Ok, I'll bite
This is a cheap way to fill space when I can come up with nothing on my own. Because I'm working on being a "glass-half-full" person, I look at it as "using my resourcefulness to come up with an alternative solution."

So, a dreaded list. Copy this whole list into your journal.

Bold the things that you have in common with me.

Whatever you don't bold, replace with things about you.

Things I have in common with Lynniechan are in bold.

001. I walked around for three months with a stress fracture in my foot.
002. I'm indifferent towards animals.
003. I'm rapidly losing my hair.
004. I procrastinate.
005. I was 12 the first time I crossed a state line.
006. I procrastinate a lot.
007. I am old enough to have seen Star Wars in a movie theater when it first was released. However, I have seen none of the other "Star Wars" movies.
008. My favorite color is black.
009. I often have trouble falling asleep.
010. I eat a lot, but I'm very picky.
011. I dated a girl for four years in high school and college -- and, thankfully, married someone else.
012. My favorite subject in school was history.
013. I'd rather be outside.
014. In grade school, a boy once asked me why I was so small.
015. I spend much of my free time on a computer.
016. My parents divorced when I was 12.
017. I use instant messenger at work.
018. I rarely watch TV.
019. I hate shopping for clothes.
020. I am disgusted by trash on a table when I am eating.
021. I don't smoke, but I'm not bothered by people who do.
022. I have seen Bon Jovi in concert three times -- all three times as an opening act.
023. I have never had a pet of my own.
024. Not counting times that I have been ill, I have slept as long as 14 hours of a day.
025. I use AIM.
026. I'm liberal in some ways and arch-conservative in some others.
027. I dislike crowds.
028. Growing up, I loved educational toys, especially science, radio and aeronautical kits.
029. If I had an absurd amount of money, I'd own several cars.
030. I would love to have more time.
031. I have never stayed overnight in a hospital.
032. I have "run" a 5K.
033. I live with my wife, three children, three dogs and a cat.
034. I really need to clean my house.
035. I got two Fs in college. One class I forgot to drop. The other, I showed up only for the tests -- I had enough test points for a "B," but the professor also graded on attendance.
036. I hate roaches.
037. I love storms.
038. I have my own computer.
039. I wish I owned more books.
040. Mainstream pop music of the '80s drove me away from commercial music.
041. I really enjoy thoughtful gifts, even if they cost nothing. Still, I'll like almost anything just because the person took the time to pick it out.
042. I get along with most members of my family.
043. I like laughing.
044. Sometimes LiveJournal creeps me out.
045. The only kind of jewelry I like is watches.
046. I am a nonconformist.
047. I designed my own Web page.
048. I'm old enough to have used the original TRS-80 computer.
049. I designed the graphic on this site.
050. I love to burn CDs.
051. I once played the violin.
052. I am opinionated.
053. I have "leave me alone face."
054. I have fired a gun.
055. I've never gone hunting.
056. I don't exercise enough.
057. I have taken tennis lessons.
058. I take great pride in my handwriting.
059. I wish I read more books.
060. I've never swum with dolphins.
061. I've never been to a foreign country.
062. I love food.
063. I can't dance.
064. I am angered by closed-minded people.
065. I'll drink from a juice box if that's all that's available.
066. I like to give gifts, but I don't do it often enough.
067. I have to have at least a sheet covering me at night, even if it’s really hot.
068. I don't have a regular bar.
069. I hate routines.
070. I own few DVDs.
071. I am constantly battling boredom.
072. I need some alone time to stay sane.
073. I'm online a lot.
074. I want to travel more.
075. I'm old enough to have played Atari games.
076. Most of my friends from college are of the opposite gender.
077. I rarely get drunk.
078. I've never had a DUI.
079. I have never been arrested.
080. I think too much.
081. I love wood and tile floors.
082. I carry a laptop almost everywhere I go.
083. I think I am boring.
084. I have an average size car.
085. I enjoy talking about current events.
086. Most days, I'd rather be around kids than adults.
087. I have a low tolerance for loud people.
088. I see "floaters" almost all of the time.
089. There is probably something else I should be doing rather than this.
090. I haven't been to a doctor since 2000.
091. I've never tried sushi.
092. I grew up in a rough neighborhood.
093. I hate getting my picture taken.
094. I would like to someday hear somebody sing a song I've written.
095. I love long, sleek black hair.
096. I love scrambled eggs.
097. I didn't fly on a commercial airliner until I was 25.
098. I dislike the beach but will go if friends are going.
099. I like to say swear words.
100. I always get kissed good night.

Random stray thought

I'm often accused of oversimplifying things. I only do so because most things are really very simple.

Placeholder
This is basically just typing practice. Nothing of substance follows.

Stuff I know
I know a thing or two about mental illness. It runs in the family.

My maternal grandfather was an incredibly intelligent and driven human being. When he was in his mid-20s, he was an accountant in Cleveland. An image that stands out in my mind is a picture of this man and his two daughters standing in front of a car with a 1956 Ohio license plate. The car was a '54 Cadillac. The daughters were my mom, who would have been 4 or 5, and her sister, two years older. Clearly, to get himself into a ride like that, he was doing something right.

Five years later, my mom found herself in the back of an old Buick station wagon, leaving Cleveland, headed for Springfield, Mo. Her dad had chucked everything to go to a Bible college in the Ozarks, a place he'd never been. He packed his wife and two kids and whatever possessions they could fit into the Buick and headed west. God had told him to.

If God speaks to you, that doesn't make you insane. But it wasn't God's voice he was hearing.

My mom has, thankfully, been stingy with details about what her life was like during the 1960s. The only thing I know clearly is that her life was bad enough that she believed the only way out was to get married at 16 and have a kid.

My grandmother divorced my mom's father in 1967, which was a pretty gutsy move, not just because divorces were uncommon in the late '60s, but also because it left her and her newly married, pregnant, high-school sophomore daughter without any discernible means of support other than my soon-to-be-dad's wages as a fry cook. My grandmother went to work, for the first time in her life, in her late 30s, and later married the man that I called Grandpa when I was growing up, a retired Army guy who was 18 years her senior.

I knew nothing of my biological grandfather until I was 5 or 6; at that point, because I wasn't very good at assembling details, I thought he lived in Cleveland. And because I had what I believed to be a complete family unit -- two parents, four grandparents -- his lack of presence didn't bother me in the least.

As I got older, I started asking more questions and getting fewer answers. It turned out that I actually had met the man, when I was 2 or 3. My mom had broken off contact with him shortly after my sister was born in 1971, because his illness had progressed to the point where she not only was uncomfortable around him, she felt unsafe.

Treatment and medicine advanced, and by 1978, my mother and her father had reconciled. I was allowed to meet him when I was 10. He wasn't living in Cleveland at all. He was living in Anytown, not 5 miles from my house. He was married to a charming woman, who happened to be 2 years older than my mom.

I spent quite a bit of time with him when I was 10; he was smart, and fascinating, and funny, and creative. He and I shared a love for American history. His political hero was Stephen Douglas; mine was John F. Kennedy. We also shared a love for old cars, although I found his obsession with Cadillacs a bit odd. Deferring to the fact that he was my grandfather and I was 10, I didn't question that obsession, nor did I question the fact that he called himself "Steve" when his name was actually Rupert. Hell, I thought, if my name was Rupert, I'd have come up with something different, too.

I was also fascinated with his smoking habits. He was the only person I've ever known who smoked Old Gold cigarettes. He would open a new pack very carefully, tearing the foil portion so he could re-close it after he got a fresh smoke rather than just tearing it off. When non-filtered Old Golds were unavailable, he'd buy the filtered variety, very carefully open the pack, and even more carefully pop the filter off each cigarette.

I did notice that he signed his name with the title "Rev.," when, my mom told me, he wasn't ordained in anything. I ran this by my other grandfather, who was in fact ordained as a Baptist minister, and he quickly and not very subtly changed the subject.

I later learned that in the late 1970s, my mother's father was very well medicated, and he was diligently taking his medicine in an effort to stay in step with the world as much as possible. His charming young wife worked in the millinery department of a downtown department store; he didn't work at all, best I could tell. But other than that, he was trying to get by as best as he could around the limitations of his illness. My mom leaned on him very hard to take his medication, but it was hard; he felt fine when he was on his medication, he believed, so, clearly, he was cured, and therefore he no longer needed it.

Then, in 1980, he suffered a heart attack while shoveling snow. He had not been diligent about his medication before his heart attack, and the voices in his head had been telling him to be mean to his charming young wife -- mean enough that, after he had his heart attack, she threw him out of their house. He moved in with us while recovering from open heart surgery, and argued that his medication wouldn't mix well with his heart pills, and given the choice, he was going to take his heart pills.

The decline happened fast. His presence was the last straw on my parents' faltering marriage. My mom threw her dad out, and shortly after that left my dad. My grandfather went back home, reconciled with his charming young wife, then began accusing her of cheating on him with my dad, then began threatening her life. She, wisely, left again.

My mom tried as hard as she could. She ignored his threats, she bought him groceries, she made sure he at least took his heart pills. One day, he threatened suicide. She delivered his groceries while he was gone somewhere, went into his house, and took his gun.

I came home from school to find several bags of groceries on the front porch, with a note scrawled in his very distinctive handwriting: "I WILL NOT accept CHARITY from THIEVES." The tail on the "s" went all the way across the paper, from right to left, as an underscore for his indignance.

