Yet another black square from my checkered past
I saw something today that referred to "Sunday, Feb. 4, 1990." It's an ad that's been running in the Classified section of the Edge-of-America Beacon at least since 1996, when we were here the first time. In the early morning hours of Feb. 4, 1990, a woman disappeared from her shift at a 7-Eleven somewhere near here. They're still looking for her.

Being who I am, of course, I always bring things back around to me. Wonder what I was doing on Sunday, Feb. 4, 1990? I asked myself. Then I remembered: That was the day when I realized I might have a problem.

I remember a lot of the previous day very clearly, because it was a hell of a lot of fun. But there's a huge chunk of it I don't remember now, 13 years later. I didn't remember it 13 hours later, either, and haven't remembered it since.

Saturday, Feb. 3, 1990, was the zenith -- or nadir, depending on how you look at it -- of my pre-marital drinking days.

As mentioned previously here, I turned 21 in July 1989, but I had a several-month head start on a just-turned-21 drinking binge. I was at one point consuming a 12-pack a night. The cycle went something like this: work until about 12:30, rush to the bar (which closed at 1) and drink as many beers as you could in 15 minutes, rush to the one package store in Anytown that stayed open until 1:30 (all the Anytown readers' minds just went to the intersection of Glenstone and Grand; we've all been there) and buy a case or two, which my co-workers and I would split while listening to Billy Joel records and/or playing Nerfoop in L's apartment on Bennett Street. The sun would come up about 5 or 6 a.m., and that was our signal to go get breakfast. The breakfast of choice was served at a place called George's, where they served a $3.99 Steak and Eggs special that L called "Secretariat and Eggs."

After Secretariat and Eggs, I'd drive home -- very carefully -- and fall asleep around 7 a.m. By 11 on most days, I was back at the Y playing basketball. Shower, lunch and go to work at 4 p.m. Then repeat the cycle.

On my days off, the cycle was a little different. At the time, I was usually off on Tuesday and Wednesday. One of the people who lived at our shithole abode only worked when he needed money; the rest of the time, he lived the casual life of the unemployed. On my days off, he and I would go to lunch at a joint called Casey's, which served a kick-ass steak sandwich and 2-for-1 beers at lunch. "2-for-1 beers" meant two huge mugs of draft brew for $1 -- very appealing to a guy who was usually unemployed, and equally appealing to me. After lunch, we'd go buy a six-pack of something and polish that off while we waited for our friends with normal jobs to get off work. We'd go to the bar about 9, and get a head start on my co-workers, who'd make the mad dash to get there by 12:45. Then we'd do the cycle mentioned above.

I probably did a few stupid things that I don't remember, but my stupidest things simply involved spending a lot of money. I was clearing about $200 a week from my job, and pretty much everything that wasn't going to my car payment or rent was going to beer. When rent became inconvenient, I moved back in with my mom. I viewed car insurance as optional. When the cash flow started to get spotty, I used a Conoco gas card to buy beer at the Conoco convenience store.

It was that Conoco card that got my friend and I started on Feb. 3. We were headed down to Branson to visit an ex-girlfriend of mine, M, whose mom and dad owned a local bar on the non-tourist side of town. I had gotten this girlfriend out of a pretty bad jam (that's another story) a few months previous, and her parents wanted to meet me and express some gratitude. So, at about 11 a.m., F and I headed down there after stopping off at the Conoco to buy some Pony bottles of Bud. Our thinking: Pony bottles stay cold all the way to the bottom, because they're smaller, and we didn't have a cooler. There was a science to this drinking thing.

We had killed the Ponies about the time we reached Branson 45 minutes later. We showed up at M's parents' dive, and M's mom greeted me with a big hug and two bottles of Budweiser. "M told me you guys like Bud," she said. I reached into my wallet, but M's mom said, "It's on the house." Well, woo-hoo!

F and I played some shuffleboard, despite my having no idea how to actually play. We shot the shit with M's mom. M wasn't there; I don't know where she was that day. Probably working. The bottles of Bud proved to be bottomless. Every time we turned around, there was a fresh bottle waiting for us. I was beginning to wonder if I had driven my truck into a ravine back on the highway and somehow made it into my version of Heaven.

F and I had tickets to a basketball game in town that night, so we said our goodbyes around 4:30 p.m. and headed back north to Anytown. I probably would have blown .23 into a generous Breathalyzer at that point. F's tolerance was a little higher, but he wasn't in much better shape than I was.

I have a clear memory of taking an exit we shouldn't have taken and winding up on a farm road. I discovered the error and backtracked. By backtracking, I mean driving about 25-30 mph in reverse. F said, "Man, you're scaring me now." I laughed a bit, until I realized he wasn't being funny.

That was around 5 p.m. Then there's a period of blackness. It's not like me to not remember a sequence of events. I remember nothing of that evening between that incident and about 10:30, when we were sitting in a local pizza joint after the game listening to a local band of musicians who specialized in parodies. The guy at the piano announced to the crowd that Buster Douglas had beaten Mike Tyson. "No way," I said. "Did I hear that right? I'm not that drunk. Must have been a gag." By that time, I was drinking water, making my way down.

The next morning's newspaper confirmed that my school had won its basketball game the previous night. Usually, even if I wasn't covering the game, I'd remember a lot of the details. I searched my brain. Nothing. No idea. I know I was at the game, but I remember very small bits of it. My ticket stub was in my pocket and torn. That was the only confirmation that I had been there.

That was the first time I was aware of having had an hours-long alcohol-induced blackout.

It didn't happen again.

I began to reassess a lot of things, starting by coming to the realization that my pickup truck must have been guided by the hand of some deity for most of that day. This is why I'm pretty sure I'll never win the lottery; I used up all my luck by not driving into somebody or landing in jail during that time. Driving around like that isn't even funny. It's just stupid. I'm not the least bit proud of it.

I started making my way off the cycle. I still made the mad post-work dash to the bar, but I started skipping the package store and headed instead to bed. I noticed the impact from that in my checkbook almost immediately. I still shot hoops, but I skipped the four-beer lunch on my days off.

This is not to say I went on the wagon. I still enjoyed -- and for that matter, still enjoy -- a good buzz.

But not every day, and sure as hell not behind the wheel.

Relief
I gave myself a small break from the terrible imagery and the pressure and all the other stuff that makes up my career. I instead delved into some therapeutic activities, and it occurs to me these are things for which I should daily carve out time:

A bike ride through my neighborhood. I actually live in a pretty nice neighborhood. The developers who built the houses here in the mid-1980s didn't feel the need to cut down all the trees, and they set up a series of trails that wind between the houses and backyards. I should get out and appreciate it more.

A beer. It had been a while since I enjoyed a beer at home. Never underestimate the therapeutic qualities of a single beer.

A two-hour session with the C.F. Martin on the back porch, playing better than I've played in a long time.

A walk with the kids. It was not totally without stress, as is true with any activity involving all three children, but it was fun anyway.

The wife came home from her evening out with a friend and announced we have weekend plans. We're going to go out of town, just us. This will be a very good thing. Then I thought, "What if we hit Baghdad this weekend?" The news has all but dissolved my life. I shake my head even as I write this.

I have one more day of self-imposed paid administrative leave. Tomorrow's activity might involve a head-clearing drive in the country. Maybe there'll be some inspiration out there.

