dumb to know I had any talent at all; I just wrote what felt right and it made its way into the paper more often than not. Despite the fact that I was 17 years old, I considered myself every bit the sportswriter that anybody else on the staff was. I didn't know any better.

I worked as hard as I could, and then some. I worked way more than 40 hours most weeks, despite being "part-time." I accepted assignments nobody else would. Whenver something involved driving across the state, I signed up. I did all this during the day and stuck around at night to answer phones. Basically, I worked my ass off.

Two years later, the "part-time" tag was removed. At 20, I had a job that many, many others spent years in college and enduring internships to earn.

Nearly a year later, I was on the verge of losing it. I received probably the worst performance review my boss -- known for being soft on performance issues -- had ever delivered. He said it was obvious that without the carrot of a full-time job being dangled in front of me, I had mutated into an unqualified slacker. Really, I was guilty of nothing more than being 21, but he was right. I had convinced myself that I was so damn good at what I did that I could do it at 40 percent of my capability and still be fine. The boss, in no uncertain terms, made it clear that was not the case.

It basically saved my career.

In that performance review, in a calmer moment, we also noted that I had some weaknesses as a reporter. I had to agree with that. Part of it was the aforementioned lack of maturity. Part of it was my natural inclination to avoid conflict. I wasn't really one to ask tough questions.

At the time, we had no copy editors on our sports staff; the sports editor and his assistant did most of the production work, with help from whichever writer was in the office at the time. A newfangled production concept called "pagination" -- in which pages were built on a computer screen and output as one piece -- was coming down the pike. The boss asked me if I was interested in learning how to be a "paginator." He gave me a book, "The Newspaper Designer's Handbook." He said, "Read it and tell me if you think you can do that." He didn't say, I hope you can, 'cause that's the only way you're going to keep your job. He didn't have to.

That's how I morphed from sportswriter to newspaper designer.

It turned out that I had above-average skill as a designer, despite not having had any formal training. That, along with my above-average technical skill and my renewed work ethic, helped me to become the assistant sports editor three years later, and into a succession of better jobs after that.

That sports editor in 1989 reminded me that I wasn't entitled to anything. Yeah, I'm reasonably OK at what I do. But it's not enough. I firmly believe that attitude is more important than talent. I try like hell to be a living, breathing example of that.

As of this week, I've been a professional journalist for half my life. I have no idea if I've accomplished anything. In this business, the only thing that matters is what's in today's paper, because tomorrow, it'll be lining the litter box. The term "body of work" is fairly meaningless to most journalists.

But I hope it on some level it matters. After all, it has been half my life.

More congratulations are in order
Our good friend fritza is making yet another addition to his family. Sometime in late July, there'll be another little fritza running around. New life is the universe's ultimate miracle. It'll be good to have another one among us.

I have very few longtime friends with whom I've maintained contact. I met Fritz in 1980, in seventh grade (Mrs. Blood's science class, as I recall. What a great name for a science teacher.) In school, Fritz and I were misfits; in very different ways, of course, but misfits nevertheless. We have stories to tell, but the stories are much better told over a beer or a strawberry daiquiri made with 151-proof Bacardi ("No smoking around the drinks, please. Thank you.") It's good to share stories with the only other person who'd get the joke.

Our late teenage years were spent fishing, drinking, going to school occasionally, fishing, and drinking. Our weekends usually started at the crack of dawn on Saturday, with a map of Missouri, some weak fishing equipment, some illicit booze; basically everything but a plan. They usually ended with some great discovery having been made and another great story to tell.

As all common paths eventually do, ours diverged after college. He got married three years after I did and moved to Kansas City a few months before I moved to Cincinnati. We've never met each other's children; we haven't taken our sons fishing the way we always said we would; and, frankly, I haven't kept in touch as well as I should. As one of our charter readers, he's done a pretty good job keeping up with my life, but I haven't done as well as I should keeping up with his.

Thankfully, a real friend doesn't hold that against me.

I wouldn't be so paranoid if they weren't out to get me
"Code Orange," it says. "Yeah, right," I say.

I can't shake the feeling that I'm being somehow manipulated by these government warnings. "They're coming to get us," says Mr. Ashcroft. "That's why we need to go drop bombs on some third-rate piece-of-shit Middle Eastern dictatorship," says Mr. Powell. "We will not allow other nations to hold us hostile," says the President. (Really. That's what he said.)

The message: Live your normal life, but while you're at it, please be scared out of your wits. That's how we can justify a war.

I'm not buying it. But I'd really hate it if I was wrong.

I might very well just watch the sun come up
Current time: 3:48 a.m. Number of hours worked since shuttle Columbia plunged into the Piney Woods: 61.

The insomnia thing is getting worse. I doubt I can sell that I need to sleep until noon today. I'm really getting too old for this.

Why it's fun to hang around copy editors
Because you hear people say things like, "My God! Look at the length of that dependent clause!"

