Tired, wired and uninspired
Stuff has just been shaking all around me. I have neither the time nor the inclination to go into it in great depth. So, following some great advice I received when I was a young sportswriter -- "If you have nothing to say, at least keep it short" -- here, in short form, is what's going on in my head:

My hometown has been battered by tornadoes. Small towns surrounding Anytown have been shredded. I keep hearing residents of Pierce City, Mo., saying they might just abandon the place entirely. The little town of 1,400 is stuck in a no-town's land between U.S. 60 and Interstate 44. Neither major highway goes through the city, so there's not much reason to be there unless you had lived there all your life. In recent years, residents had tried to build the place into an antique haven, capitalizing on the town's historic buildings and rustic feel. Not a building in Pierce City was left untouched by Sunday night's storm. As a result, the town might join a long list of Ozarks ghost towns, wiped off the map by tornado, flood or simple lack of interest. Worse news: More storms are expected to arrive overnight tonight.

I can tell Ozarkers where the warm, moist air that's triggering those storms is coming from: Right outside my house. Florida summer has arrived about a month early. Florida humidity has its own character, especially at night, where you can practically smell the mildew growing.

Among my activities on Sunday: I got to spend a few minutes behind the wheel of a new Corvette. I somehow received an invitation to a General Motors marketing gimmick on Sunday, which allowed people to test drive the car of their choice in a large parking lot. The car of my choice, of course, was a bright yellow 2003 'Vette Z06 with a 6-speed transmission. It was tightly controlled, of course; you had to test drive some other car first, then stand in line and wait half an hour to drive the 'Vette between a bunch of cones. Drivers were timed, with the fastest time of the day receiving a stereo system. Sunday's time to beat was 13.0 seconds. I did it in 16.5; no guts, no glory. Most drivers ahead of me in line were hitting high 15s. Clearly, I didn't want to rush anything. The car is everything I thought it would be; even in a very limited experience, the car basically did whatever you told it to do. Too bad there's no place to install a child safety seat.

Update from Burnout Central: Now that the war's over, we're back to a much more calm pace at work. This is a good thing. The downside: I find myself still oddly uninspired. A couple of projects sit ignored on my hard drive. The paper isn't generating its own interesting stories, preferring instead to sit back and wait for news. I'm still trying to generate some mental traction.

Off to seek some inspiration. Or at least to earn to earn another day's pay.

Glad that's over
The Young Daughter came home on Saturday afternoon after three nights in the hospital. She's back up to full speed and now has to be re-taught that the world doesn't revolve around her. We were given a solid diagnosis of "your guess is as good as mine."

Thief stopped
This guy's 27 years old and he's writing for The New York Times -- or, at least he was, until he pulled this crap. Said he got his notes and his news clips mixed up, which is why he copied a big chunk of a story from a Texas newspaper instead of writing it himself. That's called plagiarism. Plagiarism is to the news business what gambling is to the sports world. It's the one unforgivable sin.

Journalism Tip No. 1: Your notes are in your handwriting. Your news clips are the items that were set in type. For most sighted folks, it's not easy to confuse the two.

I'm still shaking my head while trying to get my mind around the phrase he's 27 and he's writing for The New York Times. This fellow had somehow developed a reputation for being a newsroom golden boy despite having generated 50 corrections in four years. That's 12.5 "the Times regrets the error"s every year. In my shop, you're going to hear about it once you're past three or four in a 12-month period.

I'm stunned to hear something like that was going on at the Times. His editors should have scared him to the point that he was quadruple-checking everything about 40 corrections ago. They didn't. So he was probably justified in thinking that he could get away with damn near copying-and-pasting from another story. Hell, I haven't been fired yet ...

And had he still been writing for the Boston Globe, he might not have been fired.

The theft occurred in a story out of San Antonio, Texas. It was brought to the Times' attention by the editor of the newspaper in San Antone.