There it is, in a nutshell
I found this on another person's online journal. It's a long, involved story about the process of making a record, and it's funny as hell. But I was struck dumb by this paragraph, because it sums up a lot of what I'm going through right now:

And anybody that thinks I should blindly skip through life satisfied at being unproductive so long as I’m being compensated for such activities, isn’t considering the negative effect that lack of accomplishment can have on the brain. The act of accomplishing nothing other than wastefulness is both exhausting and debilitating to the soul. And while in the short term it may be self-serving to my financial well being to participate in such unproductiveness, the resulting waste only serves to sicken me.

I'm making a pretty good living, which is cool. I feel like I'm accomplishing very little, which isn't. The former really doesn't make up for the latter.

Worth repeating
I found this in the archives from a couple of months ago. I like it so much I'm going to throw it out there again.

"War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other's children." --Jimmy Carter, Nobel laureate

Peace, for all of us. Now.

There's probably an explanation for this
Who would've guessed that fatigue can cause insomnia?

Y'all saw this coming
Me and The Wall had a violent collision the other night.

Marathon runners speak of The Wall, the signal that the runner has taken his or her endurance past its limit. "I've hit The Wall." For most, it hits at about the 19- or 20-mile mark. The champion marathon runner scales The Wall mentally, catches a second wind and presses on. The weaker runners collapse in a sobbing heap of muscle spasms and shin splints.

For many years, I have scoffed at The Wall. I always thought burnout was for losers, for whiny suburban corporate guys whose jobs didn't generate their own energy. That's what I've always loved about journalism, and it's what has made me think for all these years that I had beaten the system. "I've never had a job," I have often said. The pursuit of a big story in many ways is its own reward. Challenging a deadline and beating it is a rush like few others. Knowing something nobody else knows; well, there's just nothing better. Coming up with the last-minute idea that takes a good page to brilliant is like hitting a 3-pointer with 0.3 seconds showing on the clock. Making the catch that saves the newspaper from an embarrassing error was, for me, like making the catch to win the Super Bowl.

Burnout -- that's for stockbrokers and accountants and bankers and Mariah Carey and people who work in offices.

I've been wrong about a lot of things in recent weeks. I can add the above assertion to the list.

I hope I'm not wrong about the following: I'm sure this is temporary. It's been a pretty stressful time in the news world, especially here on the Edge of America. We've had teams making Super Bowl runs, we've had space shuttles falling out of the sky, and now we have war. There's nothing particularly inspiring about any of that.

A lot of things about burnout suck:

I thought I could solve it by just doing my job a little bit better. I put in a call into my usually reliable energy reserves -- and damned if they're not answering. Instead, I'm hyper-sensitive about every little mistake I make. The best way to not make mistakes or errors in judgment is to simply keep one's mouth shut. That's never been my philosophy, but I suddenly see the merits in that line of thinking.

I'm becoming an asshole. I'm becoming one at work, and worse, I'm becoming one at home. The Wife is doing everything she possibly can to help. She's offering suggestions, she's propping me up when necessary, and she's hollering at me when it's necessary. She basically goaded me into standing up for myself in a work situation today, an instance where I normally would have just said, "uh, OK," and hated myself for it. Instead, I stood up for myself, and I'm not entirely sure I should have, despite the fact that I know it was the right thing to do.

I question every decision I make. I'm questioning whether I should post this or if I should call on my trio of close friends, Click, Drag and Delete. I'm questioning whether I should go to sleep or stay up all night. Come morning, I'll question whether I should get out of bed. I'll make several perfectly fine decisions at work tomorrow, then question whether I should have gone the other way. That's a hell of a cycle in which to be stuck.

I'm bothered that I even think like this. My patience for whiners is less than nil. I don't like that I'm becoming one. And those who have followed this forum for the last several months can be excused for believing that I might never find true satisfaction.

But they tell me the first step toward solving a problem is admitting that you have one. Now I need to thumb through the directions and find Step 2.

Bold words go here
I was going to write something. I really was. In fact, I was about halfway through it.

Then I decided it sucked.

I'm going to go play my guitar instead.

A friendly reminder from elsewhere
Thanks to Otis for this piece of perspective.

The first couple of days

Wednesday, 9:45 p.m.
Here at the Edge-of-America Beacon, we're ready for war. It's an hour and 15 minutes past the deadline Bush set for Saddam to take his vacation. Saddam has decided to stay at work, we're told, so war is imminent.

Imminent. Imminent. Imminent ... but apparently not happening yet. My design staff has one extra person tonight, thanks to the designer who volunteered to come back from a seminar at which I wish she could have stayed. I told her a half-hour ago to go on home and be ready to come back in early in the morning in case we put out an extra. She said, "OK; I gotta answer a few e-mails first."

We've put together a huge special section that is set to appear in the paper the day after the war starts. We have it ready to be in tomorrow's paper. I have to call the pressroom at 9:45 p.m. to tell them to run it or hold it.

I have the phone in my hand, ready to make the call to tell them to hold it.

10:10 p.m. Wednesday
Various upper managers are making decisions. We have a plan, but, as something I read earlier today stated so well, "A military plan is followed right up to the time bullets are fired." We're adding six -- no wait, make that eight -- no, let's make it 12 pages to the paper. It's not like we just have to fill those 12 pages, however ... the 14 existing pages will be affected, also, because the pages have to be tucked into the front of the section. Even pages that have long since been finished have to be redone -- some just to change the page number, most to accommodate stories that have to move from Page One or in some other way. The designer who came back from the seminar just answered her last e-mail.

I call the pressroom to ask if the press is running with the special section. "You told us to hold it," they said. "No," I said, "I didn't. I told the guy in the pre-press area to roll it." I said Go, they heard Whoa. "Well, I'll have to talk to my supervisor," press guy says. "Go ahead," I said. "It has to go either way."

The computer system through which we do our pages is waiting for the update from the advertising folks. We can't start on anything until the pages are ready. We wait, wait, wait, wait ... still waiting to get the signal. We finally get started on the big remake about 10:35.

TO: Designers
FM: me
DATE: Wednesday, March 19, 2003, 10:36 PM
SUBJECT: You'll find this funny

All pages must be gone by 12:20. -thanks, rj

12:44 a.m., Thursday
An Upper Manager is doing laps around the newsroom, trying to inventory how many pages have still not been sent to the pressroom. She's on her 23rd lap, and she's asking me for the 23rd time. In my mind, I say, you know, the pages aren't going to get out faster if you ask more often. It's just adding to already intense stress. By my rough count, we still have 10 pages waiting to go. The copy desk is moving stories through as fast as they possibly can. Four people from the pressroom are up in the newsroom watching us work. I wonder why they aren't in the pressroom, waiting to press the button. Maybe they're up here confirming that we're still actually working on the pages, that we didn't decide to just throw up our hands and go home. I wonder if that wouldn't have been the better decision.

Adding to the confusion: the old pages maintained their old page numbers in the system; the new numbers are lost in some system-related ether. Page 15 is really Page 5. Page 7 is now Page 19. Page 6 is now Page 6.1.

Here comes the Upper Manager again. I prepare to give her the same answer I gave her two minutes ago.

1:10 a.m., Thursday
For some reason, Page One is stuck on the designer's computer screen. He keeps hitting the Go button, and nothing is happening. The Upper Managers, the pressroom folks and one lone systems person are standing over his screen. In the interim, I catch a potential really serious error on a proof. The Upper Managers get bored with the system problem and go look for somebody to fire. The systems person figures out the problem and says, "Go." I say, "Whoa." We fix the mistake -- which would not have been fixed had the system not glitched -- and we go. Not even an hour late. I'm really happy about that.

