fulcrum

2003-07-30T00:43:00.000-05:00

Oh, and I thought I was so clever thinking that blogging on HIPAA hadn't been done. Then I found this guy named Jeff Drummond, an attorney down in Dallas, whose hipaablog has been up for well over a year. He concentrates on privacy, but he seems to know a train wreck when he sees it.

2003-07-30T00:27:00.000-05:00

Six Degrees of Bloggeration
So I put a message out to someone I met during my blog apprenticeship. "I want to blog to save healthcare. What should I do?" He not only gives me great advice, he references me in a blind link. Talk about trust.

He's a pretty popular guy, and he drives traffic up to my site by, well, I'm not sure how much, because I just got the hit counter installed on the day I sent him the message. But a lot.

Meanwhile, I give him his props by commenting on his blog, and ask for some help, too. Some guy with all the right background comes out of nowhere (blogwhere?) and offers his expertise. Turns out, he lives 1500 miles away, but the little girl I saw grow up and move away from Tulsa had a baby in his wife's birthing center in NYC. The baby was born very sick, but is well now, thanks to the care he received there. For all I know, his wife helped save the life of my best friend's first grandchild, and now he is offering to help me.

Life is good. Now if I could just get my archives to reappear.

2003-07-24T22:29:00.000-05:00

Idle blogging. I started this blog nearly two years ago, calling it "fulcrum" based on the ancient Greek saying, "Give me a fulcrum strong enough, and a lever long enough, and I will single-handed move the world." Well, I fell from the Blogosphere, but I never lost sight of that concept. I've been walking along with my lever looking for a fulcrum to wedge it into. Here is what I came up with:

The HIPAA EDI Train Wreck

See, I belong to this odd group of techical/medical/business persons who understand that HIPAA is not just about privacy, it's about remaking the way that healthcare insurance transactions are conducted. Big deal, eh? Well, it is when you realize that one-seventh of the US economy is built on those transactions. And that the rules they came up with are flaky enough, yet strict enough, to make the whole segment fly off the tracks in October.

I've made my living for twenty years asking stupid questions. See my "Generalist Rant" somewhere on this site. When I started asking stupid questions, I started getting scary answers. That's the way, sometimes. When I started working with all these scary answers, I realized I needed to explain it to people outside the (relatively) small, specialized community I was working with. So I wrote a paper The Looming Financial Crisis in Healthcare: A Management Analysis of the Scheduled October 2003 "HIPAA Train Wreck."

Today, some people from the government got on a conference call and said they couldn't do anything -- the law required the train to wreck. But they published something quite different. It said the tracks could run in parallel -- old format and new, until everybody could make the new format work. I don't know if I had anything to do with it. I may never know. That's the way, sometimes.

I just keep sticking my lever under likely-looking rocks.

2002-11-25T22:12:00.000-06:00

Tonight I wished my father (see below, above, before and after) his happy 81st birthday. Tonight my daughter, now 10, said something about the mathematics of date sequencing -- that October 10, 2010 would be 10-10-10, then there would be 11-11-11, then 12-12-12, and not again for nearly a hundred years. She said she did not want to live to be old enough to see it. I explained that when I was a kid, 80 meant decrepit, but now Grandpa Al was hale and hearty. Had a few health challenges, of course, but doing fine. When she was a hundred, I said, a hundred might very well be a good age to be.

I was in my endocrinologists' office today. He's in a "heart specialists" practice, but so many heart patients have diabetes that he fits right in. Next to me in the waiting room was a slender teenage girl, and I nearly shed a tear seeing her there with the old and overweight, the walker-bound and wrinkled. I hoped she was waiting for someone -- a grandma given a ride, maybe, or a daddy in the exam room. Presently she pulled a meter from her purse, just like mine at home, and I wanted to move to the chair next to her and say, "How long, honey? How long have you been Type 1?"

I couldn't, because it would have seemed like a come-on, all her tender sadness there in its magazine-cover glory. So I continued my counseling in my head. "I had a great aunt who lived to 90 before the days of insulin," I would say. "This really sucks for you, I know, but it sucked more before, and it will suck less in the days to come."

And, "The government is talking about a healthcare initiative to address chronic diseases. So much has happened in the last 10 years."

