Something cool and different
Some people spend all day searching Google for their ex-girlfriends. I killed some time recently searching Google for favorite musicians I haven't heard from in a while.

I ran across the site of the lovely and talented Maria McKee -- you might remember her from Lone Justice, whose videos received some MTV-play in about 1986. Or you might not. The astute Dixie Chicks fans in the audience will note that a Maria McKee song, "Am I the Only One," was the second-to-last track on Wide Open Spaces.

On most musicians' web sites, the "letter to fans" section is usually a pretty lame recount of what's going on with the latest tour or whatever, and it's updated about once every two years. Ms. McKee's site hasn't been updated since July, I'll grant, but the approach lends a feeling of authenticity that no other site I've found can match. Check it out, if you'd like.

Cowboys 13, Rams 10
A game neither team deserved to win. What an awful display of football on both sides. But: The Rams are 0-4; basically you can say goodbye to them. Pretty good chance now that many people's NFC champion pick won't even make the playoffs. The Cowboys are 2-2. Yeah, pretty good chance they won't make the playoffs either. But I wouldn't have taken odds they'd be 2-2 at this point.

The bright spot for the Cowboys: Roy Williams looks like a legitimate top-10 draft pick. He knocked Kurt Warner out of the game; he knocked the crap out of everybody else who came near him; and he got his hands on a few passes. Remember the name. You'll be hearing it a lot.

All things are basically equal
And that is what I have to work with as I continue to ponder the solution to the mid-career crisis.

One option: Go back to a place I've already been -- a place I liked a hell of a lot, and was very comfortable, and that has changed a lot over the last three years, largely for the better.

The other option: Stay at a place where I've always wanted to work, a place that has frustrated me greatly over the last year, but one with a hell of a lot of potential and (finally) some interest expressed from above in making some changes.

In a crappy economy, I have a choice of two very, very good jobs. I can't complain about that at all. But I'm faced with a decision, and it's time to decide.

Back on the ground ...
... and, suddenly, faced with a big career decision. A really big career decision. As big as they come.

Not ready to tell yet. But I will be soon.

All right, then, make something happen
They call them the "winds" of change. In our house, the weather phenomenon it most closely resembles is a dust storm.

The Change is hanging over our house. It's leaving residue everywhere. We're consumed by it. All our thoughts are about The Change, and what it might mean, and how we would handle it logistically. We can't go about our normal day-to-day with any level of competence, because we're thinking about The Change.

I noted earlier that come October, my life is going to be vastly different than it is now. I'm still not completely sure in what form The Change is going to manifest itself. But I'm talking proactive measures. (Or is that pro-active? Copy editors, help me out here. I'd look it up myself, but I'm too busy thinking about The Change.)

I'm not going to go into great detail. This isn't the forum, at least not yet.

Pursuit of The Change will take me away from this forum for a few days. Until I return, keep the cards and letters coming.

I'll fly the flag for this
Take a look at what makes America great. I agree with very little of what they're saying. But I will defend to the death their right to say it.

The addiction
(There's no greater point to this story, and probably, you'll lose some respect for me after you read it, for which I apologize. And, it's being delivered after a hearty knock on my pressed-wood desk.)

It's dangerous. It's illegal. It has cost me a lot of money over the years. It provides a rush like nothing else.

My drug? Speed.

Not the kind they make in clandestine laboratories in the Ozarks. The kind produced by a violent meeting between air, spark and gasoline under a not-so-gentle nudge from my right foot.

Letting loose on an open road is one of my stress relievers. When you're running down a two-lane at something approaching half-again the speed limit, you don't -- can't -- think about anything else other than keeping the car on the road. Your mind narrows with your field of vision. All other thoughts are thoroughly ground into dust. Few things accomplish that for me.

It's my guilty pleasure, and over the years, I've had to use the word "guilty" a lot.

Law enforcement agencies all over the country know me. My rap sheet goes something like this:

7 speeding tickets in 18 years of driving, the most recent being issued by a not-so-friendly officer in McAlester, Okla., two years ago.

I've been caught by six different law enforcement agencies in three states.

I received my first three speeding tickets in one 30-day stretch in the spring of 1987, when I was 18. I received the second on the way to pay the first. Let's just say I'm a slow learner.

I received my fourth less than a month after those three went off my record. (That means I've only had three in the last 12 years!)

A total of $567 in fines, plus God only knows how many thousands extra I've paid in insurance.