1:50 a.m. Thursday
The papers are back from the pressroom. The Upper Managers thumb through them quickly and go home. We're coming back at 6:30 to put out a 12-page Extra. I express surprise that, in the hubbub of all that was going on, we weren't being interrupted with constant updates. "Is that all there was?" I ask. One small strike, apparently aimed directly at Saddam and his goons. This wasn't exactly Shock and Awe. The guy on TV says for the 300th time, "This isn't exactly Shock and Awe."

I spent the next hour or so setting up our Extra for tomorrow afternoon.

5:30 a.m. Thursday
After a 90-minute nap, I'm headed back in to put out our 12-page Extra. I check the Web for updates; strangely, there are none. As I pilot the Oldsmobile through the dark neighborhood streets, I note with puzzlement that the news radio guys are talking about non-war related stories. I wonder why we're doing this.

7 a.m. Thursday
Apparently the Upper Managers wondered, too. The 12-page edition is now eight pages. We're doing it basically because we can. We get it out 20 minutes past the 10 a.m. deadline. I get some marching orders for the rest of the day, one of which is, "Go home and get some rest." At a little before noon, I take The Boss up on that.

5 p.m. Thursday
The crew is in. We're back and ready to put out another edition, waiting for the update that never comes. No shock. No awe. A helicopter crash, which is par for the course. We steer the huge edition home basically on time. I go home to get some much-needed sleep, knowing that my grip on reality is tenuous.

11 a.m. Friday
The Wife notes, in her typical knife-through-the-crap manner, "this is a boring war. We've had fights more exciting than this."

1 p.m. Friday
I'm interrupted as I write the "7 a.m. Thursday" entry above. I find myself saying, "son of a bitch," without realizing I had even said it. My TV screen is exploding in massive fireballs. The commentators have stopped speaking, like they do during sporting events when the crowd goes nuts. It's scaring the goddamn hell out of me, like it was happening outside my own window rather than on the other side of the world.

I'm now officially shocked, and awed. And reminded of how motherfucking awful this whole thing is.

Call me paranoid
Check out the ad at the top of this page, the one I'm too cheap to pay $15 to get rid of. Damned if it isn't searching this site and making itself seemingly relevant to its content. I've noticed that it has recently featured several Texas-themed businesses. Last time I looked, it was shilling for "Music for Babies."

Avid readers know this forum frequently refers to Texas, music and children, among many, many other things.

Google recently bought the little company that created the software that powers this forum. I wonder if, all of a sudden, Google is watching me.

I may be completely wrong about this. But I'm going to be watching that ad just the same. All hail the power of Google.

BULLETIN
No, this particular post is not that important. I just need to get myself accustomed to seeing that word repeatedly over the next several days.

It appears this might be our last pre-war post for a while. We've given our official F- you to the United Nations. Soon -- perhaps as soon as Wednesday -- bombs will start falling over one of the cradles of ancient civilization. Perhaps as soon as Friday, some wacko group will retaliate with a terrorist strike in the United States. Soon, all the anti-war bleating won't matter any more, not that it ever did, I guess. Soon, I'll have to put my search for inspiration on hold for a little while while I and my co-workers spend every waking hour telling you about the war.

I'll put down my tiny little protest sign now. Time to start wondering what happens next.

A friendly reminder as we head off to war
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Keep this in mind as the drums of battle start to get louder. It's part of what we're allegedly going to be fighting for. It also makes it OK to disagree.

Shame spiral
Am needing desperately to rage against the dying of the light.

Seeking inspiration from all sources. Please share some.

Woo-hoo!
Just in time to break my doom-and-gloom mood comes this: a huge victory for RER in a national journalism contest. The Cousin Who's On TV is taking home a Best in Show in the National Headliner Awards -- a damn prestigious contest, a very small notch below a Pulitzer or a Murrow -- for exposing the half-truths found in South Carolina's political ads. The fact that politicians are liars isn't news. But RER's reports did more than simply call names; they pointed out the half-truths AND the complete truths, and educated viewers on the visual tricks that can take a truth and twist it into a falsehood. Go here to see for yourself.

This is incredibly sophisticated reporting, and, I'm sure, incredibly time-consuming. As the judges said in the citation, it's what all journalists should be doing every day. But RER took what we should be doing and did it better than everybody else.

Impending doom
I can't get past the feeling that today begins the last week of our lives, or something. It might be because I was only 22 and working in sports at the time, but I don't remember the buildup in 1990-91 to Persian Gulf I being quite this excruciating, or lengthy, or fraught with visions of homeland hell. Of course, at the time, we could still say, "what, you think a bunch of whacked-out Arabs could simultaneously hijack four airplanes and crash two of them into the tallest buildings in the nation and less than 30 minutes later slam one into the Pentagon? You watch too many Schwarzenegger movies, dude."

Yeah, those were the days.

March 17. That's a week from today. My kid's spring break starts that day. Good chance I'm going to be with her for none of it, if the president and his henchmen have their way. Of course, 300,000 of us are facing a far worse March 17 than am I, being that they're going to be in the same time zone as Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

I guess I should clarify my position on the whole war thing. I know I've been going back and forth. A quick run through the archives reveals I've been going back and forth since August. So, for what it's worth (and considering it's my forum, it's worth whatever I decide it is), here's where I stand:

I fully believe Saddam Hussein and Iraq is in possession of some quantity of chemical weapons -- just like pretty much every other developed nation on the planet.

I fully believe Saddam Hussein is an evil leader who does awful things to people in his country who disagree with him.

I fully believe Iraq has violated the provisions of every UN resolution since 1991.

I fully believe the world would be a better place if Saddam Hussein was, well, dead; or failing that, in a heavily guarded retirement home somewhere in the United Arab Emirates.

I fully believe Saddam Hussein poses no imminent threat to me or mine or the United States in general. I believe Iraq is our punching bag (see Bombing, effort to distract from impeachment by, 1998). I believe when somebody pisses us off, we go beat up on Iraq to make ourselves feel better.

I believe my family and I face a greater threat from North Korea and its well-known nuclear program. I believe my family and I face a greater threat from whatever remains of al-Evildoer. I'm starting to believe my family and I face a greater threat from our own leaders.

I understand this: Sometimes you have to stir up the hornets' nest in order to eliminate the danger posed by the hornets. I'm not ready to carry a sign and chant peace slogans. For what my support is worth, I fully support the folks whose job it is to go over and take care of this thing.

But we're a week away from wall-to-wall CNN, and I'm still pretty sure war is a bad idea.

The fence on which I'm standing is pretty long. I hope it's wide enough for me.

Wish I'd thought of it first, Part XXXVIII
Questions that should have been asked on Thursday night.

Hi. I'm rj and I'm a workaholic
I took a day off today. I don't feel bad about it. Really. I don't. I promise. Today's work hiatus wasn't entirely voluntary; The Wife took Champion Dog 2 down to the South Edge for a show. Brought home ribbons, a fairly nice paperweight and winnings of $4.50. More importantly, folks who know about dogs were impressed with her dog. This, I'm told, is very, very good.