And, "Remember that this is your life and your disease -- it is you that must live with it. Forget all the 'shoulds' and 'shalts.' You have to find a way to live, and the others will have to learn they must live with your decisions."

I looked at her and thought of my own beautiful children. And was grateful and ashamed.

2002-11-06T19:15:00.000-06:00

Reply from an Octogenarian (Eight Years on the Net)

As you know I live in a gated over-55 retirement RV park resort, yet computers are so widespread here that those who do not make some use of one stand out... and often try to explain their position. Most who do use computers use them fairly simply, for writing, for correspondence and family/friend contacts, and for keeping up to date. Some are whizzes, and they are often asked to help friends and acquaintances. We have a computer club and a geneology group deeply involved in computer archaeology. Several of our fifty clubs have email contact letters. And we are not strange!

I would suggest getting a look at the business and goals of the Datamonitor sponsor of this crap

Sincerely,

The Reverend J.

2002-11-06T07:39:00.000-06:00

"Let's print the internet so everyone can read it!"

From a health industry newsletter I receive:

New research from Datamonitor finds that while there is an abundance of breast cancer information and support groups on the Internet, the vast majority of breast cancer patients are over 55 and are therefore the least likely to use the Internet or have access to a home PC. As such, most breast cancer patients may find themselves unaware of the support available to them. One solution to this problem would be to focus on promoting offline support resources, such as books, telephone help lines and support groups, since the availability of these services now is not readily explained to patients.

The idea that 55+ patients are not capable of learning to use a computer even to save their own lives, implicit in this conclusion, is perhaps the most insulting thing I've read in a great while.

2002-09-22T08:43:00.000-05:00

Bushfill

I pulled up a video clip on David Weinberger's JOHO Weblog just now.

It's a mean-spirited thrashing of President Bush's inability to handle common figures of speech. We enjoyed it immensely.

My wife and friend Michael were looking over my shoulder as I played the clip, and we began offering opinions as to what the president really did say. Are you familiar with this game? "What did he say? No, I think it was ____."

I've christened this game as "Bushfill," the process that goes on in one's head when you try to take W's actual words and create complete sentences and/or ideas. I became aware of the phenomenon as I listened to an audio clip from some key speech on NPR. They played it several times in the morning as I was getting ready and driving to work. I thought about it all day, "What'd he say?" Then I listened again on the way home, and they played it again. "Man, he really did say that!"

This is somewhat encouraging. Because if I do it, hearing the president's words only a few times over the course of a month, then the people who work with him, and talk to him every day, must be grand masters at the game of Bushfill. That, I presume, is how Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld can walk out of the same cabinet meeting and issue completely contrary statements on what the administrations current policy might be.

2002-09-05T23:28:00.000-05:00

How to Annihilate Terrorism

Here’s the thing. The title of this essay is, “How to Annihilite Terrorism.” Sounds pretty militaristic, especially coming from me, right? But if I was really militaristic, I’d say, “How to Annihilate Terrorists.” See, the “Bomb’em to the Stoneage” crowd thinks that “terrorism” is a thing, like mosquito larvae or microwave ovens.

But terrorism isn’t a thing. It’s a tactic. It’s a tactic used by desperate, disenfranchised people who would rather be selling rugs or herding goats or building hotels.

Okay, that’s a bleeding heart liberal perpetrator-as-victim mentality. So I’ll admit it. Terrorists are irredeemable scum-sucking vipers whose twisted mentalities sprung like a seed from their mothers' wombs without external influence of any kind.

But for some reason, their communities support them.

Maybe it’s because Al Qaeda builds schools, and we bomb them.

No, still too simplistic. Unpatriotic.

So let me put on my patriotic hat, play my fife and beat my drum.

Our way is better. We are ten times more humane, twenty times more generous, seventy times more forgiving than those bigoted zealots. Our system of government, our guarantees of individual liberties, our religious tolerance is superior to their theocratic dictatorship, their self-righteous oppression.

We should cut them off at the knees.

Here is my insidious strategy:

For every fundamentalist, West-hating school they slap together out of mud and straw, we should build two schools and a hospital. Out of brick.

For every suicide bomber family subsidy, we should sponsor three legitimate entrepreneurs.