That was it. She cut him off at that point.

My mom was angry, and sad, too. Me, being a teenager by that point, I had no time for simultaneous anger and sadness, so I stuck with just anger. We went on with our lives.

When I started writing for the newspaper, my mother noted that he might try to seek me out sometime. "He'd be very proud of you, I think," she said. "Don't be surprised if he tries to make contact with you."

"If he does," I fumed, "I won't be responsible for what I'll do."

A tear formed in my mom's eye.

"I know, and I understand," she said. "But he isn't either."

That exchange happened in 1988. Two years later, my mother's father was dead of a heart attack. He had just turned 60. I couldn't tell if my mom was sad or relieved. I suspect it was a completely unexplainable and justifiable mix of both.

I don't have nearly enough megabytes to go into all the complexities of my mother's immediate family -- her mom, strong as a rock, who died of a heart attack six months before her ex-husband died; her sister, insecure, overweight, trapped for years in abusive relationships, who died of a heart attack in 2002; my mom herself, who is so detached from everything that she allows herself to be close to nobody. But at the heart of so much of that was a man whose greatest sins in life were caused by something over which, for much of his life, he had very little control.

I learned a lot from those experiences. I learned that mental illness is real. I know that perfectly wonderful people can carry a mental illness, and that they're no more deserving of your contempt than somebody who has diabetes or MS.

I also know that many mental illnesses are genetic. This is always in the back of my mind. Schizophrenia, for instance, often doesn't show up until a person is in his mid-20s. I'm 35, safely past that point, but I still worry when I don't feel like I'm in complete control of my emotions. I worry about my sister, whose ability to handle average, real-world stress is zero. I worry about my kids.

I've been scared into therapy a couple of times, and both times, I was reassured that my worry about having a problem was a sure sign that I didn't have one. Many of the elements of my dad's side of the gene pool cancel out those from my mom's side.

Society and science are starting to come around to understand that mental illness is just that, an illness, and it needs to be treated accordingly. It's difficult to say it's just like any other illness, because few other illness cause people to lash out at those they love or at total strangers and say and do hurtful -- or possibly violent -- things.

But in most ways, it is. And I know that somewhere inside my mother's father was a smart, and fascinating, and funny, and creative man.

If you know somebody who's mentally ill, stick with them and support them. Do everything you can to make sure they get the help they need. I understand -- deeply -- that there may come a point where you have to cut them off, for your own sanity or, perhaps, safety. But all you can do is all you can do, and that's all I'm asking.

No, vember
Around here, we hate November. Take a look through the archives and check it out. Big gaps in each of the Novembers. If you were to page through the archives of my brain and look through the previous Novembers, you'd most likely find the same thing.

I've always hated November. I hated November when I was a little kid, when school started to get monotonous and the days started to get shorter and the weather brought the season's first snow. I hated November as a young sportswriter, when football and basketball overlapped, meaning we covered neither particularly well. I hated November when it took my dad away from me 16 years ago. I hated November in 1993, when it came time to decide that it was time to leave Anytown and head out into the world. You can pretty much rattle off the last four: November 2000, the interminable presidential election; 2001, the month of never-ending ennui; 2002, the mind-jarring readjustment to life on the Edge after giving up the Texas experiment. And this one, which simply is the tail end of what has been a really arduous year.

So that explains everything. That's the "why" behind my recent dark spell. It's just November. It'll be over soon.

Thanks for dropping by, eh?
A quick stroll through the logs reveals we seem to have picked up a semi-regular visitor from Canada. Welcome aboard, and feel free to explain that selection process for a prime minister to me at any time.

Hit the road, Jack
It occurs to me that in the last four weeks, I have not ventured outside my immediate home-to-work corridor. That seems to be the problem. Must break free and see something outside of my home area code.

It's good to have a goal.

Me, crying my eyes out for a girl I never knew
Her message: "Make every second count."

She damn sure did. The rest of us can take a lesson.

Fair warning
I'm allowing my job to eat me alive. It's probably too late for me. Please don't let it happen to you.

It all comes spilling out
A roundup of unrelated items from the Edge:

Uncle John, who was hospitalized three weeks ago after a brain aneurysm ruptured (has it only been three weeks?) has "graduated" to rehab. Days of grueling physical, speech and occupational therapy are helping to bring him back around. The Cousin Who's On TV and Dr. Cousin have been rocks for their family, putting everything on hold at their homes in the Carolinas to be with their Mom and Dad back in Anytown. Thanks the miracle of technology, my cousins have been keeping us up-to-date ... via a blog, of course. (Because I'm absurdly protective about my family's identity in this forum, I won't link directly; however, send me an e-mail and I'd be more than happy to send you the link.) Bottom line is, it's starting to look like a happier holiday season in Anytown -- and that soothes my heart greatly.

Oh, by the way, we moved. Avid readers of this forum know that we change residences as often as some women change their hair color. This move was a simple cross-county move, however -- and it was embarked upon for many reasons. We were overpaying for a house we really didn't like all that much. The Wife took on the tasks, damn near singlehandedly, of 1/finding the house, 2/negotiating a mortgage that was actually favorable to us 3/selling our own house (for a tidy profit, after owning it for only 9 months) and the hardest part, 4/convincing me it was a good idea. Because of her work, we're in a house we do like, with a mortgage payment that's much more in line with our budget, in a more convenient location. My role in this was really very minimal, as is the amount of credit I should take. Further proof that The Wife is a goddess.

Helping to complete my technological circle, I became the proud owner of a slightly used Macintosh G4. Dual-processor 500 MHz, 256 MB of RAM (at the moment), OS X Panther. I started my tech life as a Mac user, and the reconversion is almost complete. Because I haven't found time to buy a router or a KVM switch, and beacuse I only have one monitor, I have to disconnect the Monster Dell and manually connect everything else to use the Mac. But the time I have spent with Mac OS X convinces me that it's radically superior to the previous Mac interface, and, as always, it's way better than Windows. I love being able to justify being an annoying Mac user again. And being surrounded by comptuers makes me feel like a geek, which I like.

I haven't had time to buy a KVM switch or a router because I find myself spending a lot of time at work these days. We're in the process of a "workflow conversion," a conversion which was envisioned late last year but has only recently been implemented. Change is abhorrent to most journalists, especially those of us on the production side. We're especially resistant to any change that we perceive to overemphasize the "production" part at the expense of creativity. We (me, too) sometimes forget that one can be extremely creative in the production parts, too. I also apparently missed the part of my management class (I did take a few of those while I breezed past college) that would have informed me that recruiting and hiring an experienced, talented employee could be bad for morale. I anticipate the waters will settle soon, but until they do, I'm going to spend a lot of time at the helm. It's thrown my schedule completely asunder: I'm now working mostly nights, including Sundays. Neither my body nor my family is adjusting well. But dammit, I enjoy a challenge, on some levels.

Speaking of The Wife (we were speaking of her earlier, you'll recall): She and Champion Dog I (the female) took fourth place at a large-ish dog show this weekend. You'd be forgiven for yawning at that development -- until you were informed that she and her dog did this all by themselves. Up to this point, she's spent a ton of money on "professional handlers" to show off her Champion Dog. Because she became mildly miffed at the most recent professional handler, she decided to take the leash in her own hands. Beware The Wife when she becomes mildly miffed. With no real previous experience to speak of, she stepped into the ring and earned a ribbon in a very large field -- and, I might add, blew the doors off the person at whom she was mildly miffed.

Whew. I think that about covers it, for now, anyway. It's good to be back.

Out of Creativity AutoReply
Currently recharging. Lots to talk about, little time or motivation to write it. And, as I write this, a water-line break has left us without running water. There's a parallel there, somewhere.

I sense being on the way back. Hang tight.

Exhale
Uncle John is recovering from having undergone three brain surgeries in less than a week. The surgeries were, by all accounts, successful, and he's doing about as well as can be expected under the circumstances. The prognosis for recovery is good, although only time will tell what damage the aneurysm left behind.

I have been reminded that the bond that holds my extended family together is very strong. We're scattered all over the country, and we don't communicate with each other nearly as much as we should, but it's inspiring to see the loyalty that my aunts and uncles and cousins and parents have toward each other. I need to ensure that I don't need a crisis to remind me of that bond, and of why it's important.

Too confused to come up with a title
As you can see by the distance in the dates between posts, it's exceedingly difficult to turn my muddled thoughts into complete sentences. It's been a rough week here on the Edge. I'm basically living full-out -- working, parenting, moving into a new house -- between rings of a telephone. When the caller ID shows a "417" area code, everything stops. I can feel the friction on my the palm of my hand as I reach out to stop my spinning life. I answer, bracing for the worst by following the same procedure: A deep, deep breath precedes every "Hello." In that .6 of a second, I remind myself to not scream or collapse in a crying heap or punch a hole in the drywall if the news is bad.

Breath. Reminder. "Hello?"

My last remaining male role model is facing death square on. My uncle -- The Uncle Who Made Good -- suffered a brain aneurysm on Sunday. He is hospitalized in Anytown, surrounded by his wife, his two sons, and about a hundred friends and family members. The prognosis is neutral, leaning toward positive; much will be learned about his future over the weekend, and then a surgery tentatively scheduled for mid-week will provide

Uncle John is my dad's next oldest brother, No. 5 of nine children and the undisputed leader of our sprawling yet close family. In times of need, he's the guy people turn to. He is by all measures a success. He married a stunningly beautiful woman more than 30 years ago. He started a business from scratch at age 33; less than 20 years later, he began enjoying a very comfortable retirement. He and my aunt raised two sons who are on their way to their own success.