And anyway, when the war starts (not "if," Mr. President, "when"; you don't fool me), I won't be putting the words "day" and "off" together in any sentence for a while. So I went against my nature and enjoyed the semi-break I gave myself from working today. Here was my 6-step program (hey, remember, it's a day off; I'm allowed to half-ass if I want to):

1/Baseball with The Boy. He's in a league for kids born after Jan. 1, 1999. Any resemblance it bears to actual baseball is purely coincidental. But it's a lot of fun for all involved, so far. If I see any Little League nightmare parents in this, I know the apocalypse is near. We have a "game" Saturday. Today's lesson: Holding on to the bat when swinging it.
2/Reading with the Young Daughter. I start the sentence, she finishes it. From memory, of course.
3/Installing a garbage disposal. By myself. This is a fairly dramatic feat. I'm not what you'd call "good around the house." Nor do I have any particular desire to be. But ... well, let's just say much hinged on getting the old dead disposal out and the new good one in. So I'm addicted to my modern conveniences. Make fun of me.
4/Buying a new coffee maker. My coffee maker is one of the most important appliances in the house. It'd probably be high on the list of things I'd grab from a fire. It was more of an inconvenience to be without a coffee maker than it was to be without a garbage disposal. I got one of these black-and-chrome jobs just because I thought it looked cool. Plus, it promises to keep the coffee warm for four hours without a hot surface. (One of these "thermal" things.) Anyway, when The Wife saw it tonight, she said, "You did notice that we have no other black appliances anywhere in the house?" Yeah, I did notice, after I got the thing home and out of the box. Oh well.
5/Taking the kids to a drive-in hamburger joint. One, because I was too lazy to cook (despite having a newly clean kitchen) and two, because this particular drive-in joint is for some weird reason one of their favorite places. We had one close to our house in Texas. The Old Daughter asked a few weeks ago if there was a location in Florida. We said no. Turns out there is, which was a cool surprise for the kids.
6/Doing some work. See, you say, you're no recovering workaholic. You're using again. Well, yeah, OK. But I had some stuff I need to do, and for a while, I had the perfect environment in which to do it: The aforementioned kick-ass Mac laptop; a completely dark, quiet room, instead of the usual chaotic atmosphere at the office; and a cold beer at my fingertips, rather than bad vending-machine coffee.

If one must work -- and I must -- that's the way to do it.

It's like an open book
Confidential to utexas.edu: Oops.

I don't think he means it
"I don't want to go to war," says Our President.
"Nobody likes war. I don't like war."
"If we go to war ... "
"It's all up to Saddam Hussein, whether we go to war ... "

Jobs I wish I could have
As mentioned here previously, I have been in the newspaper industry for half my life. Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to sell typewriters. I work in a medium that is rapidly losing its relevance in a more immediate, more glossy, less structured world.

However, I'm stuck with it, because I'm not qualified to do anything else. I can dream, though. Some things I wish I was qualified to do:

Computer security. Hacking for a living. Preventing others from hacking for fun. I want to be a guy who digs around on hard drives finding things some poor sap thought he had "deleted." It would suit my nosy tendencies.

"Professional driver on a closed course." Drive as fast as I want in a completely controlled environment. I really can't imagine a cooler job.

Car designer. This was the first career I seriously considered. I was 10 at the time. My lack of natural art talent -- and my lack of discipline necessary to develop what little skill I had -- were impediments to pursuing this. But I'd still love to be the guy who decides where to put the taillights and whether the license plate bracket goes on the bumper or on the trunk lid.

Writer. The only actual talent I have. Not enough of it to actually be lucrative, however.

Musician. If I had been a traditional young person, I might have chased this dream a little longer. However, I saddled myself with debt at a young age. Debt is incompatible with non-regular paychecks.

Historian. I always wondered how "historians" feed themselves. Yeah, I could sit around and do research all day, every day. I can't think of many things I'd rather do. But, what would I do with it? Who'd pay to read it?

Long-haul truck driver. I like to drive. I like highways. I like being alone, sometimes. I like seeing the country. I handle large vehicles fairly well, although my experience with large vehicles is limited to driving U-Hauls. I don't like flannel shirts or wallets on chains, and no matter how much truck-stop food I ate, I'd never weigh enough.

Writer for a car magazine. Wonder if I would get bored with cars if I spent that much time around them.

I love newspapers, and I love the news business. And I've had opportunities to try something different within those parameters. But I've always come around to shying away from the risk. I've seen too many people go into new business ventures that crashed and burned. I don't have a fireproof savings account. And I can't imagine my kid saying, "Yeah, I have to share a room with both of my siblings, but that's OK, because my daddy's a risk-taker."

There's no room in my budget for career redevelopment. Keep that regular paycheck coming.

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.

Another transition
A tinge of sadness as the Texas license plates came off the cars today. I guess we're here officially.

A memory from the other side
When I was in college -- and when I was supposed to be in college -- I lived in a really awful house on the, um, rougher side of Anytown. A friend of mine owned the house; actually, his parents owned it, free and clear, and charged him $100 a month to live there. Mark turned around and charged his friends $100 a month to live there. Whether there were two of us or five of us, it was $100 a month per person. Pretty good racket for Mark, I'd say.

Anyway, the house was an absolute shithole. Conjure the worst image you can of a place inhabited by men in their early 20s, and make it about five times worse. We once had a 400-cubic-inch Trans Am engine torn down in the living room. One really cold night, we parked our motorcycles in the house. The bathroom was so gawdawful, I wouldn't even use it. I took showers at school or at the health club.

Most of the time, we were too drunk to notice. And when you had 30 or 40 people in the house, as we did on most weekend nights, it was hard to see the crud.

When you have 30 or 40 partyers, it's impossible to actually know all of them. You start with your core group of friends, then a few of their friends show up, then a few of their friends show up, and before long, we were among people who were five or six links removed from us. Occasionally, one of the five-or-six-removed would drop by on Sunday morning, after the revelry died down; or one would show up to a subsequent gathering, despite the fact that his or her original link wasn't there.

That's a really long way of saying I don't know how I met Lee Ann. I have no idea what my original connection to her was. But one day in the spring of 1989, she called our house. She asked for one of our friends who didn't live there. Then she asked for Mark; he wasn't there either. "Then I guess you'll do," she said.

She was stranded somewhere and needed a ride. I said, "Well, OK. Do you mind riding a motorcycle?" She said that was fine. I strapped the extra helmet to the bike, picked her up from wherever she was, and took her to wherever it was she needed to go.

She began showing up to our parties without her original links. She wasn't really becoming one of us, however; she was a few years younger -- I think she was 17 in 1989 -- and, while none of us were exactly Rhodes scholars, she was really not the brightest bulb. Mark took to calling her "Box o' Rocks," as in "dumb as a ... " But she provided us amusement, and that was usually enough to get a beer from our refrigerator. She wasn't particuarly attractive, but she was attractive enough that one of our friends dated her a few times. She kind of merged into the crowd.

She began calling me quite often that summer when she needed a ride somewhere, and if I had nothing better to do, I'd provide. One night, in mid-August, she called. "I need a ride," she said. "Not on the motorcycle, though."

"OK." I found the key to my truck, somewhere, and went and picked her up. She lit a cigarette, and put it out.

"Seems like a waste of a good cigarette," I said.

"I'm pregnant," she said.

Oh. I put out my cigarette, out of courtesy. Waste of another good smoke.

"Um," I said. I knew Lee Ann hadn't been with any of us, but I wasn't sure if that made the answer to my next question any more or less my business. "By whom?"

"Sugar," she said.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Who's Sugar?"

