Dateline: Anytown, USA: July 2003

Thursday, July 31, 2003

Word of the day: Advancement
What does it mean to you? I have discovered that defining this word can help you define the rest of your life.

Advancement: Reaching the highest point possible in your office.
Advancement: Making as much money as possible.
Advancement: Being in charge of lots of people and being able to make them do what you want.
Advancement: Becoming comfortable with who you are and what you can do.

Too many of us put our "advancement" in the hands of somebody else. That's the way I've been doing it for the last 17 years. I've "advanced" a lot without actually moving forward. I ask somebody, "Am I good enough?" and hope they say yes. More often than not, they have. As a result, I make a lot of money for somebody of my limited education and skill, and I get to live where I want.

True advancement is when you're turning the wheels yourself. Yeah, that's not always the most financially rewarding way to advance. But in a world where everything really means nothing, the only true measure of success should be how happy you are with what you've accomplished.

I've become more convinced that being happy is not actually anybody's default mode. Being happy takes work and skill, just as much as anything else. It's OK if what made you happy five years ago doesn't make you happy now. It's OK to turn your back on things that used to make you happy to go find new things that make you happy.

I know a couple of you are contemplating radical changes to your lives. To y'all I say: Go.

More of us should. Maybe soon, more of us will.

Wednesday, July 30, 2003

Random stray thought

I thought that by the time I was 35, I would be immune to a lot of the insecurities that plagued me when I was younger. I was wrong.

Monday, July 28, 2003

Saturday, July 26, 2003

Killing time 'til it's dead
I'm hopelessly, stupidly addicted to this. My low score is 29. See if you can beat it.

Friday, July 25, 2003

What a weird way for the Department of Homeland Security to justify its existence
Please allow me to be the first of many to say: Huh?

If you start him up, he'll never stop
Mick Jagger turns 60 tomorrow. He's celebrating by taking the stage for a sold-out show in Prague. For those of us who are feeling older than our years, there's a lesson in that somewhere.

Thursday, July 24, 2003

Your fault. No, it was your fault
Says here that you can just about pick any random alphabet-soup government agency and slap them with the blame for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The FBI wasn't talking to the CIA, which wasn't talking to the NSA, which wasn't talking to the FAA, which wasn't talking to the INS, which wasn't talking to the EPA, which really had no stake in the matter but hey, might as well blame them, too.

Bottom line is this: As of 6 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, not one of those 19 assholes had broken any of the laws of our land, save a few immigration violations and a few speeding tickets. As of whatever time American 11 took off from Boston Logan, none of those 19 assholes had broken any of the laws of our land.

Whoever the genius was that decided it should be OK and perfectly legal for someone to take a boxcutter on an airplane: It's your fault.

New life ... there's just nothing better
Emma Louise, we're glad you're here, all 7 pounds, 14 ounces of you. Get ready to keep your brothers in line. Tell your mom we're glad she's doing OK. Tell your dad (we call him fritza here in this humble little forum) that resistance is futile, because there's nothing like being Daddy's little girl. Welcome to our world, imperfect as it is; it'll be a little bit better because you're here.

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Opposing viewpoints will be considered
And today, I'm Mr. Opposing Viewpoint. I'm not even sure I believe some of what I'm about to write, but my uncertainty won't stop me.

The world's most famous survivor of a motor-vehicle accident comes home to a hero's welcome in West-by-God-Virginia.
OK, let me start by saying this: Jessica Lynch was there and I wasn't. That makes her a tougher, stronger warrior than me. I readily concede that. But: Are we not a little quick with the hero label here? Best I can tell, her convoy took a wrong turn, they got attacked -- in the middle of a war, a place where it's not unreasonable to expect you might get attacked -- their vehicles all crashed into each other, some people died, and she was captured and left for dead in an Iraqi hospital. Some guy told our soldiers, "Hey, I think one of yours might be in that building," and they found the building, went in and got her. No enemy fire, no torture, no real resistance.