He has more basic intelligence and more common sense than any two people I've ever known, and I've known a lot of very smart people. But Uncle John is the standard. From him, I learned to always remember from where I came, and that my first loyalty is to my family.

It is from him that I received the most important piece of advice I ever received: "Be sure you tell your kids every day that the world is a better place because they're in it." Like he is about most other things, he's right.

I lost my own father at 19 -- he's still alive, but not enough to provide the guidance an adult child needs. He sometimes struggled with providing this guidance even before his accident. When I stumped him with a question or a concept, my Dad would say, "Ask Uncle John. He'll know, and he'll give you a straight answer." To this day, I'll follow that advice.

Uncle John couldn't replace my father and, to his credit, he didn't try. But he filled many of the gaps, and he sets an example that I bust my ass every day to follow.

We're not a very demonstrative family when it comes to affection. Under normal circumstances, we're more likely to insult each other than to prattle on about how great one of us is. But when things turn, we're there -- even if we can't be there physically, we're there for each other. My cousins know they can call me at 3 in the morning if they want, and if they do, they'll find somebody on the other end of the line who knows exactly how they're feeling. If or when my presence in Anytown becomes necessary -- for my cousins, for any of my aunts or uncles, for my dad or stepmother or sister -- I'm on the next flight out.

Until then, I hope. I listen for the phone. I try to stop my over-caffeinated world from spinning long enough to compose a cohesive thought. I remember who I am and where I came from and why I am who I am. And I wait for things to settle down to tell one of the most important people in my life how important he is.

That's an opoortunity you can be damn sure I'm not going to miss.

Confidential reminder
I read somewhere once about my family: "We're a family of survivors." I need to keep that in mind right now.

Technical interlude
Having finally become completely fed up with Microsoft and everything for which it stands, I'm taking up arms. I'm doing battle against the giant from Redmond, Wash.

So far I'm 1-1.

E-mail: When I downloaded the latest patch to fix yet another security flaw in Windows XP, it somehow tore my Outlook Express all asunder. When I attempt to send an e-mail, a little box comes up trying to locate some plug-in for Microsoft Picture It! 2002 (which I own but have never used). It does this through about three or four "Cancels," then finally, a dialog pops up: "The spelling check is not complete. Would you like to send anyway?" Of course, it had never executed a spellcheck.

This frustration led me through a few other e-mail clients. Can't recommend Mozilla; loads much too slowly, and the spellchecker wants to stop on everything. Can't recommend Opera; if you try to set any security at all, it clamps down and basically won't allow anything to happen.

I did find a winner: Eudora, which has been around for years and years in various forms but gets little exposure, largely because it somehow hasn't found favor as a corporate e-mail client.

Eudora 6's interface is fresh and incredibly easy-to-use -- once you get used to it. I found myself clicking around more than I needed to, thinking, "This really shouldn't be this easy." Being cheap, of course, I'm using the ad-sponsored version -- the ads are unintrusive, and they're clearly not selling well; I've only seen one ad from a company other than Qualcomm, which makes the software. I have all of the features of the paid version that I need, and I'm not dropping $49.95. A stripped-down, ad-free version is also available. If you're a Windows user, it's worth the switch.

Web browser: Back when I was a full-time Mac user, I was also a full-time Netscape user. I first started hitting the web about the time Netscape 3.x was the only game in town for graphical browsers. I upgraded to Netscape 4.0, and was a little worried, because the program didn't seem as stable as its predecessor. I then migrated to Windows, and slavishly used Internet Explorer from that point, only launching Netscape for nostalgia.

When Netscape 6 appeared, after AOL bought Netscape, I was all ready to start using Netscape again. A fully loaded, cool-looking interface wrapped around the browser of my technical youth. But alas, Netscape 6 sucked. Slow as hell, crashed a lot, didn't render some sites correctly, completely useless on secure sites.

I've been faithfully downloading each new Mozilla release; it's the open-source version of Netscape, using the same basic architecture as the AOL crew but in a more compact way. Because it's beta software, it's pretty buggy, too, but I do like it for some uses -- particularly viewing video. Its pop-up blocker is pretty solid, maybe a little too solid (it blocks solicited pop-up windows, too.)

I decided to check in on Netscape, just to see how version 7.1 looked. I had read and heard bad things about version 7, but I wanted to see for myself.

Terrible.

Installed seamlessly (including, of course, the damn AOL solicitation); crashed on launch; crashed on restart; crashed on exit; crashed while uninstalling.

So I'm back to Internet Explorer, waiting for some hacker to come in and steal my keystrokes. But at least it works. It has earned its 98 percent market share.

Potentially unpopular opinion
Don Zimmer had it coming.

[Deep sigh]
That's all. That's all I have to offer tonight.

Random stray thought

Different things keep me awake at night. All of them are keeping me awake tonight. I hate that.

More on the Epiphany, as promised
The solution: Quit talking about it and actually do it.

I could launch a commercial airliner with all the energy I've expended over the last two years babbling about:

How much I dislike my job

How I need to do something different with my life

How I need to exercise more/eat better/sleep more

How I need to find some source of actual inspiration.

It's been two years. The time to talk has passed. I'm tired of talking about it. You're tired of hearing about it.

So:

It's time. Self-improvement plan starts with ...

... finishing my bachelor's degree.

Somehow.

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

I don't consider myself anybody's intellectual inferior. The one thing that distinguishes me from the rest of the population is that I have a fairly sharp mind. I'm very capable of advanced analytical and critical thinking, my written and verbal communication skills are well above average, and I can remember facts and place them in historical context. I can even do simple math fairly well.

I skated through high school doing the minimum required to maintain a grade-point average in the high 3s. My ACT score all those many years ago was 28; I hit something in the high 1100s on the SAT. Not off the charts, but enough to put me in the top 10 percent of college applicants back in 1986, and well out of proportion to the amount of effort I put into school.

Long before I started college, I lost interest in learning anything that wasn't directly related to print journalism. I quit college when I was 20 because I was offered a job in my field. It seemed pointless to waste time in school when I could be getting paid for the thing for which I was attending school in the first place. I figured, "Well, I can go back anytime."

Not long after that, I got married, and not long after that, I lucked into a series of better jobs. I moved around the country, we had a few kids, and the idea of finishing my education dropped completely off the radar screen. After all, I was doing what I had wanted to do since I was 12 years old, and making a pretty good living at it.

The lack of a degree didn't seem to be holding back my career the way I always feared it would. Journalism's funny like that; it's a profession that talks a lot about the importance of having an education but actually puts more of a premium on having real-world skills. I'll put your parchment from Columbia University against my ability to assemble a page in an attractive fashion, put the stories on the page in the proper order based on their relative importance, find a mistake that saves us from embarrassment and send the page to the press -- all in a time span of less than an hour.

Best I can tell, few other professional fields actually rate experience and skill above education.

I found myself four years ago working for the eighth-largest newspaper in the country, despite my lack of formal education. I excelled there, but it was there -- working what I thought was my dream job -- when I started to realize that I was getting bored with journalism in general. I wasn't quite ready to face up to this fact, however; I decided I was just getting fat and happy working a job where I didn't have to leave blood on the floor every night or work a ton of extra hours, and that to restore my love for journalism, I needed to restore some of the urgency. I'm funny like that.

So I put my career in reverse and came back to the Edge, in a position of responsibility, trying to rekindle the spark that fired my love for journalism. It isn't happening so far. I've been through a bunch of big stories that really should have gotten the adrenaline pumping. It's happened, but not in the consistent, predictable way it used to. I find myself facing sudden news events with dread rather than with energy and excitement.

I've been working in newspapers for almost 18 years. I have 30 more years I have to cover before I can call it quits with any degree of financial security. I'm not sure I want to do what I'm doing for 30 more years.

I don't, however, have a clear focus on what exactly I would do. However, it's probably in one of those fields that values formal education over experience. I'd like to think 18 years of busting my ass would mean something, but I doubt it does.

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

I have many reasons to not consider going back to school:

I have a wife and three kids. In order for me to become formally educated, I'll basically have to remove myself from my family for a period of several years, except for brief periods between semesters. The Wife says that's OK; she's behind this idea, despite that sacrifice. I'm not sure I'm ready to do that.

I have enough debt; I'm only going to invest as much as I can afford in this. I didn't take out loans when I was 20; I'm not going to do so now. Nor do I want to plunder my children's college fund so I can go myself.

I don't plan on giving up my moderately high-pressure job, at least not immediately. I still need to get paid, and taking even a voluntary demotion would probably not be good for my fragile psyche. I will have to develop some much better time-management skills and self-discipline if I prove serious about this.

I'm 35 years old. Realistically, I'm looking at being 40 before I actually finish, given the constraints listed above. At that point, I'm going to be a 40-year-old white male who's no more attractive to potential employers.

It's very possible that I will find I'm no better suited to a classroom now than it was when I was 20. I would be very disappointed in myself if that was the case.

I have only one really good reason to do it:

To prove to myself that I can.

I don't know if that's the right reason. I'm figuring if I tell enough people, though, I'll be less likely to wuss out and not even try; it'll be that many more people who can call bullshit on me if I wuss out.