Which leads me to Journalism Tip No. 2: Dude, every editor in the country reads the f-ing New York Times. Most of them are relying on it to make their own news judgments. You're sure as hell not going to be able to steal from a paper and put your ill-gotten booty under your byline in The New York Times and not expect the editor of the paper in that town to see it.

He's 27 and he's pissed away the career opportunity of a lifetime, one that the rest of us would sell out our own mothers for. What a f---ing idiot.

'Her fever's up to 105. We're going to the hospital'
And so began another incursion by The Real World against the Daily Routine, two hours before the usual end of the work day. This aspirated pneumonia thing has the Young Daughter running the thermometer to redline. She and The Wife will spend another night in a hospital (admitted, this time, thank God.) I'll spend another night here with the other two children, not sleeping, idly surfing the Web with the TV on, trying not to worry.

High fevers are not uncommon in my house. This is a genetic thing, passed on from The Wife to our progeny. The house record so far is 106, hit by the Old Daughter when she was 2. I remember The Wife calling the pediatrician at 2 a.m., trying to convince her our kid really did have a fever of 106. "I think you're misreading the thermometer," said the doctor. The Wife restrained herself from saying I think you can kiss my ass. At least, she did while she was on the phone. We went to the hospital, the Old Daughter hit 106 on the officially calibrated measuring device, and the doctor was forced to apologize.

It's been a rough week for the Young Daughter, who's carrying a genetic abnormality despite the fact that neither of her parents actually has the gene. Which brings us to another irony of sorts: the actual disease has not caused the kid any problems at all. She has few visible symptoms of something called neurofibromatosis. She instead is hospitalized with pneumonia because of an infection caused when she aspirated vomit while under general anasthesia which sedated her so she'd sit still for an MRI so we could check the progress of something called neurofibromatosis.

I find myself reassuring The Wife by saying, "It's better to know." Now, I'm not so convinced of that.

Tom Petty was right: It's the hardest part (updated again)
The Young Daughter was diagnosed with the dread disease in October 2001, on her first birthday. Since then, we've learned more than we ever wanted to know about navigating the United States health care system.

She had her semi-annual MRI today. They're looking specifically at an optic glioma behind her left eye. We won't know until Tuesday at the earliest what they actually saw. We need for it to not have grown since October, when it was discovered in her previous MRI. We need for no new ones to be present.

An MRI is not a pleasant experience for a small child. First, there's the general anasthesia. At the exam in October, they had to triple-dose her to get her to the state of deep sleep necessary to keep her completely still for an hour. She wobbled around like a drunk for two days, I'm told. This all happened during the time when I was on the Edge and the rest of the family was still in Texas.

This time, they had a much easier time with the anasthesia -- they gave her a different type of medicine -- and by 6 p.m. tonight, she seemed to be on the upswing. Then I walked by where she and The Wife were laying on the couch, and patted the Young Daughter on the head. "Does she feel warm to you?" I asked, casually. "Yeah," said The Wife. We asked the thermometer for confirmation. It said 104. Yeah, that's warm.

This particular anasthesia wasn't supposed to have this particular side effect, according to our discharge papers.

So, it's Us vs. The System. We called our pediatrician, and left a message with the service. We called the hospital downtown, where the procedure was performed. All the people involved had gone home for the day, and nobody wanted to answer our questions. The person on the other end -- not a nurse, from what I could gather -- told The Wife, "If it were my child, I'd take her to the hospital." Hey, thanks for the tip.

After waiting a few more minutes for the pediatrician to call back, The Wife and the Young Daughter went on to the hospital -- the one out here in the 'burb, not the one downtown. As of this writing, four hours later, they're still there. I'm here with the other two kids, who are peacefully asleep. The Wife has called twice to assure me that everything is basically OK -- "they've given her Tylenol, and her fever's down a bit, and they'll see us eventually."