None of my tickets was a spectacular flouting of the law: The average over-the-limit was 17.5 mph, and the fastest speed recorded was 78 mph.

All of my tickets save one were written in broad daylight.

I've never really been able to contest one of my tickets. I was caught dead to rights every time. I probably talked my way into a couple of tickets; at least two of the infractions were minor enough to merit only a warning if I had kept my righteous teenage indignation to myself.

In my very weak defense, I got my license in 1984, when the 55-mph speed limit was still filling the coffers of small-town America. But, yeah, I still view the increased speed limits as merely a guideline.

Further in my weak defense: I've never owned a particularly fast car. I never was stopped in five years of riding a motorcycle. I don't drive dangerously -- really, I don't. I don't pass people on the shoulders or tailgate or engage in road-rage sessions. I don't zip in and out of traffic (although I enthusiastically go with the flow on Texas freeways, which is about 80). I slow down in bad weather. I don't speed with the kids in the car.

My father was seriously injured in a car accident. I have a well-developed respect for the bad things that can happen behind the wheel.

If you're a passenger in my car, I won't scare you in the least. But if it's just me and the tunes and sunshine and a dry, open road, I'm opening the throttle.

I will grant that, with maturity and time and all of the added responsibilities of my life, I don't take chances like I used to. Most of the time, I keep the speedometer needle where I can see it.

But I've been facing that "What do you want to do?" question a lot lately. My answer is simple: I want to be a Professional Driver on a Closed Course.

The Mid-Career Crisis, continued
It's escalating. (At this point, I would bring you the lyrics to "Crossroads," but my knowledge of the lyrics is something like this:
"I went down to the crossroads/
ben my numashuma on me bine."
Can't understand it when Clapton sings it, can't understand it when Robert Johnson sings it, couldn't understand it in the Skynyrd version. Sorry.)

Any-hoo ...

We've finished the latest fake newspaper project. The next fake newspaper project, to which I referred below, has been scuttled. This leaves me in an uncomfortable position. I have nothing to do.

Basically, I'm back to here (and I note with some dismay that this post is dated Dec. 29, 2001).

Bottom line is this: my life in October 2002 is going to be radically different than my life on Sept. 15, 2002.

I just don't yet know in what way. I'm listening to guidance.

The Befuddled Texan
Item: Election chaos reigns in Florida, yet again. The Texan says: Say this for the Soviets -- they knew how to have an election. They even knew who was going to win before the polls opened. That's efficiency. No deadline problems for newspapers getting the results from those elections. One would think those Floridians might have tested those machines sometime before Election Day.

Item: President lays out his case for war against Iraq. The Texan says: Thanks, Mr. President, for the help on this one. Seriously. I'm not convinced enough to pick up a weapon and head for Baghdad, but I have a better understanding of what has transpired since 1991 -- and what was supposed to have transpired. It's amazing what speaking to the United Nations can to do a politician. Because his audience is largely non-English speaking, Bush was forced to abandon his political idioms and cliches and doublespeak to make things easier for the real-time translators. This was not a message he wanted lost in the translation. It was clear enough even for me to understand.

Item:I was ready for some football ... The Texan says: ... but then I watched the Cowboys. Gag heard on sports-talk mouthpiece, worth repeating: "Why doesn't Fort Worth have a professional football team? Because then Dallas would want one, too."

Resolve
Love. Hope. Build. Preserve. Nurture. Cherish. Bond. Connect. Appreciate.

Peace.

There are vegetarians. Then there's me
It's lunchtime in the Very Big City. I mull my meal choices. I think back to my last two meals: Mostaccioli for dinner last night, grilled mahi-mahi for lunch yesterday. No red meat for two consecutive meals.

Woo-hoo. That entitles me to a BARBECUED BEEF SANDWICH TODAY!!

The doctor was checking my cholesterol level during my semi-annual physical two years go. She noted that it seemed a little high for somebody of my diminutive size. She asked me, "How many servings of red meat do you eat in a week?"

"Well," I replied, counting in my head, "there are seven days in a week, so we'll start with seven ... "

She sighed, shook her head and pulled a blank death certificate out of her desk drawer.

I ran out of fingers for counting. I pulled off my left shoe and sock. I stopped counting for a second. "Does bacon count as a red meat?"

She sighed again, clicked her pen and started writing.

My mother-in-law is a vegetarian. Her idea of a hearty meal is tofu. Her meals come in many colors: green, yellow, orange, bright red, a little purple if she mixes in eggplant or cabbage.