Back to this war thing for a minute
I overheard somebody say something along the lines of, "You need to remember how you felt on September 11. When you remember that feeling, you know why we need to go to war with Iraq." I'm sorry, but that feels to me more like, "Well, hell, we got to bomb somebody," and finding a bomb-ee 1/on which we can pin some sort of past trangression and 2/will be less likely to be capable of something awful in retaliation.

My guess is that's why we'd pick Iraq and not North Korea.

I think a war with Iraq would go on until the exact moment at which we got bored with it. That's one we could switch off at will, just like we did in '91. I don't think the North Koreans would let us off that easy.

Intellectually, I can understand elements of the case for a war with Iraq and for a war with North Korea. But tying either to Sept. 11 is pretty cheap. I went back over the nationalities of those 19 hijackers, and I didn't turn up one Iraqi or North Korean. I did, however, find a bunch of Saudi Arabians. Last I checked, we thought Saudi Arabia was on our side.

Well, hell, we got to bomb somebody.

I always hoped the world was a little more complicated than that.

Falling from the sky
Friday night was a night for celebration. We signed our names to 273 pieces of paper, officially declaring ourselves Florida homeowners. My wife, being the amazing person she is, had managed to strike up a friendship with the people from whom we rented our house for two months before closing on it Friday. The four of us went to a local fondue restaurant to celebrate. Bottles of wine were available. That's pretty much all that needs to be said about that.

Then, a little after 9 in the morning, the phone rang. I was still groggy; I handed the phone over to The Wife, as I was fully not intending to speak to anyone for probably the rest of the day. The Wife answers, says, "Yeah, you can talk to him, but he's not feeling very well." She hands the phone back to me. On the other end was a voice I usually hear over my right shoulder at work, not from the phone a little after 9 on Saturday morning. Being the great co-worker that she is, she led off with about 30 seconds of apology for being in my phone at that hour, then she said: "The shuttle blew up over Dallas."

Holy shit.

The space shuttle usually lands about 40 miles, as the crow flies, from our new home. At that hour, I should have been awakened by a sonic boom, not by the voice of a co-worker. Instead, at that hour, folks in East Texas were seeing pieces of the United States' space program falling in their fields.

So I had to shake off the revelry and organize a staff. I'm going to say in this forum I didn't do it very well; I felt like I was running in mud all day, not because of the hangover, but largely because of my inability to get my mind around the story. It had been a long week; had I not taken Friday off, Saturday would have been my seventh really long day in a row. We put out an 8-page extra edition, then followed that with 24 pages of stuff on top of our regular paper. I guess it turned out OK. It's a little after 11 a.m., and I haven't looked at it yet for anything other than a cursory glance.

Over at RER, Otis asks why it's different on Feb. 1, 2003, than it was on Jan. 28, 1986, when we all watched Challenger blew up. It's hard to quantify exactly how it's different, but without question, it is.

The Challenger explosion still ranks as the news event to which I had the strongest emotional reaction -- even stronger than on Sept. 11, 2001. I was a senior in high school, cutting my third-hour class to watch the launch on TV in the school library. I was something of a space geek at the time. On the Challenger crew was Christa McAuliffe, a teacher, a normal woman -- not a space geek -- who was going to open the door to space travel to the masses. When it blew up, I cried like a baby. I cried for Mrs. McAuliffe's students, who watched their teacher die on national TV. I cried because I thought that was the end of our space program. I cried because it scared me. I choke up now even as I type this.

Eleven years later, I was living in Florida. The Wife and I took the Old Daughter, then 2, to see a night space shuttle launch. She didn't care that much, to be honest. It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. The night sky turns blue as the engines fire, and you feel the noise more than you actually hear it. The space shuttle is an amazing testament to the capabilities of the human mind and the human hands to harness power and use that power to explore things way beyond the boundaries of civilization.

It's also probably the most dangerous mode of travel ever invented. It's a wonder it took 22 years of space shuttle flights for an accident like Saturday's to happen. Every launch damages the vehicle in some small way. Every landing takes the vehicle to the edge of its physical limits. This time, it crossed the line.

Back to Otis' original question: Why is it different?

Start with a major news event occurring on a Saturday morning. One of my staffers, who was out of town, responded to my morning message at about 8 p.m. She told me she hadn't even heard about the shuttle until a few hours before she called.

Routine shuttle missions really don't get a lot of coverage outside of Houston and Central Florida. The Israeli astronaut being a part of this mission took it slightly beyond the routine, but only slightly.

But most importantly: After having experienced a day where nearly 3,000 people were killed just because they went to work, it's hard for us to get fired up about seven people who voluntarily strapped themselves in to the most dangerous form of transportation available.

It reminded me of my reaction to the crash of American Flight 587 in November 2001. As soon as we can cross "act of terrorism" off the list of causes, for some reason, that makes everything OK.

And that's probably what I hate most about the world in which I live.