They wait. I wait. I'm sure everything's OK; she's just reacting to the medication. Our kids, like The Wife, tend to run high fevers when they run fevers anyway. A reading of 104 is barely past "cause for concern" in our house.

But they wait. And I wait. And we're not even to the part where we have to yell at the insurance company.

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

11:20 a.m. Tuesday update:
The Wife and the Young Daughter made it out of the emergency room around 6 a.m. -- approximately 11 hours after they arrived. Apparently they had a full house in the ER last night, and my kid's high fever was less of a priority than the car accidents or potential SARS cases or whatever the hell they were seeing.

After 11 hours in the ER, they left with this: "Might be a urinary tract infection."

Excuse me. She had an MRI under general anasthesia nine hours previous. You're saying that she picked up a uninary tract infection out of the blue? The Wife reported that even the doctor wasn't convinced. But it had been a bad 11 hours in the ER for everyone involved, apparently, including the medical staff. I suspect this physician didn't want The Wife to leave with nothing, so he came up with his best guess.

I'm frustrated, and I wasn't the parent who had to spend 11 hours in the emergency room last night with a 2-year-old. Amazingly, the 2-year-old was the most calm of all the parties involved. When they came home, the sun was rising, and the Young Daughter was her usual cheerful self -- just like she had been all day.

Nobody told her she had been awake all freakin' night. Nobody told her she should panic. I wish they had forgotten to tell me.

------------------------------------------
4 p.m. Tuesday update
The Young Daughter's pediatrican made the ruling: Aspirated pneumonia. Kind of like a urinary tract infection, only completely different. Suspected cause: She vomited while under anathesia, then inhaled it. I hope it sounds worse than it is.

Now that's a no-hitter
Philadelphia's Kevin Millwood, a Braves castoff, no-hit the Giants on Sunday. No-hitting that crew is a pretty serious accomplishment.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming
Enough weak political commentary. I'm scaring myself with this hard left turn I've just taken. Let's instead tell yet another story from 1989, back when politics was the furthest thing from my mind.

And then, there was the girl who attempted suicide right in front of me.

Her name was Michele, with one "l." She was a year younger than me, tan, big brown eyes, a little on the heavy side. I met her through a mutual friend at school. I was intrigued by her slightly bizarre sense of humor and her really cool voice. We dated a few times. It turned out her sense of humor wasn't the only bizarre thing about her, so I, in my single-guy wisdom, decided that dating her a few more times probably wouldn't be a good idea.

I guess she didn't take it well. One Saturday night in May, about 8 p.m., my roommates and I got a hang-up call right as we were leaving the house. As soon as we determined the caller wasn't going to leave a message, we went out the door. I heard the phone ring again. "Wanna get that?" Mark asked. "Nope," I said.

It was a night for motorcycle riding, and ride we did. When we rode, we didn't drink. (We were at least that intelligent. The margin for error on a motorcycle is pretty small.) We rode until a little past midnight, and came home, clear-headed but tired. When we got home, the message light on the machine was flashing.

Mark hit the button. Michele's voice came from the machine. "Don't call me back, not that you will anyway," the quavering voice said. "By the time you get this, I'll probably be pretty sick." Then some really long soliloquy that I don't remember much of. Then, a pause. I thought the tape had run out. Mark's face was ashen, which surprised me. He didn't scare easily. And I wasn't particularly taken aback; this woman had a flair for the dramatic. I figured she was just doing her drama-queen thing. I wondered what he had heard that I hadn't. I was fully prepared to ignore it and go to bed.

Then: "It's been fun."

Click.

Mark was still looking at the phone. "Guess you better go check that out," he said.

I grabbed my helmet and started for the door. "You know," Mark said, "you probably should take your truck."

Yeah, I probably should. I drove to her apartment, which was near the university campus, wondering what I was going to see. I knew that Michele wasn't, shall we say, mentally stable. I didn't know her well enough to know where her line was. Was this some kind of ruse, or sick prank? Was she just trying to get me to talk to her?