My preferred color is a little pink in the middle, thanks.

That's so Sept. 10
You get what you pay for. I wonder if the non-free Blogger would have just spontaneously deleted my last post. That's OK; it was all about football, and I suspect I'm boring you with football talk.

As we've been reminded ad nauseum, we're approaching an anniversary. Allow me to divert your attention to another anniversary: One year ago today.

It will go down as the last "normal" day of most of our lives. The last day in which our country wasn't at war against terrorism, whatever that means. The last day in which you could say to somebody, "You know, some crazy Arabs could hijack a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center," and somebody would reply, "They would not. You're an idiot. Where do you come up with crap like that?"

It was a day for shark attacks in Florida, for Gary Condit, for Barry Bonds chasing the home-run record. It was a day at work in which we chased a story about Blockbuster phasing out VHS tapes in favor of DVDs. It was a day in which we dove to the bottom of our feature-story barrel for the big hit on 1A.

It was a day on which I was anticipating the release of the new Robert Earl Keen album, due out the next day. It was a night I watched the Monday Night Football season opener, Denver beating the Giants, 31-20. Ed McCaffrey had his leg practically torn off in that game, as I recall.

There was no Monday Night Football game the next Monday.

I wish I had some neat, pithy way to wrap this up. I wish I could say that everything really is back to normal in my/our world, the way it seems to be. In most ways, it is. But I went to bed that Monday night after the football game and thought not one second about terrorism. I haven't been able to do that since. I wonder if I ever will again.

Choices
Avid readers will remember the death of my aunt back in March. It was a difficult time; she was 52 and recently married, and she and her husband had moved from his home in Virginia and were carving out a new life in Arkansas, relatively close to my mother. She was my mother's only sibling, and my mom justifiably felt cheated out of the opportunity to finish rebuilding her relationship with her sister.

I met my aunt's husband -- I guess that would actually make him my uncle -- for the first time at her funeral. That's not a good place to meet somebody for the first time. I felt terrible for him. He was putting her in the ground when he should have been making plans for their first anniversary, which would have been the next week.

I asked my mom if he had any relatives or friends or anything. He had none. Parents dead, no siblings. My aunt was all he had. My aunt's children, both adults, are serving their country in various ways overseas. One's in Germany, one's in Thailand.

My mom checked in on him periodically by phone, and visited his house, some 50 or 60 miles from hers, a time or two, helping him and my cousins with some logistical matters. He was doing about as well as one could expect, in his situation. It's difficult to go through this life with no real connection to anyone.

On Saturday, he decided it was no longer worth the effort. The medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.

I'm struggling with this one. My mother is driving herself mad, wondering what more she could have done. I can't imagine she could have done more. She didn't have much time to establish a connection of any sort with him, and a family connection doesn't just happen by way of a marriage certificate.

I can't say with any certainty what I would have done had I been wearing his shoes. And I can't imagine being in those shoes; I have a large, loving family, both immediate and extended. I do a fair job maintaining the bonds with the extended family, although I could do better.

Hearing this news was a reminder that I must do better. I said a little prayer, in my way, for comfort for the soul of this man, and my mom. I'd be grateful if, in your way, you'd do so too.

Exclusive In-Game Blog!

Texans 10, Cowboys 0, 8:17 remaining, 2nd quarter: Holy crap, Quincy Carter is gawdawful. Which one of these teams is the expansion team?

Texans 10, Cowboys 3, halftime: Should the Cowboys come back and win this game -- and one suspects that's a possibility, as David Carr starts looking a little more like a rookie quarterback and Houston looks a little more like an out-of-sync expansion squad -- should the Cowboys come back and win this game, all 45 guys on that roster should write thank-you notes to that stupid Texans d-back who whacked the Cowboys receiver with the ball already 10 yards past the play. Then all 45 guys should write thank-you notes to Jermaine Lewis, for dropping that beautiful pass from Carr three yards from the end zone. Same as it ever was: Quincy Carter's awful, Joey Galloway's hurt and the Cowboys make big plays on defense mostly out of survival instinct. I waited the entire off-season for this?

Texans 10, Cowboys 3, 7:13 remaining, third quarter: Jerry Jones has descended from the owner's box and is wandering the sidelines. I'm sure that'll help. Memo to Quincy Carter: Aaron Glenn is not on your team. That's why he's wearing a white shirt, not a blue one like yours. Stop throwing the damn ball to him.