She explained that Sugar was a guy she met at some party. He was going to be a pro boxer someday; he had been a Golden Gloves champion or some such back in Arizona. He also was on probation in Arizona, she said, which made it kind of tough for him to get a job in Anytown, because technically, he was supposed to be in Arizona, not in Anytown. And, oh, by the way, Sugar's black, she added.

In Anytown -- not the most racially diverse place in the world -- it was necessary to point this out. This made everything different, even in 1989. This made her situation, as a white girl in Anytown, even more delicate.

I wondered, for the 4,231st time in my life, why it was that I was tagged with the "Everyone will bare his or her soul to you" designation. I really didn't want to be everybody's confidant; it just happened that way. On that night in August of 1989, I was driving around with a 17-year-old pregnant girl I barely knew, and suddenly I was going to be the person to help her figure out what she needed to do next. I knew then I wasn't going to like where this was going.

"Well, um, what do you do next?" I said. "Are you going to marry Sugar?" You could count the number of interracial couples in Anytown -- a city of almost 135,000 at the time -- on the fingers of two hands. I knew what the answer to that question was going to be.

"I don't know," she said, looking out the truck window. "Probably not. I'm going to live with him, though."

I realized at this point I hadn't asked where I was taking her. I asked. "I don't know," she said. "Sugar's going to be home at 3," meaning 3 a.m. "You can take me there then, I guess."

It was a little after 1. I drove her around Anytown for a couple of hours, listening to her life story. She was living with her grandmother. Her mom was an alcoholic. Her dad lived in St. Louis or Kansas City or somewhere. She had actually been a decent student and a freshman cheerleader at a high school across town, in a particularly affluent area. She decided she didn't fit in, moved in with her grandmother, transferred to a school on the north side and dropped out. It was already clear that she was probably going to function at the level of a high school freshman for the rest of her life.

She was going to keep the kid. She was pretty sure of that, she said. Beyond that, she didn't know.

"When are you due?" I asked. "March," she said.

"Are you seeing a doctor?" I had never used the words "prenatal" and "care" in a sentence at that point in my life, but I knew that a pregnant girl needed to be seeing a doctor. "No," she replied. "I don't have any money."

Nor any insurance, nor anybody to make sure she was seeing a doctor. There wasn't going to be a lot I could do about it at 3 a.m. on that night in August. I took a deep breath and wanted to know if she was ready to go home, wherever home was.

She gave me directions to a place in the really, really bad part of Anytown. "I don't think I'm going to stay here tonight," she said, noting a party was still raging. "But I don't know. Wait for a minute, and if I don't come back out, I'll talk to you later."

I waited for about 10 minutes -- long enough for a violent fight between two young black women to break out in the front yard. One girl's shirt was ripped, revealing that she was braless. The other had a kitchen knife. At this point, I decided Lee Ann was staying. My 21-year-old mind had made itself up -- her situation, it told me. She got herself into it, she can get herself out. She's a big girl. Wasn't going to be any chivalry here. I knew when I was in over my head.

I started my truck, lit a smoke, and left as subtly -- and as quickly -- as I could. I stopped at a nearby Git-N-Go and dialed 911 on a pay phone. I told the voice on the other end that they might want to go check out the melee on Scott Street. I hung up. I went home.

I thought not at all about Lee Ann for about another month and a half, until she called me needing a ride to work. She was living with a friend in a two-room apartment that had seen its better days about 40 years previous. I knocked on the door and let myself in when Lee Ann didn't answer.

I found her curled up on the floor in her work uniform, heaving. Morning sickness at 5 p.m., apparently. Her eyes were bloodshot, her normally pale skin had moved a few shades down to pasty. "You need to see a doctor," I said, stating the painfully obvious.

"No," she sobbed. "If I don't show up today, they'll fire me."

"Come on," I said. "Let's go."

"Just leave me here," she said. "I'll be fine. I'll call and tell them I'll be late."

I helped her up and took her to a walk-in clinic, which was getting ready to shut down for the night. "She's really sick," I said. "I don't know with what. She's pregnant."

The receptionist looked at me. "She's just a friend," I said. "Not mine."

Mollified, the receptionist gave me a clipboard to fill out. Lee Ann, slumped in the seat, helped me fill it out as best as she could. Under "Emergency Contact," she listed her grandmother's name. "I don't know her phone number," she said. "Any chance it's in the book?" I asked. "I don't know," she said. I went to the receptionist and got a phone book. I located her name and address. "This her?" I asked. "Yeah," she said. Yay. An emergency contact number.

The doctor called her back, checked her out, deemed her OK and sent her home with instructions to take better care of herself. Said the kid looked fine.

I wasn't sure what to do at this point, until we saw the receptionist again. She certainly knew what to do. "Forty-five dollars," she said. I looked at Lee Ann. Her face said I don't have it. I wrote a $45 check to the walk-in clinic. I made a mental note to figure out another way to get food and beer that week.

I took her to her workplace -- by now she was two, maybe three hours late -- and asked her if she had a ride home. "I can get one," she said. "I'll pay you back next week for the doctor."

"Whenever," I said. "Get better."

Summer became fall, which became winter. I moved out of the shithole house and moved in with my mom, needing to get my finances back in order after a several-month just-turned-21 drinking binge. The day after I finally got my checkbook back up to zero, I received a call.

"It's Lee Ann," she said, weakly. I hadn't spoken to her since that day in the walk-in clinic. "I had my baby. It's a girl."

"Congratulations," I said, not really enthusiastically. It was Saturday morning, four inches of snow were on the ground, and it took me a minute or two to remember who "Lee Ann" was.

"The doctor said I can go home," she said. "But Sugar's working. I need a ride."

I got in my truck, backed out of the driveway, and realized there was no way I could put a baby seat in my truck. I went back in, told Lee Ann's story to my mom in about a minute, and asked to borrow her car.

"I wonder sometimes how you get yourself into these situations," she said.

"At least I'm observing them from the periphery," I reminded her.

"That makes me feel a little bit better," she said. "I think."

I drove my mom's car to a south-side hospital. It was just Lee Ann and her baby. No boyfriend, no other family. Just the two of them.

I greeted Lee Ann and looked at the baby. At that point in my life, the little girl was the youngest person I had ever seen. She had a full head of wiry hair, and her skin was a light coffee-with-cream color. She still had the scrunchy baby face, and was opening her eyes only briefly enough for me to determine that they were big and brown and beautiful.

I looked around the empty room. No balloons, no flowers, none of the accoutrements I always imagned a new mom's room would have. Little girl, I thought, you have no idea what you've gotten yourself into just by being born.

A nurse was walking out as I was walking in. "Hi," she said, perkily. Then, more of a question, "Congratulations ... ?"

No, I said. Just a friend.

I helped Lee Ann with the paperwork the nurse had left. "What's her name?" I asked.

"Keisha," she said, smiling weakly.

Keisha. I looked over the paperwork Lee Ann had already filled out. "Keisha" on one page, "Keshia" on another. "How do you want to spell it?" I asked.

She looked at the two pieces of paper. "Which one do you like better?" she asked.

I haven't spoken to you for five months, I thought. Now I'm naming your kid. "K-E-I-S-H-A," I said. "Less likely people will mess that up."

When she received the official OK from the nurses, I helped Lee Ann buckle the kid into the car seat the hospital mercifully provided. We wheeled her to my mom's car. The nurse showed me how to strap in the car seat. "Congratulations," she said to Lee Ann.