For every bag of rice, a case of medical supplies; for every AK-47, a half-dozen child-size flak jackets; for every shoulder-mounted missile, a bulldozer and a backhoe.

My cold and calculating approach has a precedent. When the US government wanted to destroy the Indians, they killed all the buffalo. To destroy terrorism, we must heartlessly defile the desperate and hopeless soil in which it thrives.

2002-09-05T21:34:00.000-05:00

What Pop’s Under God?

Okay, I’m not a religious Pepsi drinker. That is, about Pepsi as a brand. But you know, I only drink diet soda, and Diet Coke tastes kinda like rusty bilgewater. And okay, so Allie feels the same way, and we’ve raised the kids so they don’t drink Coke either. They drink Dr. Pepper, or Mountain Dew or Slice.

So today I got a message from a friend. She’s passing along an email that got passed along, that got passed along. You know the routine. And according to the email, Pepsi doesn’t believe in God. Or at least, Pepsi doesn’t believe in under God. So okay, I read the email and it’s like one of those urban mythology chain letters that says how Pepsi is going to come out with a special Commemorative Can that has the flag and the Empire State Building and the Pledge of Allegiance. Only the Pepsi Pledge of Allegiance leaves out the phrase “under God.” Which is to say, they used the text of the original Pledge of Allegiance, rather than the version that congress revised in 1950 to point out how we were different from those godless communists, like if it weren’t for the new Pledge of Allegiance 2.0 nobody could tell the difference.

And the email says I should boycott Pepsi because they don’t want to offend anyone so they took Under God out. And so I’m looking at this urban email, this well-meaning spam and I’m thinking, “Should I pass this along to everyone I know, just like it says?” Well, I’m not really thinking that, of course. Instead I’m thinking, “Do I just delete this like all the other messages I get that have more strangers’ email addresses than actual text, or do I respond?”

I’m feeling ornery, so I respond.

This is what I say:

[Dear Friend]

We were just talking about this at the dinner table the other night.... As you probably know, the Pledge of Allegiance (with the "under God" phrase, which happens to have been added after the original text) is a mandatory part of the school day ritual in most classrooms across the US. I object to this for two reasons:

1 - I believe that religious expression -- even when this expression is to deny the existence of God -- is the supreme province of the individual. Government which impinges on the territory of religion compromises the authenticity of both government and religion.

2 - Even as a believer in God, I have trouble with the phrase "under God" on a personal level. It implies that God is "up there" and I am "down here." That separation is the antithesis of my beliefs and the very name of my chosen denomination: Unity.

So, I'm going to continue to enjoy my Pepsi....

And so now I’m thinking that religion is like email. Everybody should be allowed to say what they want, no matter how repetitive or wrong-headed I, in my ultimate wisdom, know it to be.

And maybe you’re one of those people that can’t tell Coke from Pepsi, or Catholicism from Protestantism, or Free Will Baptistry from Apostolic Bibolatry. But to some of us these are fundamental distinctions. Are you a Pepsi Drinker by drinking Pepsi, or was it predestined? Can those who choose the path of Coca Cola find redemption?

And I’m also thinking that some religions may very well be like this email – not even a true story, but something made up in a marketing office in Atlanta. The apocalyptic Pepsi Can they describe is never even going to arrive, and they know it. But they send it along so you will get the true message:

Drink Coke.

2002-08-14T19:41:00.000-05:00

An Open Letter to My Schoolmates

Just signed up for that service
You know the one
See who
You may have knew
Who
May be looking for you

A few
Names popped out, but shoo!
So many strangers,
Even those once known flew
From head like few
Last cells of brainstem, clues
Like faces dimmed
Like dances in the dew

This stew of friends remain
These memories glimmering
Like soft shoe in the rain

Hope springs anew
I look not particular
Just an instance of you

2002-07-25T20:47:00.000-05:00

Just got an unsolicited attaboy from ClueTrainee Frank Paynter. Took the opportunity to visit his Sandhill site, where he has posted a remarkably human interview with Annie Mason, a self-confessed Blog Virgin. This is what happens when two people who can write get together.