Texans 19, Cowboys 10, 2:20 remaining, fourth quarter: Pinned back on his own 4-yard line, I predicted Quincy Carter would throw an interception. I got a safety.

Final: Texans 19, Cowboys 10. Don't rush out and try to get David Carr on your fantasy team just yet. You're not going to win every game going 10-for-22 for 145 yards with two touchdowns. You will, however, have a pretty good chance to beat the Cowboys with those numbers.

North Texas airwaves in August were filled with a lot of chatter about how great the Cowboys' training camp went and how they have serious playoff potential. Normally, one can't base much on one game. But this game answered more questions for Cowboys fans than it raised. Get ready for a long year.

Bold words go here
I put myself on paid administrative leave for a day, figuring a long weekend might get me re-motivated and stuff. I instead did basically nothing, other than waste a day of my life I'll never get back. I'm a little disturbed at how satisfying I found that.

It's 6:04 a.m. I've been up an hour and a half.
And I have no idea why.

I went to bed last night somewhat earlier than usual, but not early enough to justify waking up at 4:22 a.m.completely unable to go back to sleep, as if I had absorbed caffeine through my skin via my pillowcase. I have nowhere to be, nothing to do; the Mini-Humans won't even be waking up for another half an hour, at the earliest.

Nor, particularly, do I have anything on my mind, not even after having read the Very Large Metropolitan Newspaper cover-to-cover for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long.

So, it being a new month and all, I will simply assess where things sit in this little adventure I call life.

I have spent fully two months producing fake newspapers. The first involved re-shuffling our content to see if younger readers would be more interested in a newspaper that takes a hyper-local approach, putting neighborhood stories on page 1 instead of the latest incremental development in the stock market or the Middle East. It made its first appearance in front of focus groups last week. I didn't go, but here's how I'm told it went:

US: Do you subscribe to the paper now?
YOUNG READERS: No.
US: Check this out.
YOUNG READERS: Wow, that's really cool. Like, lots of news about people I know and stuff.
US: Would this make you want to subscribe?
YOUNG READERS: No.

Then:

US: Do you subscribe to the paper now?
OLD READERS: Yeah, we've been subscribing for 50 years. Wouldn't think of leaving my house without reading the Very Large Metropolitan Newspaper cover-to-cover.
US: Take a look at this.
OLD READERS: What the hell? Where's the stock market news? Where's the story about the Middle East? I don't give a shit about some kid taking fifth place in a spelling bee. I'm too old for "trend stories." Give me back my newspaper!

The other fake newspaper goes to press today. It's in Spanish. Lots of fancy color and big pictures and stuff. We're told that appeals to the Spanish-speaking reader. We wouldn't know, ourselves; the team that produced this edition -- my boss, my favorite co-worker and myself -- are the three whitest people you'll ever meet. And none of us speaks more than rudimentary Spanish. We did it with the "help" of a couple of freelance translators, who spent most of their time secretly re-doing each other's work. Further complicating matters is that this will go to a Spanish-speaking focus group eventually, if it gets past its first stop: a presentation to corporate bigwigs. None of them speaks Spanish either. We'll see how this goes over.

I learned last week that I will spend my next two months doing yet another fake newspaper. I'll be working with the sports department. "Because you have a sports background," the Boss says. I certainly speak Sports better than I speak Spanish. This project will affect me in one of two ways: 1/It'll make me realize how much I missed working in Sports and make me want to go back when they let me start doing real newspapers again or 2/It'll drive me out of the business forever.

I hear the rustling of a Mini-Human awakening. Guess it's time to actually start my day.

Is it Sept. 12 yet?
Some good points made here.

A pen. A piece of paper. The English language
Those are my tools. I build sentences. I assemble paragraphs. I tighten a phrase, I paint a picture with words. That's what I do.

It's been a long time since I've written for an audience. I took the easiest route to a paycheck that I could take with my toolbox, taking a sportswriting job with a newspaper. Writing for a newspaper is hardly art. The job of writing, for most newspaper reporters, is incredibly secondary to the job of gathering information and doing research. Some reporters have serious writing skill, but that number is dwindling. A very few newspaper writers can write off the top of their heads, but you can just about count them on the fingers of one hand. Go ask 100 random people to name any newspaper writer. You'll get two who will say, "Dave Barry," five who will mention some local columnist and 60 who'll say, "Ann Landers." The rest will ask, "What's a newspaper?"

Some of the greatest -- Steinbeck, Hemingway, Thompson -- wrote for newspapers. They had the good sense to get out.