"Thanks," she said weakly.

I took Lee Ann to yet another residence, a duplex on the north side. "It's only $199 a month here," she said. "We're sharing it with Sugar's friend and his girlfriend. They have a 2-year-old. Keisha can play with him."

I wished her luck. I wasn't sure what else to say. She went inside, and I went home.

Later that night, I found myself in the baby aisle at the grocery store. I didn't know what any of the stuff was. I knew even less what a 2-day-old kid would need. I finally settled on buying a big package of newborn-sized diapers and a six-pack of baby formula. I took it to the duplex. I knocked on the door. I heard a TV going, but nobody answered. I left the stuff by the front door and drove off, slowly, wishing I was intelligent enough to know what I really should have done in that situation. Wondering what I should have done for a girl I hardly knew.

I heard from Lee Ann one more time after that, in about August or September of '90. She called me at work and left a message with one of my co-workers. I called the number she left. The voice on the other end of the line answered with the name of a local, notorious "companionship" service.

Um. I said I was returning Lee Ann's call. The voice hesitated, and said, "Just a minute." I heard her put the phone down. After a few minutes, she came back. "She'll be here in a minute," the voice said. "Next time you call her here, ask for Brandy."

Brandy. OK. Lee Ann came to the phone and made small talk. "I'm engaged," I said. "Getting married next month."

"Good for you," she said. "I've done nine tonight. Nine!"

"Look, you know I don't judge anybody," I said, "but ... never mind. Where's your kid?"

"With my mom," she said. "Or my grandma."

"DId you need something?" I asked.

"No," she said. "I was just calling to say hi. I gotta get back to work."

Yeah, I said, me too.

Little Keisha was born on Feb. 28, 1990. Wherever she is, she'll be a teenager very soon. I think about her about once a year, when it gets really cold in late February. I think about her and I wonder how it is that some people can view human life as so disposable, how parents can just abandon their kids, and how the cycle will continue forever unless somebody way smarter than me can figure out a way to make it stop.

Let's get a rivalry started
I have had a very enjoyable regular discourse with utexas.edu for a while. Now, I see in the logs that Anytown, USA, was visited yesterday by somebody from tamu.edu; Texas A&M University, the dreaded Aggies. If you drop back by, tamu.edu, click on the Enlighten Us link. We're always looking for an Aggie perspective. Really.

It really happened
The dog ate my kid's homework. I witnessed it with my own eyes, and I was powerless to stop it.

Must. Go. To. Sleep
Hmm. Maybe I'll go see if I can find a tape of that State of the Union speech. That oughta help with this insomnia thing.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the Super Bowl
Roll those words around a few times. Sounds ridiculous, huh? Kind of like, "Saddam Hussein just agreed to disarm and live in exile in Antarctica," or "Al Gore is President," or "I just had the most enjoyable root canal." The Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the Super Bowl. That's like Lucy holding the football and letting Charlie Brown kick it. It's like Arkansas high school students leading the nation in SAT scores. It's like snow in Florida -- oh, wait a minute, that happened, too, this week.

For Christ's sake, what's next?

Two posts for the price of one!

Because I am a so-called manager, I tote around a work-issued laptop computer -- so that I can do more work at home, of course. Having a work-issued laptop feeds not one, but two of my personality disorders. I am a workaholic and I am a technogeek. So imagine the nirvana into which I've been launched. After a several-week delay, I received my new work-issued laptop yesterday. It ain't no beat-up ThinkPad; I'm toting a Mac Titanium PowerBook G4, with 1 GB of RAM and a 1 GHz processor. Now I'm looking for excuses to do work at home. (Confidential to utexas.edu: I'm becoming a Mac person again. I'm returning from the dark side.)

As a transplanted Midwesterner, I know a thing or two about being really, really cold. It's really, really cold here on the Edge of America, by Floridian standards, but the reaction is a tad absurd. The NBC affiliate posted a little box on the bottom of the screen with the temperature -- and left it there all night, over Will and Grace and Good Morning Miami and ER. It had made its way down to 35 degrees by the time the news was over. In the early morning sun, it's 29 right now. The National Weather Service says it hit 27 overnight -- making that my personal Florida record low. It hit 28 here one day the last time we lived here. One school district north of here, expecting an overnight low in the mid-20s, canceled school on Friday. For cold. "We don't want kids standing out in the elements waiting for buses," they said. The day in January 1994 when it was 24 below outside our apartment in Cincinnati, you can bet your ass the kids were going to school.

I'm going to go let the battery from my PowerBook keep me warm.

The Raiders and ... who?
Rich Gannon had a message to send to the Tennessee Titans. It went something like this:

I'm throwing to a Hall-of-Famer on one side. Jerry Rice. Remember him? And I'm throwing to a Hall-of-Famer on the other side, this guy Tim Brown. But hey, while you're covering them, don't forget to watch 84, this Porter guy. Best of luck. Enjoy the Super Bowl from your armchairs back in Nashville.

All of a sudden, Rich Gannon is the best quarterback in the NFL. He's the best quarterback in the NFL because he's surrounded by all these geezers Al Davis signed, guys who were supposed to break down in December, guys who were supposed to be one-and-out in the playoffs.

And it's only fitting that the best quarterback in the NFL -- and his Hall of Fame receiving corps -- is in the Super Bowl. I don't care what uniform Jerry Rice is wearing or how old he is. It's damn good to see him in the Super Bowl one more time.

What's not so fitting is Gannon's opponent. We knew and loved them as the Yuks when we were in Florida the last time. We have not-so-fond memories of tuning into Sunday afternoon football games and being forced to watch the Yuks because they were the local team. We turned the channel once just because those atrocious orange uniforms were so hard to look at.

Probably never in the history of sports has a team become so much better just by changing their uniforms.

Back in my sportswriter days, it would have been kind of fun for the quasi-local team to wind up in the Super Bowl. It was a chance to do some special stuff in the newspaper, lots of big extra sections, chances to write a couple more stories, lots of overtime but worth every hour.

Of course, I was younger then. Now, having the quasi-local team in the Super Bowl is simply going to be a pain in the ass. I was probably the only person in the state emitting a loud groan when Ronde Barber swiped that pass there at the end.

But hey, it's only a week of maddening hype. We'll get through it and watch a hell of a fun Super Bowl. And as much as I respect Rice and Gannon and the Raiders, it'll be fun to see Jon Gruden shove it up Al Davis' ass.

Go Yuks.

" ... the cancer is in her lungs and other organs. She started aggressive chemo yesterday and will go through five days of treatment this week. The treatment will continue, and if that doesn't work, she'll go to MD Anderson for other treatment. ... I don't know much more than that but will keep you posted."

My God. Last year, she just had a spot on her face. She had it removed, and had to wear a big bandage for a while, but otherwise, she was fine. Aggressive chemo?

The above update was in reference to a friend in Texas. A mutual friend sent me that update today in an e-mail. It's the first time I've ever opened an e-mail with the word "cancer" in it in reference to one of my friends.

She's 36. We worked together at the Very Large Metropolitan Newspaper. Her second child was just born a few months ago. Her first child was born on the same day as our son. She's a hell of a journalist and, much more importantly, she's one of the nicest, smartest, gentlest people I know.

Cancer. Newborn baby. 36 years old. I'm at a loss. It seems so empty to say, "God, I hope she's OK." Well, no shit. And clearly, she's not OK. I know very, very little about cancer, but I know that the words "aggressive chemo" and "OK" aren't often found in the same sentence.