2002-07-14T09:03:00.000-05:00

The Collapsing of Virtual Space

On the Cluetrain List, David Weinberger wrote:

> Our friend Marek, whom most of us met through this list, is in the
> hospital.

There were links to details on friends' blogs, and more details on the list. I posted:
_____________________________________

Re: Marek

Tell Marek that I'm pissed at his stunt. I've been observing radio
silence for months while I dealt with "other issues" and he pulls this
dramatic shit to get me back in the conversation.

Okay, some spontaneous verse:

Mad Pole

Marek, you climb through the hole to the street surface,
a mad Pole in search of a clue in the pointless forest.
You clever observer, you lover and despiser of good and otherwise
Singer of many songs, all languages native to your tongue
You have hit the one true note
We have heard it and our hearts resonate in accord
Remember your body is a sounding board
All the harmonies of the earth converge on your heart
We are with you and in you
We find that humanity we feared was lost
Godspeed back to us
Who miss your voice.
_____________________________________

The amazing thing was that people who knew Marek only through the "virtuality" of cyberspace began calling his hospital room, and even showing up (presumably with flowers or kielbasa). The medium of communication was suddenly quite insufficient to carry the message. So much for those who draw bright lines, "Is he a real friend or a web friend?" The person I know is Marek, not some fiction of internet slight of hand.

Soon, good news:

David Weinberger wrote:

I spoke with Marek Friday night at 6 EDT and he seemed really good. It's
an intestinal infection ("something-itis" says Marek) that they're
treating with antibiotics. He should be home on Sunday.

Whew!

(Okay, it should have been "we who miss your voice," but I was a little verklempt.)

2002-07-09T19:29:00.000-05:00

my first fan-e-mail

On Tue, 9 Jul 2002 03:25:03 -0400 "Chris B____" writes:
> Hey Martin-
>
> We were kinda f-ed up and decided to go to Google and type in the
> first thing that came to mind. It was "fulcrum" and your web site
> came
> up. We read your poem at the same time together with enthusiasm and
> figured we had to write you a letter, together. So hey . . great
> job.
> Great choice of words. Are you an android? I know you
> understand!!!!
> If so write us back at majentacream@knowhere.com
>
> Later,
>
> Marielle and Chris

Where to start...?

"fulcrum" was the first thing that came to mind? That was the *last* thing that came to my mind when I was trying to figure out what to call my blog. I'm not sure if that counts as convergence or anything like that.

As far as androids, I guess if I were one, I might understand. But I'm writing back anyway, so maybe I am an android after all. That would explain a lot, actually.

By virtue of your message, you qualify as my first fans, outside of actual relatives and friends I have pestered into visiting the site. In recognition of this, I will extemporize a verse for the occasion:

Android 1.0

I try to sleep
But my bones are ill-fitting
the shoulders creak
the waterbed pushes at me
In the morning I brew, brush and floss
Join the stream of traffic headed
to the center
Park, lock, clock in
Do my time at the screen
File out

I am commuting with the populace
I am wracked by drive through ATM withdrawl
I am buggy with disjointed e-motion

I am sliding my card through the reader
I am trying trying trying to recall my PIN
5-6-7-8 schlemiel, schlmozzle
For some reason
I think it may be time for a beer

2002-05-23T09:33:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the time away. I've been having a problem with my shoulders which renders me unworthy of correspondence. Will post eventually. The needles are starting to do their work....

2002-04-15T23:51:00.000-05:00

C.P.E.
9/21/1999
Dedicated on this Samsaday 2002 to my milltilting buddy, RB, for whom I unbeknownstingly wrote it, lo those many moons ago.

“You must cannibalize yourself!”

    So the pundits say

Your business
Your upside
Your career
Your life.

Nevermind old lessons learned
Nevermind the rational ways
Sterile metrics are passe
Re-vision is king
    Of future plays

So I put myself away
    And slow-cured
        My smoking heart

I seasoned all my tender parts
Stopped up all my stinky starts

I put myself away

When I emerged,
    I was
        Delicious!