My cynicism may partially be fueled by the stories that came out immediately after her rescue -- that she fought to the death, that she got shot at, that she shot at her captors, etc., etc., etc., that we all just jumped on and believed because that's what people were telling us, despite the annoying little problem of the stories lacking any basis in truth. In the post-Wag the Dog era, it's not a far leap to believe that the producer really liked this story. Nice, gentle, young white woman from a small town, in the Army 'cause she wanted to save up a money so she could be a kindergarten teacher ... now, there's your hero.

The images I saw today of Miss Lynch suggest that she's a very, very nice person. She's a soldier, and a warrior, and she's tougher than me. Am not convinced that makes her a hero.

We say we shot Uday and Qusay
Of course, it's not exactly like these guys carry driver's licenses or anything. But U.S. Central Command is convinced that it saw the bodies of Saddam Hussein's sons. That should be good enough for me. For some reason, it isn't.

If indeed U.S. forces did kill these guys, fantastic. They're two people who really didn't need to be sharing a planet with you or me anymore. Their dad falls into that category, too.

I hope U.S. Central Command is right. I hope that we're not going to be funneling 30 million American big ones to kick-start some other Iraqi terrorist network that was willing to give up a couple of guys who didn't really deserve to live anyway. I hope.

While I'm at it ...
Just about the time we're all starting to get bored with the whole Iraq thing, about the time we're starting to become dismayed at the nightly report of some U.S. soldier dying in a guerrilla attack (never mind that news of those deaths always comes in right after 1 a.m. EDT, every night, right after our deadlines but no so late that we don't have to scramble to get the news in some editions) about the time all these idiots are wailing "Quagmire! Quagmire!" after 126 days, about the time the news about the war is turning solidly negative, is it just a wacky coincidence that Jessica Lynch makes a public appearance on the same day that we scratch Uday and Qusay off our scorecards?

She was NOT asking for it. Was she?
I really really really wasn't going to talk about the Kobe Bryant thing. I wish everyone else would stop, too.

But if it turns out he didn't assault this woman, I hope her life is ruined.

If it turns out he did assault this woman, her life is going to be ruined anyway.

And 100,000 more women who get raped in far worse situations than in the room of a $300-a-night hotel with a multi-millionaire athlete won't report it.

That will be the heart-wrenching tragedy in this case.

Friday, July 18, 2003

What's news? Don't ask
As mentioned previously, I'm really wary of slow news cycles, owing to the fact that one of the slowest news cycles I ever endured was in 2001, from May to early September. That said, I can't help but wondering how it is I live in a metropolitan area of 2 million people, a state with 16 million, and a country of 300 million -- and not one of them is doing something interesting. That has to be the case, otherwise we wouldn't be reading about:

The debunking of the African uranium intelligence.The Democratic Party is a farce. I remember that from March 7, when it actually happened. Of course, it got buried in the rush to war. It's a real shame the Democrats have nothing more solid than old news with which to beat Bush and his crew. "Damn," say the left. "He's killing us. What can we do now?" "Hey, remember back in March when that Mohamed ElBaradei guy said that stuff from Niger was all lies? Didn't he mention that in the State of the Union? Have we mentioned that lately?" Sad. Where the hell where y'all on March 7? In case you've forgotten: You were marching your asses to war, just like the rest of us, because you couldn't come up with a strong enough argument against it. Next year's election is going to make Reagan-Mondale in '84 look like it was close. Bush might carry all 50 states and five Canadian provinces at this rate.

The stunning announcement of a security flaw in Windows. If you have a computer running Windows XP, and you have Automatic Update enabled, you get a patch from Microsoft about once a week automatically sewn into your operating system. Somehow this story crawled on to Page 1 of our rag. This week's flaw affects primarily server software. If you don't know what "server software" is, chances are you won't be affected.

Michael Savage getting dumped by MSNBC, but thriving on radio. You might say, "so what?" and, of course, you might well be right. Most readers of this forum are sane people who have no use for right-wing-wacko radio. I listen to one radio station driving to work and another driving home. When I get in my car at night, he's on the former station. I usually switch pretty quickly, but he occasionally gets my attention -- and really, isn't that the point? -- because he's so off-the-charts outrageous. He got booted off TV because he said to a caller to his TV show something along the lines of, "I hope you die of AIDS, you sodomite." You can't say that on TV. You can, however, say it on right-wing-wacko radio, and much worse. He'd be funny if he wasn't so scary -- despite the fact he seems to intend to be neither. The local rag asked the local station why Savage is still on. Their answer was something along the lines of, "because nobody's asked us to stop carrying his show." Look, I'm as against political correctness as the next guy, but there is a line. I'd decline this asshole if he tried to buy time on my station. I sure as hell wouldn't pay to carry him.