But, dammit, the English language fails me. Or I'm failing it. It's all I can do.

God, I hope she's OK.

Wow! And, just, um, wow

Hearty congratulations to our friend Sy-rah, who's having a baby! Apparently we didn't frighten her away from parenthood, but she certainly took her time. She was stranded in Cincinnati one night and spent it with us. The Old Daughter was about 13 months old at the time. She took eight years to reflect on that experience and decided to take the plunge. All the best to her and Mr. Sy-rah.

Be happy you don't work for this person. I'm not interested in showing up as a referrer in her logs (she may not understand the phrase "server's log files," but I do), so you'll have to take my word for it. If you're interested in reading an incredibly self-absorbed newsroom leader tell the world about everything that goes on in her TV newsroom, e-mail me and I'll send you the link. Because it's a small world, I'll reserve further opinion.

So much for the insomnia thing (see below)
Apparently, I was almost right on my political leanings. I always thought I was a right-leaning centrist. According to this, I'm a left-leaning centrist.

It really could be worse
A long day ended on kind of a crappy note. But there's plenty with which I can console myself. Thankfully ...

I don't work at Kmart. Pretty soon, a lot of other people won't be working for Kmart, either. I've never had a big preference for one discount store over any other; I go wherever's closest. I got a lot of my clothes from Kmart when I was a kid; I got plenty from Wal-Mart, too. I was equally made fun of for either. But apparently Wal-Mart is doing cheap better than Kmart. It's the American way; may the stronger company live.

I wasn't the TV reporter who had to interview the convicted sex offender tonight. Said offender was accused and acquitted of a subsequent offense. Actual question: "Sir, did you show them your personal parts?"

The wife is feeling better, and nobody else is showing any sign of catching whatever she had.

I didn't drink that second cup of coffee tonight. I'm actually tired enough to sleep tonight. Here's to sleeping.

Hey, could you come in and ... oh, never mind
At work, when somebody calls in sick, it's a relatively simple issue. I call somebody at home, most likely waking this person from an I'm-off-today-leave-my-ass-alone sleep. I beg and plead and make deals with the devil to persuade the person on the other end of the phone to drop by and pick up some time-and-a-half. The lure of semi-free money being what it is, they usually say, "OK," shake off the cobwebs, and come on in to cover for the sick person. I'm happy, the person who just came into semi-free money is happy (eventually), and the world keeps turning.

When The Wife calls in sick, however, it's a different story. Our budget being what it is here at Mom-and-Dad, Inc., I haven't been able to hire a backup. So, when the wife calls in sick, I go home, as I did today.

It's rare that illness renders the wife basically non-functional, but that was our situation today. I blame some Chinese food from last night. It didn't sit very well with me, either. Thankfully, it was a relatively easy day: no scheduled activities, no out-of-the-ordinary events, just me trying to keep the Mini-Humans from causing injury to themselves or each other. Feed them a couple of times, bathe them, put them to bed. It was about one-third the degree of difficulty of her average day. And I still worked twice as hard as I would have if I had stayed at the office. And most of my days at the office don't involve poop, or dishes, or laundry, or having to read the same book repeatedly over the course of the day. The Wife does this every day, and she doesn't even get the paltry wages most day-care workers get.

But she does get to hang out with three of the coolest little people in all the world. Can't measure that in dollars.

Amateur geopolitical analysis
Iraq, I can take or leave. I don't feel particularly bothered by Iraq, and I am not convinced we should be sacrificing American lives there.

These f---ing North Koreans, however, scare the hell out of me. I sense some desperation emanating from north of the 38th parallel. It's almost like they're trying to goad the United States into giving them a reason to fire off their atomic bottle rockets.

Unfinished business from 1991. Unfinished business from 1953. I'm not liking the way this feels.

Jonesing
I can tell you this: If a heroin withdrawal is worse than this, I can't imagine anybody living through it.

Ran out of coffee yesterday. Forgot to buy more coffee. Also out of Coca-Cola and other caffeinated treats. The Wife left me wtih kids and without a car while she went off to sell some of our junk at a friend's garage sale. And I am hurting.

My head feels like it's absolutely going to explode -- that is, when I'm not experiencing fits of narcolepsy. I think nodding off and leaving three kids in charge would be a bad thing. Florida has laws against that, I think.

I need a drink. Coke. Pepsi. Dr Pepper. Mountain Dew, for Christ's sake. Anything. And fast.

Happy birthday to The Wife
Our ages don't matter anymore. That's a good thing. Once you pass 16, 18, 21, 25 (that was very important to me; car insurance decreased by half) and 30, there's not much reason to count anymore. And I don't ever do any more math than absolutely necessary.

Neither, of course, does The Wife. She has been fully aware for several months that she was going to turn 33 today. This, of course, until she did the math and realized that the correct answer to 2003 minus 1971 is ... 32.

So The Wife has received a bonus year. Wish her a good one.

Tightly Wound Insomniac
Like most people, when I'm under stress of any sort, I have trouble sleeping. Unlike most people, however, during these fits of insomnia, I develop super-sonic hearing powers. I become sensitive to every little noise in and around the house, and they become louder and louder, eventually convincing me that my home is surrounded by criminals waiting to break into my house and steal all my stuff and break my kids' toys.

So, in an effort to ward off these phantom ne'er-do-wells, I ... well, apparently, I get out of bed and come to the computer.

It turns out that tonight is a banner night for strange noises in and around the house. The Young Daughter has a cough, which I'm sure is annoying her intensely. The dogs are out by the pool. One of the dogs had a fit of barking earlier, but The Wife groggily contended that particular dog wouldn't be smart enough to bark if anything was amiss and was likely barking just to hear the sound of his own voice. The pool pump is making periodic strange hissing noises, for reasons that I don't completely understand. There is much about the pool that I don't completely understand, but if I was to think too much more about that, it would just add to my stress and probably would keep me awake another hour.

One time about 12 years ago, one of these fits of insomnia exploded into a full-blown panic attack. It was less than two months before we got married. I was completely convinced my wife's ex-boyfriend was outside our apartment, wanting to do harm to both of us. He wasn't, and he didn't, but my mind and body reacted 100 percent as if he was and he did. The reaction came complete with a full-volume, blood-curdling scream. It still ranks as the No. 1 most frightening experience in my life, and probably of The Wife's, too. It convinced me that I should never own a firearm; if I had access to one that evening, I might very well have used it for no good reason. It scared me because I felt like I had absolutely no control over my reactions, and to have something like that happen during what was essentially a bad dream made me wonder what other sorts of chemical imbalances I might have had.

It scared me to the point that I actually made an appointment with a psychiatrist. The doctor assured me that I was fine; she noted that the fact that I was checking to see if I had a problem was a good indication that I didn't. She pointed out that I was under incredible stress, being that I was about to get married and all. Her advice to me was to find some sort of release and to stop worrying quite so much.

That, of course, is easier said than done.

My yawn just now was interrupted by some unintelligible gibberish coming from the Young Daughter's room. She's apparently having trouble sleeping, too. However, being only 2, her options for dealing with her insomnia are limited. She's not awake enough for me to go in there and rock her to sleep; that would just wake her up further, which would only make her mad.