I'm looking for guidance here, folks. I'm a few days away from making up my mind. Give me a push or save me from myself.

Happy anniversary to us
It was on this date 13 years ago that I told The Wife that I would be hers forever, no matter what happened, good, bad or otherwise. I told her I'd do all of that for the rest of my life. She said, "You'd better, because that's my plan, too."

As of this moment, I've had roughly 410,227,200 chances to regret it for a second. I haven't.

Epiphany
It's quite possible I have Figured it Out.

More later.

Art for art's sake
Here's a rare solicitation, one from which we're not actually asking for any money: Go take a look at some new stuff on The Freelance Gig. The photographer took a trip to Maine last summer and, needless to say, came away very impressed. I think you'll come away very impressed with her work.

One of the reasons I really enjoy working on that site -- and referring people to it -- is that all it really asks of you, the viewer, is to appreciate the artistry in her photographs. Yeah, she's running a business, and yeah, she'd like to sell pictures to everybody who hits the site, but that's really secondary to the primary vision. That vision is simply to take a look and think about what you see. If you like it, it'll brighten your day a little bit. If you really like it, you'll hit the e-mail link and ask to see more. If not, you're out nothing but the minute or two you spent to check it out.

Too many creatives spend too much time worrying about marketing and copyright and from where their next check is coming, which necessarily takes time away from the main mission: being creative. I understand economic realities and all that. Sometimes, though, it's nice to take a break from all that and simply appreciate the work. I invite you to appreciate hers. No obligation.

Bonus! Two random stray thoughts for the price of one

Actually heard in my house today ... The Boy, 4, to his 2-year-old sister, who's been annoying him for two hours leading up to this: "Urrrrrrgh! I'm going to sell you on eBay!" (This, of course, begs the question: How the hell does he know about eBay? I'll keep an eye out for mysterious deliveries of action figures ... )

After the post below ripping the American automotive industry, is it any coincidence that my Oldsmobile almost left me stranded at work last night? Had to get it towed to the dealer from work to repair a "faulty ignition module." Thank God for Roadside Assistance and the 60,000-mile extended warranty. (Take that, Detroit.) Of course, it should be noted that Hondas or Toyotas probably don't need 60,000-mile extended warranties ...

Fuck change
I'm working in Detroit in 1979.

For the last 30 years, we've been making cars the by-God American way. Big, lumbering cars, straight-line interstate gobblers, cars laden with steel and chrome and power windows. Cars that take up space and shut down gasoline, the purest reflection of the by-God American way: Consumption.

A weird thing is happening around me, though. All of a sudden, people aren't buying what we're making. Worse, they're making fun of what we're making. It could be argued they hate what we're making and what we represent.

People are making concessions to the fact that gasoline is no longer cheaper than tap water. Individuals are suddenly feeling a need to take up less space. Function is starting to overshadow form: People don't want chrome, they want a car they can drive 150,000 miles, just in case they get laid off from their job when President Carter finishes crashing the economy. It's becoming less important to one-up your neighbor with a bigger, chromier car; in fact, society is beginning to turn on people who do so.

But we're in Detroit in 1979. We remember 20 years ago, back in the '50s, when somebody said, "As goes General Motors, so goes the United States." We're not going let a bunch of Japanese people with a better idea stomp all over the by-God American way.

Here in Detroit in 1979, our answer to Japan is to build slightly smaller versions of the same cars we've been building for the last 30 years. So, instead of a big, roomy, comfortable rear-wheel-drive gas guzzler, we're making oddly designed, smaller, cramped rear-wheel-drive gas guzzlers. It's OK, too, that these cars are only good for about 75,000 miles. It wasn't all that long ago -- say, 1955 -- that the economy was roaring and people bought new cars every three years whether they needed to do so or not. Durability is pretty low on the priority list here in Detroit in 1979.

That's OK, because treating the employees well is becoming lower in the priority list, too. The companies react to a downturn in the economy the only way they know how, by passing the pain on to the workers. The workers react in turn by building even crappier cars. Doesn't matter; nobody's buying them anyway.

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

We all know what happened next. The best-selling cars in the United States bore the names of Honda and Toyota, not Ford and Chevrolet. And these cars weren't being built in Tokyo or Hirsohima; they were being built in Maysville, Ohio, and Georgetown, Ky., by people who just wanted to be paid an honest day's pay for an honest day's work and who wanted to feel like they had a stake in the final product that rolled off the assembly line.

Suddenly, only idiots and old people drove American-made cars. The quintessentially American industry had been completely taken over and co-opted by people who had a better idea. The better idea was not to build a revolutionary new car that flew on air or magically jammed toll booths; the better idea was simply to listen to what the buyers wanted out of a car, and then building said car and offering it for sale.

I'm on the Edge of America in 2003. I don't work on an assembly line. I make newspapers.

But I'm in Detroit in 1979.

I work for an industry that doesn't really give a crap what its consumers want. We stick doggedly by tradition, remembering the glory days nearly 30 years ago, when a newspaper single-handedly brought down a president. We put out newspapers the way we want them to look, not the way that people want them.

We respond to readers who think that newspapers are a wasteful use of trees by making them bigger, packing in more sections and more stuff. Then we make them smaller, going to narrower page widths while telling people how we're "giving them more" and making them "easier to handle" and more "environmentally friendly".

We treat our workers like they're all white men from middle-class backgrounds, despite the fact that they're all different people with different approaches to life and different needs from life. We treat them like chess pieces, wedging them into a five-day, 40-hour work week because that's the way we've always done it, not because it's the best way to produce the best newspaper.

Meanwhile, much in the way Hudson and Nash and Studebaker and Kaiser and Frazier disappeared from the automotive menu in the 1950s, media choices are dwindling, not expanding. Media has its big three now, and you can kind of draw automotive-industry parallels there -- Gannett (General Motors, the big lumbering monolith with the best-known brand), Knight-Ridder (Chrysler, the financially shaky purveyor of products of inconsistent quality) and Tribune (Ford, the consistent, unexciting, tradition-bound conservative).

Better ideas are pooh-poohed. We give away our online products and charge people for the newspaper, despite the fact that people seem to want the former more and the latter less. The idea of putting interesting stuff in the newspaper is anathema to grizzled, ink-stained wretches who know what DBI stands for*. Too many people in charge of newspapers long for a lost time when we could simply write stories, and let the composing room handle the rest. They refuse to see there might be another way, and they defend their stance in the name of "traditionalism."

And the people in charge at the corporate headquarters will do whatever they need to do to ensure minimum profit margins that General Motors or Ford or Chrysler could only have dreamed of, even in the best of the tail-fin and chrome years.

The American automotive industry almost put itself out of business because of the mistakes it made in 1979. It took 15 years of irrelevance and one government bailout to save those millions of jobs.

Newspapers don't have 15 years to be irrelevant, and you can be damn sure the government won't bail us out. Now you know why I'm concerned about my future.

(oops, almost forgot: *- DBI = "dull but important," as in, "I have to find space in my section for a 40-inch DBI ... ")

Random stray thought

If I wasn't so bothered by how absurd things seem to be, I could laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Blue-collar man, sort of
So on Sunday morning, I found myself driving a white van with "1800flowers.com" emblazoned on each side in big purple letters.

I was loaded up -- an arrangement in a Lenox vase ("The vase is worth way more than the arrangement," the florist assured me); two identical arrangments going to houses on the same block, and the old standby, a dozen long-stemmed red roses going to a woman in an apartment.

I was doing this as a fill-in for my wife, who drove 16 hours on Saturday from the dog show in Cleveland to our home on the Edge. She's buddies with the guy who owns the flower shop, and delivers for him on weekend mornings to help finance her dog habit. After all that driving on Saturday, the last thing she needed to be doing Sunday was driving the flower van. So I stepped in.

I'm lucky enough to have never worked at a minimum-wage job. The only time I have done anything resembling work outside my chosen profession is a very short teenage stint in my uncle's business, where my role was basically to be The Boss's Nephew. Other than that, the summer in Texas spent umpiring Little League baseball, and The Freelance Gig, I've never collected money for any work other than newspapering.

This has clouded my perspective in life, of course; I went years wondering how anybody actually made a living doing anything else. Most other jobs seem so much like, well, work. At this point in my life, of course, I envy those people, people who get holidays off and who aren't on 24-hour call at the whims of some terrorist or untimely celebrity death.

For a few hours on Sunday, however, I was just the flower-delivery guy.

So, of course, where was my first delivery? You guessed it: A television newsroom. The recipient of the Lenox vase works for the local Fox station. A security guard leads me to the newsroom, telling me along the way that he owned a flower shop back in New Hampshire or New York or New Jersey or somewhere new. The newsroom looks much like the one in which I work, except with fewer square feet and more video equipment. Manning the newsroom at 9:30 a.m. on a Sunday were two young male producers, who were most impressed with the ornate white vase in which the recipient's flowers were arranged. "Jesus Christ," said the guy who signed for it. "How much does that go for?" I was about to tell him I didn't have a clue when a loud beeper went off. "Uggghhh," he said, running to the source of the beep. "Breaking news ... "

With every bone in my body, I wanted to stick around and find out what the breaking news was. But ... I was just the flower delivery guy. I almost blew an internal gasket in the process of saying, "Thanks, have a good day," and walking back to the van.