I gave up reporting -- actually, it's fair to say I received a little nudge to do so -- because I didn't enjoy reporting. I don't really like to challenge people that much, at least not to their faces. I prefer to issue a challenge from the safety of my office chair, and see what the response is. That, of course, makes me a wuss. But that's who I am.

It turned out that I had enough skill in the non-writing part of newspaper production to keep a job, and to occasionally get better jobs. I began to think newspapers were my passion. I've always been drawn to news, from my earliest memories. I call it curious. You might call it nosy.

I quit writing, except for the occasional memo. I looked back at my clips every once in a while, flipping through the tattered pages and saying, "that sucked ... that sucked ... that sucked ... that one wasn't bad ... that sucked."

The money kept coming, better jobs kept coming, and I was pretty sure I'd found my niche in the world. I was a "newspaper designer," whatever that meant. I learned complex computer graphics programs. I attended design seminars. I began to worry more about how a headline looked than what it said. I was told this was very important to our readers, to look good. Lucky for me; I turned out to be good at making a newspaper look good.

I still had my toolbox. It was gathering dust in my mental garage. When I finally acquired a computer, I got the toolbox down. I replaced the pen and paper with a keyboard and monitor. I built a few sentences, assembled them into a few paragraphs. The resulting structure fell apart under its own weight. My skills were rusty in the way a screen door on an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of Oklahoma is rusty. I thanked God that my family's next meal didn't depend on my being able to assemble a paragraph.

Then, I started this. What you're reading here isn't writing, really. It's basically just me talking with my hands, rhythmically hitting a beat somewhere between "QWERTY" and "NM,./" Because I lead a pretty routine life, I don't have a lot of stories to tell. That's OK; that's the sign of a good, comfortable, productive life.

Someday, maybe, I'll write as an artist again. I'm keeping my eye out -- and, more importantly, my heart open -- for a story to tell.

Stuff scattered in the back seat

These are officially the last words I'll write about the baseball strike.

What exactly is our beef with Iraq? What have they done since 1991 to piss me off? Somebody please help me with this.

Re my mid-career crisis: Next time somebody asks me, "What do you want to do?", I'm going to jack-slap them. I don't think I even know how to jack-slap somebody, or what that even means. But I'll give it my best shot. That said: Thanks for asking, anyway. It makes me feel better to know somebody cares.

Happy birthday to the site that was the inspiration for all this. (You decide whether that's a good thing.) Confidential to Otis: You're finding your voice, man. Be ready to let it take you somewhere, when the time is right. Thanks for sending me back out in search of mine. And, just, thanks.

My writing was just interrupted by hearing the first notes of one of my favorite songs of all time: "My Hometown," by Charlie Robison. The notes were coming from the speakers of my television, of all things. Just saw the video to that song for the first time. Now that's what Texas looks like. Anybody who thinks Texas is wretched excess or big hair or dusty desolation or anything they saw on "Dallas," well, yeah, it's all that too. But the ancestral home is a big enough place to have stuff that sucks that much and still be wonderful.

Speaking of "that's what Texas looks like": We're still waiting on the Major Lifestyle Change alluded to earlier in this space. Part of the Major Lifestyle Change involves an attempt to sell our house in the driest real estate market in North Texas since the early '90s.

Said market is likely going to get more parched: another Large Telecom Company for whom so many of my neighbors work just announced 7,000 more layoffs. The severance packages from this company's March layoffs begin running out in September. I suspect "For Sale" signs are going to be going up like those ugly mushrooms that sprout in the backyard after it rains.

"There is never a shortage of bullshit"
Thus declared The Wife a couple of days ago. She noted that while we suffer deficits of many necessary things, there seems to be a perpetual bullshit surplus.

This is reality. Some people deal with it by meditating, or smoking weed, or lighting incense, or getting an occasional massage and spa treatment.

The Wife, right-leaning person that she is, has declared war.

"I am declaring war," she said, "on bullshit."

Now there's a war I can get behind.

This is a noble cause. Instead of obsessing and bitching and moaning and freaking out over things over which we have no control, now would be a good time to simply choose to not worry about them. Many things are just not going to get any better. That's OK, 'cause they're really pretty good. Let's say I take that excess energy freed up by ceasing to acknowledge bullshit and devote it to things that really matter, and who knows? Maybe I'll take less aspirin.

I know I won't be able to dodge the opponent every day, but it'll at least know I'm there.

The War on Bullshit is on. All are invited to join the effort.