I took a deep breath as I jumped out of my truck and walked to her door. I heard music coming from her apartment. I knocked a couple of times, then I tried the knob. Coincidentally, it was unlocked.

She was sitting in a rocking chair in the corner to my left. A strong smell of something was in the air. I determined it was some alcoholic beverage. This struck me as odd, because Michele wasn't the drinker that, say, I was.

"Hi," she said from her chair. I saw then why the house smelled like wine. The top part of the bottle was in her hand. I walked a little further and noticed the rest of the bottle -- and its contents -- were on the kitchen floor to my right. An empty bottle of store-brand aspirin was on the kitchen table.

It took me about .0023 second to compute the possibilites for that wine-bottle neck she was holding in her hand. It took me a hell of a lot longer to figure out what I should do about it. "Did you take the aspirin?" I asked. "Is that why that's there?" I pointed to the little bottle on the table.

"Yeah," she said. "It was almost full." I looked: 500 count. I doubted that was fatal in itself, but I figured in a few hours she was going to be pretty uncomfortable. And I didn't know how much, if any, of the wine she had consumed.

I was being fairly careful not to talk to her; I figured I had the right to remain silent, and anything I said could be used as an excuse to go off the deep end. I walked to the phone.

She moved in the chair, sitting forward. The bottle neck was in her left hand, sharp side pointing away from her. "Don't call anybody."

"I have to call an ambulance," I said, calmly, trying really hard not to belie my agitation. "You're going to be really sick."

"I'm not going to be really sick," she said. "I'm going to be fucking dead. Don't you understand that? That's what I want." She wasn't trying to hide her agitation. Next step: reasoning.

"If you wanted to be fucking dead," I said, barely above a whisper, "you wouldn't have called me."

"You didn't call me back," she said. "You didn't care."

"I wasn't home," I said, still quietly. "I came as soon as I got your message."

A few minutes of silence ensued. It would be an understatement to call it an "awkward" silence. I was watching her for signs: Signs that she was going to do anything stupid with the bottle neck. Signs of her being sick. Signs of her not actually having taken the aspirin at all. Signs of this being some sort of silly melodrama. While I was watching her, a completely unrelated thought hit me: she was a lot heavier than she had been when I last saw her, three weeks previous. Probably 10 pounds, maybe 15. I don't know why this occurred to me at such a time, but it did. Hey, I was a 20-year-old guy. I noticed these things.

I took another step toward the phone. She sprang up out of the chair and pulled it out of the wall and threw it across the room with her free hand. The bottle neck was still in her left hand. I backed way off; I was standing at this point in the kitchen, one foot in the puddle of vino on the floor.

Apparently satisfied she had gotten her point across, she sat back down in her rocking chair. If it was merely silly melodrama, it had suddenly become quite a bit sillier. I really had no idea what she had done, and what the effect of whatever she had done was going to be, so I decided to go to Plan C: waiting her out. If she had taken several hundred aspirin, at some point, she was going to pass out. I'd make my phone call then.

I went back to Plan B, the "reasoning" approach. "OK, I'm not going to call an ambulance," I said, "but I have to use the phone."

"Who the hell are you going to call?" she asked weakly. Could she be on the downswing? I hoped, and feared.

"My mom," I said, calmly. My mom had experience dealing with mental cases and other unstable elements of society; she had worked in mental health for 10 years before becoming a corrections officer. I had no doubt she would know 1/what several hundred aspirin would do to someone and 2/how to deal with someone who was off her rocker in every way but literally. "I need to ask her a question."

"You promise that's who you're calling?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said. "I promise."

Silence. Then, "OK."

Thankfully, the phone was still in pretty good shape. I plugged it in to the jack in her bedroom and dialed up my mom. It was a little after 2 a.m. I explained the situation as quickly and as neutrally as I could, knowing that Michele was listening. "How long has she been like this?" my mom asked. "I've been here about two hours," I said. "She'll fall asleep soon," my mom said. "You're safe until then."