It was interesting to be on the other side of the desk, as the service-industry guy rather than the servee. People, of course, are very nice to the person who delivers flowers to them. But I could tell I was still just the delivery boy. People are way more impressed with my real job than they should be, and at times, that has created in me an overblown sense of my actual worth to the world. I had no such issue on Sunday morning.

Having made all my deliveries -- on time, on target, safely and without incident -- I returned the van to the florist and prepared to return to my real life after essentially a three-week vacation. Alas, when I arrived Monday morning, that newsroom wasn't in a lot better shape than when I left it.

Chucking it all and delivering flowers for a living isn't an option, of course. But my four-hour foray into the real world has made me wonder even more what else might be out there.

AT&T, AT&T Wireless, mLife
(UPDATED with response! Well, it was kind of a response)
The above is for the benefit of search engines. Anybody who's considering switching to AT&T Wireless, here's a solid recommendation that you should choose somebody else instead.

When I get frustrated with a big monolithic company, I dash off a letter. It accomplishes little other than making me feel better; but a company can't fix a customer service issue unless it knows about the issue. And, I have received some interesting responses, often in the form of gift certificates or rebates. I once received a very nice letter from the Missouri Secretary of State after I sent him a letter ripping the customer service at the Department of Revenue.

Anyway, in somewhat edited form, here's what some poor minimum-wage schlub at AT&T Wireless is forwarding to his her or supervisor, who will read it and delete it:

To whom it may concern, if anybody:

My mobile life hasn't been made better. In fact, my mobile life pretty much sucks.

We chose AT&T as our wireless services provider when we lived in the Dallas area. We're long-time customers of AT&T Long Distance, which has a pretty solid customer-service record (we've tried the others, and we've always come back to AT&T.) Our trust in the AT&T brand led us to AT&T wireless.

When we moved from [Very Large Metropolitan Area] to [the Edge of America], our service took a turn for the much, much worse. Our service in our home area is spotty at best; it's at its worst in our own home, in a suburban area 15 miles from a large city. Our friends in the area who have other wireless services -- Verizon, Sprint, Cingular -- don't seem to have this problem. One friend who has Sprint uses it as her only phone. There's no way we could do that with our current service, even if we wanted to.

We signed a contract, however, and we believe in living up to our end of an agreement. to our end of a contract. We've questioned it, but we've lived up to it. Now, we're questioning why we would want to live up to it.

My wife has spent the week at an event near Cleveland. She's rooming with a Verizon customer and a Cingular customer. To reach her, I have to call one of them. Her AT&T phone is useless, less than 20 miles from downtown of one of the nation's largest cities.

I understand the aforementioned contract guarantees us nothing, except that you'll charge us and we'll pay. That said, at the current level of service we're receiving, we're certainly not going to renew said contract when it expires, and we certainly can't recommend AT&T Wireless to anybody [on the Edge of America] -- or to anybody who travels at all.

I wish we had known when we signed the contract that the "m" in mLife stands for "mostly static."

[our names and cities here]

The good folks at "AT&T Wireless" respond, thanks to the wonders of cut and paste:


Dear [Unrepentant Ex-Texan]:

Thank you for contacting AT&T Wireless regarding coverage reception. Wireless service is normally available to your telephone, when it is within the operating range of our system and it may be available outside of that area in other carrier service areas. However, the quality of your service is subject to transmission limitation or interruption caused by natural conditions such as atmosphere and topography. Also, there may be other limitations such as capacity limitations, system repairs/modifications, and/or other conditions.

Please note that coverage concerns or equipment related inquires are not currently supported via e-mail inquiry due to the number of factors that can affect your service. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

In order to troubleshoot the issues you are experiencing with your equipment and/or service in the most effective manner possible, we will need to have you contact one of our Customer Care representatives by calling 1-800-888-7600 between the hours of 6:00AM and 1:00AM CST, 7 days a week.

Please click on the link below to take a short survey about your AT&T Wireless email Customer Care experience. Your opinions will help us improve our service to you.

[link to survey]

If you are unable to click on the link above, simply copy the link and paste it into the browser where you enter web addresses, and press enter.

Thanks for choosing AT&T Wireless. We appreciate your business.

That was a lot of words to say, "blah, blah, blah, sorry, but whatever." Of course, if they'd called me on my cell phone to tell me that, all I would have heard was "blah ... bl ... ry ... er."

Somebody out there gets it
And gets it way better than most of us.

Quick setup: Here in my hometown, a man went nuts and killed two of his four children, in very public ways. He threw two in a pond and, a day later, drove his car carrying the other two into the path of an oncoming semi. One child died in each incident; the father died in the car wreck, as was his intention, as laid out in the suicide note found on the passenger's seat of the car.

I wrote:
It's not going to do any good for me to write what I think should become of this subhuman monster's soul.

Somebody went me one better. She came up with some ideas that might actually do some good. She shared them in a guest column which appeared in today's local newspaper, as follows, edited to avoid naming names:

I wanted to give in to the anger that [a local columnist] expressed in his column the other day. The easiest answer is for us to turn our sorrow against this man. But then, after my sleepless night, it came to me. What if, instead of hurling our anger and sorrow at this deeply disturbed person, we took those emotions and used them for something good?

What if everyone who read the story committed themselves to helping a family in crisis this month?

What if we baby-sat for that stressed-out mother next door?

What if we bought a gift certificate from a Target Superstore for a family whose father was laid off to ease the burden of providing for so many little people?

What if we called that man or woman in the midst of a failing marriage and asked them to lunch or breakfast?

What if we took the kids of a family in crisis out to the movies?

What if we volunteered at a shelter?

What if we told the children in our classroom that we cared about them and that we were there for them if they needed it?

What if we took five minutes out of our day and prayed for that family in crisis that lives across the street?

What if we sent an encouraging e-mail or card to that person in pain?

What if we made it easier for those who are hurting to reach out for help?

What if [the local columnist] wrote a column that listed all of the services in [our city] and Internet resources and books that could help another father or mother out there in quiet agony before it is too late?

What if the [local newspaper] wrote a series highlighting these services?

We can all honor their precious lives by committing ourselves to one action in the next few weeks that would bring relief to a family in crisis.

Well put. Wish I had said it first.

Reading the newspaper makes me cry
Warning: What follows is not objective reporting of facts. What follows is raw human reaction, and it's not very nice. I apologize if anybody takes offense, but I don't apologize for the way I feel.

This month's candidate for The Worst Story Ever happened four miles from my house Sunday and Monday.

It started Sunday afternoon with the bizarre report that two young children had been found in a retention pond not far from the Interstate by a guy who went out to go fishing Sunday morning. The 2-year-old girl was dead; the 4-year-old boy was clinging to life. No children had been reported missing. Police cast a net all up and down the eastern seaboard trying to figure out who these kids were and how they wound up in the water.

On Monday morning, the authorities had pieced enough together to determine they were looking for a gold-colored Dodge Durango. As they were getting ready to issue an Amber Alert, police two suburbs up the Interstate were called to work a fatal accident ... involving a gold-colored Dodge Durango.

The wreck tying up Interstate traffic for 20 miles Monday morning turned out to be no accident at all. It was caused by the father of the two children who were dumped in the pond, who chose to commit suicide by driving his Durango in front of a truck that was hauling new cars. His other two children, 6 and 9, were in the Durango. They survived, although one child remains in critical condition.

News reports revealed the father to be an upper-middle-class suburban man, distraught over the loss of his job and the impending breakup of his marriage,
whose behavior had become bizarre to the point that his estranged wife sought a restraining order and restricted his access to his children. The kids were with this man for a weekend visit.

"The system failed [the mother] and her children," the mother's attorney told a local television station.

Bullshit. The "system" did everything it could do. The father -- for whatever reason -- became a subhuman monster.

Listen, I understand being dazed and confused from the blows life deals you. I've never lost a job, and my marriage has been pretty sound for nearly a decade and a half, but I do know stuff can turn in an instant. And I've seen worse things happen to nicer people.

The thing that separates men and women from animals is how you take the blows. Our species stands up and takes the blows and thinks its way to a solution. Animals lash back.

I understand being desperate. I understand this man thinking, "Damn, I played basketball at Dartmouth, for Christ's sake. I graduated from Dartmouth. I shouldn't be wondering where my next house payment is coming from." By a lot of contemporary standards, the guy was a failure. It somehow never occurred to him that our society is rife with opportunities for redemption, even for its worst failures.

I understand that despair, although no despair I've ever felt runs as deep as I'm sure this guy's despair ran.

But, dammit. Your despair is your despair. Leave your children out of it. When you have nothing else left of yourself, you still have an obligation to protect your children against everything. That's the root of our existence. It's the one thing you can do when you can't do anything else. To not do so is the highest violation of natural law.

Some people try unsuccessfully for decades to have children. Some people have children with health problems who demand constant attention. It's an insult to all of these people all over the world when somebody treats a child's life as disposable.

I didn't know anybody in this family and I probably never will. But this story cleaves me to the bone, and it would do so even if it happened in Spokane or Minneapolis rather than within a long bike ride from my house.

Although I'm not smart enough to conceive how this is possible, pray that the mother left behind, and the three remaining children, find some way to find peace.

It's not going to do any good for me to write what I think should become of this subhuman monster's soul.