Meanwhile, while all this is happening, John Ashcroft still has a job, the Recording Industry Assocation of America is trying to make felons out of file-swappers, soldiers are still dying defending a country we don't want and that doesn't want us, and people are getting scammed, screwed and soaked daily by businesses big and small because the education system isn't solid enough to make us smart enough to learn how to keep it from happening.

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Musical interlude
John Denver is pretty cheesy. I concede that. But I'm not at all embarrassed to admit one of his songs comes out of my C.F. Martin almost every night.

"Take Me Home, Country Roads" was the first song I taught myself how to play on the guitar. I was 10 or 11 at the time, trying to play a cheap off-brand acoustic that my dad had borrowed from his sister, or something. You could drive a truck under the strings on the fretboard. It damn near took a torque wrench to push the strings down enough to make a note.

I, of course, quickly advanced past John Denver, and for many, many years wouldn't be caught dead playing one of his songs. But, as a gag, and because I knew it would amuse Cousin Otis, I broke out in "Country Roads" during our late-night guitar-fest last month. He caught on quickly; he had heard it sung in gawdawful harmony among our uncles at as many family gatherings as had I.

I found myself comforted by the familiar simplicity of the melody, the chord progression and the lyrics:

G
Almost heaven
Em
West Virginia
D
Blue Ridge Mountains
C                      G
Shenandoah Ri-ver

The words just came out, despite the fact that I probably haven't heard the song all the way through since about 1983. And normally, you can't take a song you haven't heard in 20 years across a bridge, but there I went:

G (walk down to Em)
Em             D
I hear her voice
G
In the morning hour, she calls me
C          G                      D
Radio reminds me of my home far away
Em                        Am                C
And driving down the road, I get a feeling
           G                                 D
That I should have been home yesterday

Yesterday

You can strum it in a very simple down-down-up-and-down pattern, or you can finger-pick the chords (a style that seems particularly suited to the Martin I'm playing.)

Yes, it's cheesy as hell. And no, I probably wouldn't play that song around people among whom I'm not totally comfortable. I certainly wouldn't admit to having John Denver in my repetoire.

But sometimes it's good to luxuriate in the familiar.

Monday, July 14, 2003

What I'm not
It's 12:22 a.m. on a Monday morphing into a Tuesday. The Wife and I are cruising Ocean Drive on South Beach. Cruising, of course, as much as an Oldsmobile will allow.

It's 12:22 a.m. on a Monday morphing into a Tuesday, and everything is open. The Versace store ... open. The Gucci store ... open. Who buys clothes at this hour?

Can't hardly drive for all the pedestrians around, so we decide to pull over and park. The Atlantic is on our right, a hopping, pulsating, thoroughly enticing life is on our left. Buy a drink, have a dance, be pretty.

All the doors are open. Everybody's half outside, half inside. Clubs, pizza joints, the aforementioned clothing stores. See, be seen. No other discernible purpose. So many people, out on a Monday night. The smells of beach life fill the air: sea salt, expensive perfume, cigarettes, a spilled pina colada, piss, expensive cigars, vomit, sweat.

We're sightseers, and there are sights to be seen in all 360 degrees from where we stand.

"Hey," she says, "hookers." Yep, there they are, three of them, talking to a cop. The cop isn't chatting them up because they're great conversationalists. He's ruining their nights.

The two taller women have blank looks on their faces, the look you would expect to see on the face of a prostitute in the process of getting busted. But the white girl looked different. She looked a lot less sure of herself. I looked in her eyes for the .39 second it took to walk past them. Her face betrayed her. Her face, obviously soft before it became so hard, showed defiance, fright, anger, despair, all at once.

We knew we were out of place, The Wife and I. But we walked on. Cigar stores, hotels, restaurants, velvet ropes. Big houses, fast cars, pastels illuminated by neon.