I looked out the bedroom door, and my mom was exactly right. It appeared that Michele had fallen asleep in her rocking chair. I walked over, very slowly, and took the bottle neck out of her hand. "Gotta go," I said to Mom. "Time to call 911."

I called 911 and asked for an ambulance. A police officer showed up first. I was a little irked by that -- you know, she needs to go to the hospital, not to jail -- and a little more irked when I realized most of the cop's questions were directed toward me. I answered them, trying to keep my irkedness to myself, and the ambulance showed up shortly thereafter.

"You want to ride with her?" the cop asked.

I thought about it. There's my truck. If I ride with her, I'll have no ride home. "Yeah, I'll ride with her," I said.

Michele was completely unconscious by this time. The EMTs were scurrying, which made me feel a little safer; they were at least treating her like she was alive, which relieved me of the obligation to ask. They loaded her up. I rode up front, next to the driver. We made our way to the hospital, lights, no siren.

An awful thought occurred to me when we arrived, crashing through the doors like they do on ER: I had to call her parents. I had never met her parents. I wasn't even sure I could remember their names. It was by now well after 3 a.m. I decided to put that off for a while.

Doctors determined Michele had indeed taken the aspirin. Michele's stomach was pumped, she was given some form of medication, and she was awake and reasonably alert by 5 or so. "I have to call your parents," I said.

"No, no, no," she managed to say, shaking her head weakly. "Please don't."

"I have to," I said. "They need to know." Plus, I thought to myself in my most caring way, you're going home with them, not me. "What are their names?"

She told me, and I called. It was the most difficult phone call I had ever made in my life up to that point. I wasn't sure what I was going to say to these people I didn't know. I identified myself, and Michele's mom seemed to recognize the name. That helped calm me, a little bit. "Michele is in the hospital," I said. After the usual oh-my-gods and yeah,-she's-ok,-but, her mom said she and her husband were on their way. They had an hour drive from a small burg south of Anytown.

I stayed in the room and held Michele's hand until her parents arrived. Michele wanly made the introductions. I braced myself. Her mom gave me a big hug. "Thank you, thank you," she said. Uh, OK.

Mom and Dad assured themselves (and, indirectly, me) that they were going to be taking Michele home. Mom motions to me and asked, "Do you drink coffee?" I didn't at the time, but figured it would be a good time to start. We walked to the coffee machine down the hall.

Mom explained to me that Michele had not been in the best of mental health for a while. She had been living at home and had been doing reasonably OK, but then she rented this apartment in Anytown. She had only been there a few months; she had, in fact, rented the apartment since I knew her. "She got that to be closer to you," Mom said.

I mentally sighed and shook my head. "We told her not to, but she did it anyway," Mom said. She explained that she had decided it would be a good chance to test how Michele would do on her own. I guess they had their answer.

In my not-yet-21 self-centeredness, the main thing I was trying to figure out was if they were upset with me. I was reasonably assured they weren't. "I'm so glad you thought so quickly and helped her," Mom said. "God only knows what would have happened if you hadn't."

"I just did what I thought would be right," I said. "Listen," I added, "it's probably best if I said 'bye' to Michele and let y'all take it from here. I don't mean to be mean, but it's probably best if I'm not around." I wasn't sure how Mom was going to take that. Thankfully, she agreed. "If you need any help on this end, getting her lease canceled or whatever, let me know," I said. "Otherwise, I'm probably going to not call."

"I understand," Mom said.

"Does she need, you know, help?" I asked.

"Yeah, she does," Mom said. "And she'll get it this time." I wondered what had happened "last" time.

With that, I turned my attention to figuring out how I was going to get home. In a surprise development, I saw my mother in the waiting room. She had apparently listened to the whole thing unfold on the scanner. "Man, am I glad to see you," I said.