Time to talk football
Two weeks into the best time of the year, and some things are already becoming evident:

--The Dallas Cowboys cannot be as good as they looked Monday night. That's a classic up-for-the-big-game that the Cowboys, in their down periods, tease their fans with every year -- twice a year for the Redskins and now, apparently, twice a year for the Giants. That said ... it's amazing how much less Quincy Carter sucks now that he has a crew of legitimate NFL receivers.
--The Philadelphia Eagles cannot be as bad as they've looked for the last two weeks. Getting it handed to you by the Bucs is one thing; coming out flat against the very average Patriots is another entirely.
--Speaking of the Bucs: It's starting to appear that the Bucs' defense is going to have to score, too. The Tampa Bay D is already doing everything else. Brad Johnson has no more to show for throwing 61 passes than to lose 12-9 in OT? The Bucs are champions until proven otherwise; all of a sudden, however, they have something to prove.
--Who's worse: the Bengals or the Jaguars?
--Which is worse: Lisa Guerrero on the Monday Night Football sideline or the Coors Light commercials?
--I'm reminded of how difficult it is to watch Monday Night Football in the Eastern time zone, with or without Guerrero. Just about the time the game starts to get interesting -- as is happening right now, with the Giants going for a potential game-tying 2-point conversion -- I'm ready to go to bed.
--I take back what I said about the Cowboys a minute ago, as they just gave the Giants not one, not two, but three chances to get those game-tying 2 points. Guess I'd better go back and watch the game.

Some good things I saw today
Ahead of me is a week of chaos, in which I, the Dad left behind while Mom goes on a trip, take on three children. In preparation for this, I treated myself today to a relaxing drive through Florida countryside. Ride shotgun with me:

--At a Wendy's in the rough part of DeLand, a mom and her kid walk from the Dollar General Store next door and deposit that day's shopping and a stroller in the back of a beat-up, rusted-out baby-blue '89 Mercury Topaz. They come into Wendy's -- mom looking a bit shabby, kid looking shabbier -- and sit down. Kid, about 3, gender undetermined, runs up to counter and yells, "Daddy! Daddy!" They're waiting for dad to get off from work behind the line at Wendy's. Kid looks happy to see Dad; Mom looks happy to see Dad. They seem like a perfectly happy family, despite material circumstances that appear way less than ideal. Good for them. It ain't what you don't have; it's what you do have.

--U.S. Highway 17 takes you north from DeLand to DeLeon Springs, a neat little town around a big state park. Impossibly tall pines, nothing but trunk for maybe 100, 150 feet before branches and needles appear. The road is lined on either side with these trees, standing majestically in perfect formation.

--Take a left on State Road 40 and head west over the St. Johns River into the Ocala National Forest. Owing to our rainy summer, everything is green; rivers run clear and strong; and the flora and fauna are vibrant. This is in stark contrast to when I lived here a few years ago, during one of the worst drought and wildfire periods in Florida history. The renewal is a thing to behold, and a reminder of how resilient nature is.

--State Road 40 takes you by Silver Springs Park, one of the pre-Disney Florida attractions struggling to remain viable in the New Economy. The parking lot stretches for nearly a mile along 40, and then for another mile south along SR 35. The parking lot was nearly empty on a Saturday afternoon. This is a shame; I've been to Silver Springs, and while it's cheesy just like other theme parks are cheesy, it's cool in a way that no other Florida theme park is. One of the attractions is a glass-bottom boat ride on the Silver River, which takes you into the real Florida, a land of cypress, clear springs and fascinating wildlife. It would be a shame to have that go the way of the drive-in movie.

--SR 35 leads you into Belleview and dumps you on County Road 25, which leads you east along the shore of Lake Weir through the little towns of Ocklawaha and Weirsdale. Weirsdale is the home of the Orange Grove Opry, by all appearances a really serious honky-tonk. I would have stuck around to hear the local talent if I'd had more time, but alas, CR 25 had other places to take me.

--CR 25 took me to U.S. 27/441, the road home. U.S. 441 leads me to Apopka, the home of the 2001 Little League national champs. I stopped off at the field where the Little Leaguers were playing as day turned into evening. Packed stands, burgers on the grill, Slim Jims and M&Ms available at the concession stand. The teams were from the 9-10 year-old division. Crisp uniforms, with names on the back. Three coaches on each team. (Although, oddly, only one umpire. When I called games in Texas, I was part of a two-man crew. I can't imagine facing all those coaches by myself.)

I stuck around for a couple of innings, long enough to see some redemption. A kid was having trouble controlling his swing; he had struck out mightily his first time up. His next time up, with teammates on second and third, he was facing a 1-and-2 count. The coach tried to calm his hitter down. "Just looking for a base hit here, buddy," he said. "Don't try to hit it over the fence. Just make contact." The kid nodded in his best "Yes, coach," nod, and took a couple of oh-so-level, oh-so-controlled practice swings. He took a deep breath and stepped back in. The pitch came and, disregarding his coach's instructions, he took another mighty cut -- and the ball sailed 10 feet past the center-field fence. The three-run homer broke the game wide-open. "Guess I'll go get that one," the coach said, smiling wanly, as he trotted out the gate and around the field to retrieve the ball.

--A couple of miles from home, I saw planted beside the road a series of homemade signs, the sort which usually announce garage sales or some such. These signs, hand-written in large, feminine penmanship and lined up in Burma-Shave fashion, read as follows:

"Hey you! Yeah, you!"

Then:

"Where have you been?"

Then:

"We've been waiting for you!"

Then:

"It's been 7 months!"

Then:

"OK, blame the Navy"

Then:

"Interested in some desert property?"

Then:

"The party's THIS way!"

An arrow pointed into a subdivision entrance. On either side of the entrance are two huge trees, each festooned with a yellow ribbon. The last sign, inside the subdivision, bigger than the rest, with two small American flags taped to the top corners:

"Welcome home, Marc!"

The party was several houses down, but you could feel the love all the way out on the main road. I thought briefly about finding a parking spot, ringing the doorbell, asking for Marc and, over the din of a houseful of really happy people, shaking his hand and saying "Thank you." Thank you for defending our country, and thank you for coming home alive to family and friends who clearly think you're really cool.

I didn't, of course. But it made my day to know I could have.

John R. Cash, 1932-2003
My father instilled in me a deep love for country music, a love I re-discovered about 10 years ago. With my dad, Willie Nelson was No. 1. But not far behind was Johnny Cash, a man without whom there would have been no Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings or any other modern country star. Without Johnny Cash, country music would have gone the way of polka after Hank Williams died.

Cash sang the requisite love songs, of course, but he took country music a step further. He was as close to Everyman as any artist before or since. His songs seemed to genuinely identify with the lives that many of his listeners led. The only songwriter who comes close to being able to match that skill now is Alan Jackson, and he would probably be the first to admit he couldn't carry Johnny Cash's pen.

Cash cultivated an image of a brooding, melancholy man, but you can't listen to "A Boy Named Sue" without laughing out loud. You can't hear him sing "I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die" without believing that he actually had done that very thing. (He didn't, but you still believed it anyway.)

And his swan song, the Nine Inch Nails dirge, "Hurt," was painfully, searingly, caustically appropriate -- a man looking death square in the face, conceding, but not before he grabbed your emotions one last time.

I never saw him in person, but it gives me chills to this day to hear his signature concert opening. In an age of "HOW YOU DOIN' ATLANTA!" or "DALLAS, ARE YOU READY TO ROCK????" there will never be anything more dramatic than a cavernous baritone saying simply:

"Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."

The voice is silenced. The music -- and a genre -- lives on.

Technobabble
My next computer is so going to be a Mac.

As a print designer and sometime graphic artist, my first 10 years or so of computer use was almost exclusively on a Macintosh. I worked on what a guy I know calls a Turtle Mac, a light-brown, self-contained unit with a 9-inch black-and-white screen. I advanced to a Mac IIsi, and also claimed as my work machine a Quadra 700, a Quadra 650, an 8500/180, a tan G3, a silver G4, and my current work-issued Mac, a Powerbook G4 laptop with all the toys.

I was at one time a give-me-Mac-or-give-me-death person. Oddly, however, I've never owned one.

I, in fact, did not have a computer at home until 1999, when we received the first of two hand-me-downs. When I finally had enough cash flow, thanks to my first web project, to purchase a brand-new, all-mine home computer, I had the choice of a well-loaded Windows XP machine or a low-end iMac.

I weighed the options: The Windows machine had bigger numbers (more processor, more RAM, greater expandability) in every category except the price. My wife had never used a Mac. I needed maximum compatibility with work machines (which by that time were primarily Windows-based) and maximum compatibility with my web customers (well, customer), who were Windows people.

I chose Windows. I chose wrong.

I've kept up with installing the near-daily Critical Security Updates, which lately have been accompanied by media reports confiriming what Mac users knew all along: that Windows is more porous than the Mexican border and more corrupt than the Nixon administration. I've muddied my way around the Windows XP interface, which is way superior to any previous Windows product but still not as intuitive as the Mac. I routinely run my anti-virus software in response to every news story about the latest virus, which always includes the boilerplate paragraph, "Mac users are not affected."

The final straw came today, when I was making some mix CDs for my wife's impending road trip to the National champion-dog show in northern Ohio. I tried to use Windows Media Player to do this, because I don't have third-party CD burning software. It was a monumental pain in the ass. I finally threw my hands up and pulled from its case my work-issued Mac. In clear violation of company policy, I booted it up for personal use. (Please don't tell anyone.) Having never used iTunes, I found it completely intuitive. In the hour it took me to make one CD on Windows, I made six with iTunes.