When I was in college, I'd deal with one of these episodes by calling my mother in the middle of the night. I'm sure it annoyed her, but I also know in a twisted way it made her happy to be needed. She was the one who moved out when my parents divorced, so she missed out on seeing most of the teenage angst first-hand. I think she saw my 3 a.m. calls as a way of making up for that. This, of course, is further evidence of the goofy nature of my childhood; when my mom's phone rang at 3 a.m., it was a signal to her that everything was all right.

When I became more adjusted to working late at night, most of my REM sleep was occurring during daylight hours, so I began to worry somewhat less about intruders and security breaches. Not so long ago, I'd just now be ending my work shift, rather than facing the prospect of an alarm clock blaring in six hours.

Quick inventory of the noises: low hum of the computer fan ... refrigerator ... ceiling fan ... holy shit! what's that? oh, the icemaker ... furnace ... cat ... kid with a cold. I think I can go back to bed now.

In case you haven't read it lately ...
... or at all, click here.

Why we're all doing this
Back in August, we talked here about making a Major Lifestyle Change. It was not the change we ultimately made. Before the whole move-back-to-Florida thing came up, we had our eyes on a piece of property in deep rural Texas.

The house was situated on 10 acres of land approximately 15 miles south of nowhere. It was built, depending on which property record one believed, in 1893 or 1912. It was in remarkably good shape for a house that old, but it was going to require a lot of work. But we saw what the place could be. As soon as I made my peace with the idea of living in a rural area and having my Very Long Commute made even longer, I was excited about the idea. I had a vision of a place where my friends and co-workers from the Very Large Metropolitan Area could come spend a weekend far away from the city lights and the traffic and stuff. They could bring their kids to ride horses. They could bring guitars for all-night jam sessions on the second-story porch. It would have been an escape hatch, a place where my family would welcome everybody we know to come and experience some much-needed simplicity.

But, in a world where all things happen -- and don't happen -- for a reason, the deal fell through. Our house didn't sell in time, and another buyer showed up with cash in hand. That buyer showed up the day I was interviewing for the job in Florida.

The thing about that house was this: It was the closest thing we had seen so far to a place that fulfilled a vision.

------------------

One night in 1990, not long before we were married, The Wife and I had one of those up-all-night talks. In that conversation, we described to each other what our Home would be like. It was going to be rural, but not so rural that a career wasn't accessible; it would be old, a place with a history; and it would be surrounded by so much land that our kids wouldn't even know how to spell "neighbor." It was going to be about 10 miles north of Anytown, where I was going to fulfill my goal of being sports editor at the Bugle. I was going to work 11-4, come home for supper, and go back to work about 8-11, to make sure the paper got out.

Reality, of course, has thrown us some curves. Reality dictates that:

a) We live within access of a major metropolitan area, because that's where the career opportunities are.
b) We live in a house that's not going to cost us a lot of money.
c) We live in a house that's not going to require extensive construction.
d) We live in a house with access to high-quality public schools.

When we moved to Cincinnati to fulfill (a), we bought our first house. The family at the time was me, The Wife and The Old Daughter, who had just turned 1. It was a 2-bedroom, 1-bath built in 1912. It was in a neighborhood that admittedly had seen better days, and it wasn't going to be a good long-term solution for us, but it was a great experience and fun while it lasted.

The house, on Taylor Avenue in Bellevue, Ky., was three miles from my office in Cincinnati. We could see the Ohio River, Riverfront Stadium and the Cincinnati skyline from our backyard.

The house was part of the 1912 version of a subdivision. It was identical to the house next to it, and you couldn't walk between the two houses with your arms outstretched without touching both houses. The lot was 30 feet by 112 feet. The house was red brick, with a big porch (on which we immediately installed a swing) and the hardwoods inside were beautiful. The place had actually benefited from neglect; as nobody had ever bothered to "update" the place, much of the original house was intact. Old, but intact.

In a kitchen drawer, we found the receipt for the work to uninstall the original gas light fixtures. The receipt was dated 1977.

The house also had a story, which I unearthed by spending a day at the county courthouse.

At the courthouse, I followed the deeds backwards through the big books. The house's first owners were a young couple named Knaebel. A 1913 city directory listed Mr. Knaebel as a "laborer;" a 1933 city directory listed him as a "foreman." The Knaebels had one son, sometime around 1915. The son was listed in a city directory from the late 1930s as an "artist," and he lived in his parents' house.

The elder Knaebels died in 1952 -- she on Oct. 4, he on Nov. 18. The obituaries noted that she died in the house on Taylor Avenue, and he died at his son's residence in a nearby town. The son received the house and the remainder of his parents' estate, valued at something in the high four figures.

He owned the house and rented it from 1952 to 1977. The next owner rented the house out from 1977 until 1995, when a well-moneyed couple bought the house as a rehab project. We bought the house from them three months later. The first time I walked on the front porch of this place, as soon as I turned the knob on the door, I told The Wife, "We're home."

This place was Home for 13 months. Then, in pursuit of a better job and a better neighborhood for our daughter, who was going to be school-age at some point, we moved to Florida.

We bought a typical Florida suburban place -- one story, 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, about 2,000 square feet. The Wife put her considerable decorating talents to work, and when we left 2 1/2 years later, it was a typical suburban place with a seriously cool personality. It was a very comfortable house, in many ways.

Having made that place our home, we left it behind to move to Texas in 1999. We moved for two reasons -- it was a good career move, and I had long held a desire to live in the homeland of my ancestors. I am, at heart, a Texan, no matter what my address says, and it seemed to be destiny that we live there.

Our search for a house led us into suburbs that were a long way away from downtown, because, they said, that was our best chance of fulfilling criteria (d) above. One of the benefits of this is that we were able to look at very, very nice houses in our price range, houses that we wouldn't have come close to being able to afford without a Very Long Commute. I did, in fact, openly express skepticism that I had done anything to deserve to live in a house as nice as the one we finally settled on. The house was not even 10 years old, but for what we needed, it was perfect in every way -- except, of course, its location, 33.8 miles from work.

The house was nice, but it just never quite became Home. This led us to the house out in the sticks, the place that could have been our Home. Yeah, it was a hell of a long way from work, too, but it was going to be worth it. It was in a rural school district that was fairly well-respected. But it wasn't meant to be, and, as it turned out, it wasn't meant for us to stay in Texas. We wound up making a complete U-turn.

-----------------------------

Now, back in Florida, we're in a house that's much different from the one we left. It has flaws, but we're in the process of making it ours, and I have no doubt that The Wife will inject this place with a personality all its own.

I also have no doubt that this place will be, as has been our history, temporary. At some point -- maybe many years in the future, when the fact that Florida's rural schools are atrocious will no longer matter to us -- we'll pursue the rural dream again. Hopefully there'll be some "rural" left in Florida by that time. At some point, maybe we'll be able to afford a better suburban house, and we'll move there instead.

But Home is not just about a house, or what the license plate on your car says. It's not about your job. Have we found our home yet? I don't know.

But I do know that we have found Home.

I am so plugged in
At this very moment, I am:

having an e-mail exchange with a friend who just moved to San Diego

having an IM conversation with a co-worker, who's holding down the fort at work

updating this forum

having an IM conversation, using another program, with a friend in Missouri, about yet another piece of software I just downloaded.

I don't know when I became such a geek, but it's kind of cool. Beats watching TV.

I will not give up my dishwasher
But there are some other interesting concepts discussed here.

Random stray thought
If I was blissfully ignorant, that'd be OK. Instead, I'm just smart enough to know that I'm not as smart as I need to be.