The sun was up. My mom took me home. I went directly to sleep and didn't wake up until just before I had to be at work that afternoon. At the time, I just chalked it off to another wacky event that had gone on around me.

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

I didn't think about that night -- or Michele -- until just before Christmas.

She had sent me a Christmas gift and a card. I set it aside and called her after the first of the year. She asked me if I wanted to get together for coffee, or dinner, or something. "I'm taking medication," she said. "I'm not crazy anymore."

"I never thought you were crazy," I said.

"Well, I was," she said. "Or am, or whatever. That's what the doctors tell me, anyway."

I decided that meeting her for dinner wouldn't be a bad thing. Hell, I needed to eat anyway.

I was surprised to see her; she had changed visibly. She had lost a significant amount of weight since I had seen her last; she was, in fact, thinner than when I had first met her. She was no longer "a little on the heavy side."

She explained that her mental issues -- and her weight -- were caused by a thyroid problem of some sort. With the problem under medical control, she said, she was attacking both issues with equal gusto. Therapy and diet had returned her to a state of solid mental and physical health. She was back in school, down in her hometown, and she was doing well.

She invited me to come down to her parents' bar sometime. I did; that was another story. I only saw Michele one other time after that; a few months later, I was engaged to someone else, and the whole episode had become another footnote among my stories from the previous year.

But I did learn a lot about mental illness. There are some strains of mental illness that run in my family, but it was the first time I had encountered it in a peer, somebody my age. I learned that it's something to be taken seriously, both by those who have it and by those who know someone who has it.

And I had never before been in a position where I had to simply trust my instinct. I could -- and still can -- question anything 10 ways to Sunday. But in the end, you have to do what strikes yourself as right.

I like French wine and the Dixie Chicks. Do something about it
I just composed a long post bemoaning our country's lack of tolerance for dissent. I decided it was worthy of a good ass-whupping from my favorite trio of thugs, Click, Drag and Delete.

Not because I didn't believe what I wrote. I did. I still do. But it was badly constructed and would have reflected poorly on my skill as a writer. I don't give a flying fuck that some of you might have thought it reflected poorly on my patriotism.

I'll come back to this when my thoughts are in a little better order. In the meantime, I offer this:

After some effort -- more effort than it should have required -- I have located the text of the Patriot Act passed in 2001, without any accompanying opinion, analysis or interpretation. Do me this favor. You read it, and you decide for yourself whether it's a full frontal assault on your civil liberties or whether it's a necessary shield to protect this country against a repeat of the atrocities we saw committed against our friends and neighbors and fellow Americans on Sept. 11, 2001.

And then do this:

If you think it's the former, please locate your representative and determine whether he or she voted for the bill. Then, in the next election, do a little research and determine his or her opponent's stance on civil liberties. If it matches yours, vote for that person and not the incumbent.

If you think it's the latter, please click here and explain to me why you think it's OK for us to give up our civil liberties. And then read this (it's a PDF file, Acrobat Reader required) and tell me if you're ready to take that next step.

And, if you think it's the latter, that's your right as an American. I would die to defend that right. But I dare you to tell me that I think it would be OK for another Sept. 11 to happen because I think it's the former.

Getting old, growing up
As part of the brainwashing activities all managers in my company must go through, I'm taking the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator. This is the second time I've taken this test. The first time was in 1998. Apparently, I've changed quite a bit in five years.

Five years ago, I was not yet 30. My personality type was ENTP, which is described as follows: "Quick, ingenious, stimulating, alert and outspoken. Resourceful in solving new and challenging problems. Adept at generating conceptual possibilities and then analyzing them strategically. Good at reading other people. Bored by routine, will seldom do the same thing the same way, apt to turn to one new interest after another."

Now, I'm looking down the barrel of 35. My personality type has morphed to INFP, described thusly: "Idealistic, loyal to their values and to people who are important to them. Want an external life that is congruent with their values. Curious, quick to see possibilities, can be catalysts for implementing ideas. Seek to understand people and to help them fulfill their potential. Adaptable, flexible, and accepting unless a value is threatened."