Of course, now I need an iPod. And a Mac of my own.

What really matters
"Look, the flags are flying at half-staff," I pointed out to the Old Daughter this morning as we maneuvered the minivan into the car line in front of her school.

She looked. "I see," she said. "Why?"

"Today is September 11," I said.

"Oh yeah," she said. "I had forgotten today was September 11. We'll probably sing The Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful today." The Old Daughter is 9. She was in second grade in North Texas when I took her to school that day, the last act I completed before the world stopped turning.

"I remember Mama came and took me home from school that day," she continued. "I think she was scared."

"A lot of people were scared," I said. "It was a very confusing day. Stuff happened in New York, then in Washington, then a plane crashed in Pennsylvania. We didn't know if something was going to happen next in California -- "

"-- or Missouri," she jumped in.

"Right. Or in Missouri, or in Texas. We just didn't know what was going to happen next."

"People were panicking," she said.

"Well, not really panicking," I replied. "It was semi-controlled chaos."

"I don't understand what you mean by 'semi-controlled,' " she said.

"Well, chaos means a situation out of control ... "

"I know what 'chaos' means," she replied. This is a kid who just read the first two Harry Potter books in less than a week. "I just didn't understand 'semi-controlled.' How can you have something that's chaos and controlled at the same time?"

"Well, it wasn't really panic, in that people weren't getting violent, or running around screaming, or anything, at least not where we were in Texas," I said. "But it was confusing, and that confusion was disruptive to life. You had to miss school, a lot of people went home from work, business kind of came to a stop."

"That's what the terrorists wanted to do, right?" she said. The car line inched slowly forward, as kids popped out of cars one by one and walked into school, many cars in front of us. "To confuse and disrupt us."

"Right."

"Why wouldn't they have wanted things to shut down entirely?"

"Well," I said, "I'm sure they did. But terrorists aren't that smart, or that good, or that organized. Pretty much all they can do is cause relatively small disruptions. They mainly just try to scare us. But it would take a lot more than just terrorists to shut down America."

"Because there are so many of us," she said.

"Right."

"And because Americans aren't going to be shut down by a few terrorists."

"Absolutely."

I could see the front of the car line, finally, through the windshield of the minivan. The Old Daughter gathered her stuff, completely oblivious to the profound words that came from her 9-year-old mouth. She was headed into school for just another day, its only distinction being that they would sing The Star-Spangled Banner or America the Beautiful when they normally wouldn't. It's been six hours since we had that conversation, and six hours ago was probably the last time she'll think about it.

But she gets it, just like the rest of us get it: Americans aren't going to be shut down by a few terrorists.

Peace, y'all.

Dateline: Washington
I've just discovered America's greatest city. So much to write about, so little energy. I'll come back to this topic in daylight.

Let the restoration begin
As August pulls into the pits and September takes the track, I'm hopping in for a ride to recovery.

It's been a long year. The upheaval that began roughly this time last year is still heaving, to some extent. The adjustment to the move back to the Edge has been longer than expected. It hasn't helped that the work has been constant, the rewards minimal, and the time for rest and relaxation almost non-existent.

That all changes soon. I work tomorrow and Tuesday. Then, a three-week voyage back to sanity.

Week 1: I hop a plane Wednesay for a trip to the nation's capital for a work-related seminar. It'll be my first trip to Washington. I'm pretty fired up about that. I don't know how much work-related seminaring I'm actually going to do, but I will get in plenty of sightseeing and reflection.

At the top of the list of the many sites I want to visit one that will make me very, very sad: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I'm not sure why the draw for that is so powerful for me, but it is. The Vietnam War was the definition of my parents' generation, and it defines the way many people of my generation view our government, for better or worse. It's the same pull that drew me to the Oklahoma City National Memorial in 2000. I don't know why I feel I need to pay my respects. But I do.

Week 2: I return Sunday to the Edge for a week basically to myself and my family. So much around me is in disarray: My computer desk, my CD collection, the interior of my car, my garage, my marriage, my brain, my psyche. I need to somehow relax, decompress and refocus -- and be productive -- during this time. But I'm going to do so in the lowest-pressure way possible.

Week 3: On Sept. 13, The Wife leaves for a trip to Ohio to hang out with champion dogs and the people who own them. This is a big deal and a crucial time for her and her Champion Wannabe golden retriever. Champion Wannabe won the first of the two major titles required for Champion Dog status on Sunday. The dog is on the brink of major national success, and if The Wife plays her political cards just right on this trip, good things will result. I don't pretend to know much about how the whole dog show thing works -- I'm not really a dog person, and my interest level in my wife's hobby is high only because of the amount of happiness it brings her -- but it's an important trip for her.

What it means for me is one full week of Me vs. The Mini-Humans. Vegas has the Mini-Humans as 28 1/2-point favorites right now, down from 30 a few days ago. I'm not sure what's causing the fluctuation in the betting line, but I'd take the Mini-Humans and the points.

This is an important stretch of time for me -- perhaps more important than any three-week stretch previously. I've been a very unpleasant person for a very long time. I'm not getting enough rest, I'm eating poorly, and I'm carrying every possible work stress with me everywhere I go. As soon as I get on that northbound plane, my list of excuses shrinks to zero. I need either to get my brain focused on what I'm doing now or get my brain focused on doing something else. I haven't had time to do this for a long time.

I'll have the time now. How well will I use it?

Work, and life, and stuff
If you work for a newspaper that hits driveways every morning of the year, you're going to work nights and weekends. That's a given. You're also going to find yourself adjusting your life pretty dramatically on the whims of breaking news. Say you had plans for Tuesday evening, Sept. 11, 2001. Sorry; canceled. You're at work. Horrendously hung over on a Saturday morning? Pray God it's not the Saturday morning the space shuttle falls out of the sky. A fire breaks out in a warehouse downtown at 6 p.m., just as you're about to head home for dinner? Put it in the fridge, honey; I'm grabbing a notebook/camera/mouse instead.

Then there are the nights that don't involve breaking news. I can look around my newsroom at any given time and see some mid-level editor heading for his or her 11th or 12th hour -- even on normal days. On my staff, overtime is routine; somebody's working it pretty much every week. Some weeks, I have people working double shifts just to get the paper out.

And most of these people are working all of these wacky hours and subordinating their personal lives to the greater mission of daily journalism for less than $50,000 a year -- despite the fact that many have advanced degrees, despite the fact that they've worked here for five, 10, 15 years, despite the fact that the company that owns the newspaper is profitable in bad years and wildly profitable in good ones. They aren't busting their asses for doctor money or lawyer money or even car-salesman money. They aren't busting their asses because they might someday be editor of the newspaper if they do so. They bust their asses because they care, and because they love their jobs, and because they believe passionately in the greater mission of daily journalism.

As for me, I'm one of those mid-level managers. On a routine day, I put in 10 hours. If something happens, figure on 11 or 12, maybe 13. For the extended coverage we did on the shuttle report for Wednesday's paper, I was in at 10:30 a.m. and done at midnight -- and then sat at my desk decompressing for an hour before leaving at 1 a.m.

I'm lucky enough have a wife who loves me and supports the fact that I'm living a dream through my job. She's a full-time parent, which means, during the week, she's a full-time parent. I'm out the door not long after our oldest goes to school at 8:15 a.m., and I'm not home before the kids are in bed. On many days, I'm not awake at 8:15 a.m., which means that it's not uncommon during the school year for me to go the entire work week without seeing my oldest kid awake.

I don't work all those hours because it makes the paper better. I work all those hours because my boss expects me to; because his boss expects him to; because her boss expects her to, all the way up the line. And they all do it, too. Overworking yourself is almost a fucking badge of honor.

That's wrong. And stupid. And really not an investment in anything, because my raise is already budgeted and it's going to be the same whether I bust my ass or not. And really, it results in diminishing returns, because the more you do it, the more you're expected to do it.

Yet I do it, and I work with at least 100 people who do it, too. I ask people on my staff to do it. Some of them say no. I think that's to their credit. I don't get angry about it; I respect it.

The downside is that, if somebody on my staff takes that step to protect his personal life, the work is still there and must be picked up by somebody. That somebody often is me. It's a tough balancing act. I do it voluntarily, so I can't whine about it. But the cycle continues.

Some co-workers get sanctimonious about their roles as parents. I disagree with that attitude. I understand that for people without children, a bowling league or a pottery class or a yoga session or whatever is just as important. The bottom line is the same: A journalist who doesn't have a life outside of work is a damn bad journalist. You can't expect to tell people about the world when all you see of it comes to you through a computer screen or the CNN on the TV over your left shoulder.

I left this place four years ago to work for the nation's eighth-largest newspaper -- a paper that was staffed-up enough so that I worked in a department where night workers had four-day workweeks, where overtime wasn't necessary just to put the paper out, where if an editor had to leave for a family commitment before a story was ready, another editor was available to step in. For the most part, it was good to its people, but it lacked the frenetic energy to which I had become accustomed and which, for some reason, makes this career both worse and better than every other career.

I left that environment and came back to this place, because it's a better place to live.

I can't complain, because I have everything I ever wanted. I'm paid well, I work with people who care, and I live with the best four people on the planet. And I can't complain, because I chose this career, I chose to work at this level and I chose to have management responsiblities.

Absent my petition to extend the day to 32 hours from 24 being accepted, I must choose to be better organized and more energetic.