"Lots of drugs here, I'll bet," The Wife mused. Yep. Probably so. Impossibly pretty women over there, talking loud, dancing at full speed. Wonder what's in her purse. Two young men, dressed casually to the nines. They're clearly in love. You can see that on their faces. Good for them.

We're walking back toward our car, headed back toward Suburbia. We've seen, we've been seen, although we were invisible. As we walk back, the ocean on our right, a life we never lived and never will on our left, we see him, asleep under a light in front of an apartment building in the process of being rehabbed. We walk past him at the same steady clip at which we walked past the hookers. His face was covered by a scraggly beard, his skin hung loosely on his bones, his legs were covered in purple sores. So many people come to Miami Beach to dance, to drink, to show off, to live. He's come to Miami Beach to die.

We walked back to the Oldsmobile, silently. Soon, the ocean was behind us, I-95 was in front of us. We saw what we needed to see.

It must be a hell of a life there on Miami Beach. But it's not us. And we're very comfortable with that.

Thursday, July 10, 2003

Sorry for the delay ...
... but among the things I brought back from South Florida was a raging sunburn on my back. Alas, it's all I've been able to think about the last few days.

Tuesday, July 08, 2003

Here's a tease
Sometimes you have to venture far from your home to find out who you aren't.

More later. I've just returned from a family trip to the Southern Edge, where all manner of wackiness rules. I have a few stories to tell.

Sunday, July 06, 2003

Directing traffic
The Editor just dropped by for a late-night visit, and stayed long enough to make some new Picks. If you're new around here -- or just want to take a trip back in time -- click one or two of the links on the right to get a little better acclimated to life on the Edge.

Saturday, July 05, 2003

I'm old enough to run for president. But I won't
It's time for the annual acknowledgment of my having made another lap around the calendar. This time last year, I was moaning something about "feeling like time is running out" or some other equally fatalist crap.

An awful lot has changed in the last year. We were going to make one major lifestyle change, then switched up and made another instead. I took a step back in the career in order to step ahead. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I'm going to do with the second half of my life, which officially starts today.

Of course, I haven't found the answer yet. But I have some ideas. I think I'll consider:

Appreciating what I have. As I say hello to 35, I'm reasonably healthy, I'm happily married, I have three fun and well-adjusted kids. I'm fairly well-off financially, at least well-off enough to get me through the next two weeks. I have a job that pays me well and offers the occasional reward. I live in arguably the best area in the country (as long as you're OK with bugs, lizards, tourists and hurricanes, which I am).
Looking for reasons to do something, rather than for reasons to not do something. It's easy to debunk just about any idea. But that's not how things get done. Seems to me it might be better to start letting a few ideas roll rather than riding the brakes.
Getting outside more. Time was I would have given my right arm to live in an outdoorsperson's paradise. Then I stopped being an outdoors person. Too expensive, not enough time, incompatible with small children. I'm strongly considering taking my next several hundred dollars to Bass Pro Shops and reacquiring all the equipment I've let get away over time.

I'm listening to other ideas. Please share.

Friday, July 04, 2003

Happy birthday, Old Daughter
Nine years ago today, I was in a hospital in Northern Kentucky, watching the miracle of new life unfold for the first time ever. A 2-minute-old baby is a really remarkable sight.

Few moments of triumph I have ever felt have matched that moment. Yeah, I saw it happen two more times, and those were special in their own ways.

But she was the first, and she'll always be the first, and something about that is sublime.

She's not a baby anymore, and hasn't been for a long time. She's 9, not too far away from Judy Blume books, her first curse word (and her first mouthful of Ivory), and trials and triumphs yet to be conceived. She's a little person now, with opinions and concerns and everything. She's starting to learn that the world around her isn't perfect.

My life began anew on July 4, 1994, the day before I turned 26. And it begins anew every year on July 4, thanks to the wonder that she brings to our lives every day. The world's a better place because she's in it.

Happy birthday, USA
It ain't perfect, certainly. But nodody's come up with a better idea.

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

My day, in IM poetry
To an equally mystified co-worker ...
(me): so now i'm securely at home
(me): and i realize i've just had one of those days
(me): that makes you say
(me): "what the hell just happened?"

Dateline: Anytown, USA