(The Wife went through the questions, too. It turns out we're direct opposites, which surprises neither of us.)

Both descriptions of me are frighteningly accurate -- the old then, the new now. Five years ago, I was a lot more outspoken than I am now. I was less aware of my "values" and was probably less driven by them. I remain adaptable and flexible, right to the point where it starts cutting into my family time. I'm not as driven by career as I used to be. I am more aware of ways that I can help other people. I am idealistic, but not in the way most people think of the term.

Five years ago, I was midway through my first stint here on the Edge of America. Between then and now was three years in Texas, a place where I was able to spend a lot of time finding myself and confirming a value system. I was working at a job that bored me to tears for two-thirds of the time I was there, but it did allow me time to bond with my family in a way that I wasn't able to when I was here the first time. Now that we're back here on the Edge, I'm back in a job that requires a great deal of my time and energy. Five years ago, I accepted that as part of the deal. This time, I don't, and I think that inner struggle contributed to my little burnout episode.

Am I growing into the person I want to be? I don't know. I'm still a little too worried about money and about material stuff, and it's hard for me sometimes to find the balance between idealism and realism. I was probably better at my job back when I was more outspoken.

But at least I'm evolving. Even with the struggles it brings, evolution is a good thing.

Tunes in my head
I have previously professed my love for Maria McKee in this forum. A mid-'80s album from her days as the lead singer of Lone Justice is still in my regular CD rotation. Her new album just came out this month. She performed earlier this week on the Tonight Show. She was awful. She had a much better voice when she was a blonde.

And then, I noticed in the It's-Stalking-Me ad above an offer to buy a CD of children's music by Nicolette Larson. (The name was misspelled Nicholette, but, oh well.) For reasons that were known only to my 11-year-old head, I had tremendous crushes on Nicolette Larson and Melissa Manchester in the late 1970s. Larson was kind of a one-hit wonder -- "Lotta Love," a song written by Neil Young, made some top-40 noise in 1978 -- but she had hair down to here and an intriguing voice to boot. Plus, I really liked the name "Nicolette" for some reason. Most boys my age at that time were pinning up posters of Farrah Fawcett and Daisy Duke and Suzanne Somers. Me, I had album covers of Nicolette Larson and Melissa Manchester.

Because I was curious, I decided to follow the links to see what became of Nicolette Larson. Imagine my shock to learn she died five years ago. Died of a cerebral edema at 45, leaving behind a daughter who's now 13 and a husband. And her one hit.

If we don't have newspapers, we won't need the Pulitzers
A journalist for whom I have a great deal of respect wrote a piece on an industry web site bemoaning the fact that in the last few years, a disproportionate number of Pulitzer Prizes have gone to the nation's biggest newspapers.

I have to confess I'm a lot less worried about small newspapers' Pulitzer chances than I am about their chances for survival.

After 17 years in the business – at papers ranging in size from the 60,000-circulation paper in my Missouri hometown to the nation's eighth-largest newspaper – I have reached a conclusion about the future of print journalism, and it is this:

The print newspaper will someday die. Its death will be a suicide.

The corporations are going to kill the newspaper by continuing to allow smaller newspapers to be bad.

I don’t know off the top of my head the percentage of the population that lives outside the top 50 markets, but I’m sure it’s a significant number of potential readers. Yet, in many cases, we give these readers two choices:

An under-staffed, under-newsholed, under-funded Gannett or Knight-Ridder profit center, or

a first edition of a possibly faraway metro, which might well have gone to bed as early as 9:30 or 10 p.m and as such lacks key information, such as sports scores.

Meanwhile, the corporations funnel a disproportionate amount of resources, talent and funding to their large papers.

