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.