Spaced out
The long journalistic odyssey that began on Feb. 1 with the crash of the space shuttle Columbia ended today. The Columbia Accident Investigation board released its 248-page report, blaming NASA's "culture" for its cavalier attitude toward crew safety for Columbia's doom. The report noted that NASA is underfunded and deadline-driven, and managers don't listen to underlings. In short, it runs just like every other governmental agency.

How about privatizing the entire program? When Boeing or Lockheed designs and builds a passenger jet, engineers oversee engineers, redundant systems back up redundant systems and voila! you have the safest mode of transportation ever invented. With NASA, you have Congressmen overseeing engineers, and corners get cut in order to shave costs and make deadlines.

Let rocket scientists build space shuttles. I'd rather see us spend our money to fix the "culture" in underfunded, deadline-driven and top-down state child-welfare agencies first, then worry about NASA.

Hello. It's me
Just noted that it had been nearly a week since the previous post. Nothing to add, yet; it's fixin' to be large day at work today. Gotta go do my routine stuff before doing some very much not-so-routine stuff. Much more to come, I'm sure, after all that is over.

Academia needs something to do
I could have told them this in 1987, if they had asked.

Recycling
One of the things I really enjoy about this forum is the ability to look back and see what the hell I was thinking during a particular time period. I culled this from this week last year. I think it's a good dog-days-of-summer thought, and because it is after all my forum, I think I'll share it again.

Simplicity (from Aug. 22, 2002)
I was going to work up something really deep, and thoughtful, and introspective, and stuff. I decided against it. All I have is this:

Today'd be a good day for a good day. I sincerely hope you're having one.

There is no news
I work with some of the very best journalists in the world. My boss's boss's boss is a man who was a high-ranking editor at the nation's third-largest local daily newspaper. Many of my co-workers have excellent news judgment, honed by years in the business and by having been trained at the best journalism schools that money can buy.

But these days, when it comes to news judgment, I trust my wife: a 32-year-old suburban white homemaker whose education is in "hospitality and restaurant management" and whose only qualification to determine what's news is by determining what actually matters in the grand scheme.

Allow her to take apart some front-page stories from the last few days:
Item: At least 17 dead in bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. The Wife: "It's Baghdad. Things blow up there every day."
Item: At least 18 dead in bombing of bus in Jerusalem. The Wife: "Suicide bombings happen every day over there. What's different about this one?" Well, it imperils the Roadmap to Peace. "Yeah, like that was going to work. Everybody thinks they have the idea for peace in the Middle East, and they're all wrong."
Item: Every state's child-welfare system is in serious disarray. The Wife: "Now, there's a good idea. 'Hey, State, your child-welfare system is in disarray. So we're going to fine you and cut your federal funding, meaning you'll be able to pay even fewer overworked caseworkers $26,000 a year to hold these kids' lives in your hands.' That's like the bank charging an overdraft fee -- taking more of what they already know you don't have. That oughta fix things."

(Quick confession: The last one was mostly mine. But it's pretty much what she would have said had I asked her about it before she went to sleep to nurse this pesky cold she has. When she wakes up, I'm sure she'll react that way.)

Every day, I present her with an item we think is news, The Wife dismisses said item with a really solid "So what?" and a really lucid 30-second statement confirming that it doesn't really matter.

I'm pretty sure she's right and the rest of us are wrong. If I owned a news outlet, she'd be my first choice for editor.

Getting scarier every day
While buildings are blowing up on the other side of the world, and Israeli children continue to die while we continue to tell the Israelis to "show restraint," our attorney general spews forth this -- an impassioned defense of the Patriot Act.

Folks, the only link that matters on this page is the one at the bottom: Text of the Patriot Act. You read it for yourself and decide for yourself. Do not under any circumstance let John Ashcroft decide for you.

"Now," the man challenged, "write what you know"

I know that I have a cousin who sees with his own eyes the worst of what the world has to offer -- dead bodies, grieving parents, drunk South Carolina rednecks and lying, thieving bastard politicians -- and not only manages to maintain his sanity, but tells the world about what he sees in a very articulate manner. Me, I sit behind a desk, push paper, make the occasional decision and do schedules -- and I'm on the edge of my sanity, while still somehow calling myself a journalist.

I know that I need to get Time on my side, despite the fact that Time and I have been at cross purposes for most of my life. I've treated time like a mortal enemy -- killing it, fearing its effects and disrespecting its value.

I know that few things are as bad as they seem.

I know that the ocean has many therapeutic effects.

I know it's late and that I'm still awake for no good reason. It sucks, having a run-on mind.

I know that if you read at an average speed, you've just given me 28 seconds of your life that you'll never get back. It might not seem like it sometimes, but I appreciate that more than words can express.

"Just write what you feel," the teacher said
There's a tropical wave coming to the Edge of America. I'm not sure what a "tropical wave" is, exactly, but the weather guys tell me I'm supposed to be really concerned about it. Best I can tell, the local news mouthpiece led the 11 tonight with: "It's going to rain." ...

Headache, fatigue, tickle in throat mean cold's coming on ... The Old Daughter is in her second week of fourth grade. She's having Boy Troubles. One is really nice, but "I think he's kind of boring." The other picks on her all the time. The Wife tried to explain that's how boys show affection. The Wife tried explaining a few other things. The Wife finally got to the bottom line: "Boys are dumb." ...

Write what I feel? OK. Tip to job-hunters: When applying for a job in a newspaper newsroom -- no matter for what position -- run spellcheck on your resume. Nobody with a college education should let "judgement" get into the hands of a potential hiring manager. ... Back in the day, I would have crumpled up said resume and thrown it into the trash. Dragging it from my desktop to the Trash icon isn't quite as satisfying. ...

I have actually started an exercise program of sorts. I'm now a participant in a regular lunch-hour pickup basketball game, which for about the last 15 years has been organized by the guy who sits next to me at work. We play on the roof of our office. A concrete roof in the middle of summer on the Edge of America is at least as damn hot as you think it is, and it might be a few degrees hotter. I'm getting in shape whether it kills me or not, and at this rate, it might very well. I'm a lot slower and a lot worse shooter than I used to be, and I never was that fast or that accurate. Thankfully, I'm at about the median age for this group. Guy Who Sits Next To Me at Work is 52, I think, and was recently treated for prostate cancer. He's up there twice a week, every week, except for the rare occasion when a work commitment gets in the way. I'm too much of a wuss for twice a week. ...

Reading work e-mail at home is a bad idea. Somebody needs to put a parental block on my work e-mail. ... I'm going to Washington for the first time soon. Am very much looking forward to it. I went to Philadelphia for this same event back in 1998, and was humbled by standing on ground where Ben Franklin and John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson and others who built the bedrock of this country stood. As flawed as our government can be, it's going to be a thrill to be in the same area code as the place where the decisions are made. ...

Write what you feel. Area codes: 202, 407, 606, 214 ... was bored in a meeting today and wrote down all the different addresses I've had, going back to when I was born (don't ask me how I know; I just do). I came up with 19 -- and remember, I lived in one house for 13 of my 35 years ...

Write what you feel. No larger point here, just writing what I feel.

Maybe this is democracy, after all
I'm pretty sure the gubernatorial recall in California is a farce. It smacks of an unhappy political party wanting to reverse the results of a legitimate election. (Where has that happened before? Oh, wait a minute ... ) I was all ready to jump on and join the rest of you in lamenting the ridiculousness of the entire thing.

And I still think it's ridiculous, but only becuase of the election-reversal thing. It's not because actors and wackos and a 100-year-old woman and a "self-described porn star" have filed papers to be on the ballot. Why shouldn't wackos have access to the American political process? Why shouldn't some girl with a cute smile and $3,500 to burn be treated a like a legitimate candidate for a governor of a big state? Hell, even Schwarzenegger has a degree in international economics (did you know that? I didn't either.)

This is the people speaking, and you know what? Thank God they are. It's refreshing to see the people attempt to wrest control from the politicians. Was Jesse Ventura good for Minnesota? No. But his presence was good to energize a stale political system, and that's really more important -- and necessary.

Somebody in California lost control of this situation somewhere. The only certainty is that the chaos that will surround this election is going to make Florida 2000 look like a minor historical blip. By the time they finish counting those votes in Sacramento, Gray Davis will have finished his term and none of this will matter.

But it sure will be fun to see Father Guido Sarducci run for governor. Maybe it will take a farce to force change in the system.

Fore!
Back in the days when I had a lot more time to kill and a lot more money to burn, I played the occasional round of golf. I was terrible, of course; it was rare that I completed a round without losing a ball, and even rarer that my score was not in triple digits.

But I kept coming back, because every damn time I played, I'd hit the one shot that made me say, "I can play this game." The one shot where everything came together and the ball flew straight and high and landed within a foot or two of where I intended. Out of 111 shots in a round, that one kept me coming back for more.

My job is kind of like that. On a lot of days lately, I've hated it more than I liked it. I'm a lot better at my job than I was at golf; I was a double-bogey golfer, but I'm a birdie visual journalist. It's very frustrating to a birdie golfer to shoot par. I've had a stretch where I felt like I've struggled to shoot par.

I've hit a couple of birdies lately. I'm starting to think I can do this again.

That's not to say I'm not going to want to throw my figurative clubs into a lake again. I'm sure that'll come soon. But it feels good to have my swing back.

You can take a boy out of Dixieland ...
Interesting perspective from the other side of the pond.