I'm not saying that the paper in Grand Forks, N.D., or Rome, Ga., should be a Pulitzer contender every year. But so many sub-100,000 circulation papers are barely serving their readers, never mind fighting for awards. This is something that should be a matter of great concern among those who have a vested interest in the continued health of the newspaper industry.

Many people choose to live in small towns and cities. These people deserve a good newspaper.

Many other people grow up in small towns and cities and move away. They never pick up the newspaper habit because the local rag isn’t worth reading. As an industry, we need to figure out how to get an interesting product to those people so that when they do move away, they won’t equally ignore The New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle.

This is not necessarily an anti-corporate journalism rant. Plenty of family-owned small newspapers are gawdafwul. Every newspaper I've worked for has been owned by a large corporation. I'm lucky to work for a corporate-owned newspaper that has the resources to have a serious commitment to quality journalism, despite not being the corporate flagship.

But I've seen -- and have tried to read -- too many examples of the opposite. And I think as an industry, we’re only a few years away from really regretting that we let that happen.

Security provided by Keystone Kops
A 15-year-old boy was killed and three other students were injured Monday in a school shooting in the rough part of New Orleans.

The school was equipped with metal detectors and a security guard. Yet somehow, three thugs and an AK-47 managed to get past all that.

This from an Associated Press account of the incident:

Councilman Oliver Thomas, among city officials who went to the scene, said it was understandable that the parents were upset.

"He didn't go through the system. We don't have electrical fences around the building. How do you stop a kid if he wants to get in? He'll find a way."

Parents in the crowd were jeering school offiicals who were trying to assure them their kids were safe -- while simultaneously blocking their entrance into the building. When the parents were finally let in, a mob scene apparently ensued.

So let me get this straight: Three thugs and an AK-47 can get into this school, but a scared parent can't?

It wasn't that long ago school shootings were all the rage. Media outlets were falling all over themselves every time something popped at a school. Which, in a way, is probably a good thing. We should be shocked when a building which houses our children comes under attack.

This one, as I write this, is not on the home page of msnbc.com nor cnn.com, less than 12 hours after it happened. However, right now on msnbc.com, clicking on an image of Monica Lewinsky takes you to a story about the TV show she's hosting.

I'd like to think this story isn't getting much attention because of the war. Or because only one student died.

I'd like to think it's not being ignored because it might have been gang-related and it happened in an impoverished, predominantly minority section of New Orleans.

Some things I think
It's my forum, so I can indulge in this moment of self-centeredness with no regrets.

I think good handwriting is sexy.

I think marijuana, prostitution and gambling should be legal -- despite the fact that I have no personal use for any of the three.

I think the United States is making a major tactical error with its invasion of Iraq. I hope I'm wrong about that.

I think the daily newspaper as we know it will cease to exist before I can retire.

I think the USB port is one of mankind's greatest inventions.

I think speed limits are unnecessary.

I think "stay-at-home mom" is one of the most important occupations in the world.

I think if a woman chooses not to stay at home and pursues career goals instead, that's also wonderful.

I think it's great to have the freedom to choose.

Pardon our dust
We've taken it from gawdawful to merely bad. Still working on it, as time allows. And time hasn't been very generous lately.

Monuments don't fire back
Yay. We killed a statue. That's historic. Meanwhile, the man himself is probably in an air-conditioned bunker in Syria, laughing his ass off. Pardon me if I don't join in the euphoria just yet.

What the hell is this?
In print design, we don't have to let you look at the prototypes. In cyberspace, apparently, everything is laid bare. Hang with us while we fix the awfulness. Yes, I know, that damn blue background has got to go. However, I've been kicked in the ass by Daylight Saving Time, having lost an hour of my life that I'll really never get back. So it's too late. Must log off and sleep.

But we'll fix it. After we fix it, I'll tell you about a fabulous weekend -- 48 hours that have put me well on the road to recovery from the shame spiral.

Until then, if you can read this with your eyes closed, please do. If your eyes need a rest, go to The Vault; I haven't f-ed up the archives yet.

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.