All my rivals
    Waxed
        Suspicious

They thought they’d trapped me
    In my mind

Only to find
    Me redefined:

I’m a Certified Poetic Engineer

I'm a visionary of the new veridigm
My diversity is my strength

I’ve sharpened up my techno-chops
Synergized my afropops
Helix-bent my bumpercrops

I can wheel and deel
    With the real

But don't get
    Me wrong

I’m not looking for a safe position
I’m not hiding from the competition
I’m not stuck in mindless repetition
I’m not stuck in mindless repetition

I’m an incubator of composition!

I’m a Certified
    Poetic
        Engineer

2002-04-07T15:02:00.000-05:00

Going Forth

A man of words, he did not put them in the way
Of, “This is how…” or, “I’ll explain…”
Instead “Look at the deer!” he’d cry,
No lesson so plain as awe
Caught wild in a civilized eye.

In cabin home – the chunk stove hotplate rising red.
Lake ice, feet thick, beckoning to skate
or grind a hole to fish the dome below.
He offered boats for every skill and wake:
An agéd outboard, or seamsplit sail to blow.

He’s since confessed these wilderness escapes just that:
A route away from pains of day-to-day.
But this does nothing to slight my good:
Steam rising from dawn’s freezing bay;
Moss carpet floor of Adirondack wood.

All fond memories seem of going forth,
This man who stayed at home for all.
What he did to save himself, he pulled along
The willing son, despite the storm or squall.
No running wind, but tack and jibe, and finally brought up strong.

2002-03-12T20:56:00.000-06:00

I Copy from the Cluetrain List
> Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 17:11:32 -0800
> From: Kevin Marks
> Subject: Re: [cluetrain] Nonzero and Dawkins
>
> Hey, I'm writing the debate on Slashdot too...
>
> Nonzero says that the root of human ontology can be found in game
> theory. Non-zero sum activities do better than zero-sum ones, so
> over
> time they win out by basic Darwinism.
>
> With markets and conversations being key examples of non-zero-sum
> behaviour, there is a long term evolutionary pressure towards
> cluetrain.

This is so cool. I've been out for a few days, kicking back in the
Ozarks. I come back completely clueless about all the topicas under
discussion, then I find I gotta buy a book. Just keeps readings, I sez.
Before I know it, Kevin encapsulates.

I don't even have to read it now, because a couple weeks ago, I said the
same thing about clued cavemen.

Meanwhile, I'm troubled about this "open source" discussion on
intellectual property. Because that's what we're talking about when we
talk about fair use -- in practice, it has meant that you steal from
those you love. You think you are screwing the bad bad record company
when you dupe an MP3 by your favorite artist off the net -- but you
haven't *screwed* the record company -- you've *become* the record
company. You are now screwing the artist, which used to be A&R's job.

The ironic thing is that some of the most compelling arguments for the
need for unrestricted copying comes from the very creative sorts of minds
you would expect to be most threatened by it. If my product is not
wingnuts or woodracks, but an act of my imagination, then I must have
some measure of compensation or I must needs return to the wimpole
factory.

And everyone acts like this is the most intractable religious schism --
you are FOR copy protection or you are FOR freedom of information. It's
like there is no historical precedent for the economic model where
stealing is so easy and yet so undetectible. And yet somehow rare.

I can think of at least two: Horse thievery and paper hanging.
Everybody's watched the old westerns where the cowboys would ride into
town and just flip the reins around the hitching post before they went
into the saloon. Was it because it was hard to steal a horse? Was it
because people in them days was so durned honest? Hail, no. It was
because the penalty for stealing a horse was hanging -- generally hastily
arranged and unencumbered by legal procedure.

A tamer example is forgery or check kiting. It's actually pretty easy to
do. Write a check for a hundred dollars, present it with a smile on your
face and a ready excuse, and someone will likely cash it. But if your
fraud is exposed, the penalties are more akin to armed robbery than
shoplifting. And no one said there was gonna be math, but you'll have
ten years to figure out how much that hundred bucks has cost you.

So what brings this up is my kid's birthday party. I got five fourteen
year old boys in da house and they're talking about burning CDs and
upgrading pirate OSes and they can't even understand me when I say what
they are doing is three ways from right. And I'm not lecturing them, I'm
just giving perspectives, doncha know, but to them I might as well have
antennae sprouting from my temples. And then I start talking about
buying a $70 copy of Linux and getting better performance out of a
castaway PC than they will get sinking $1500 into a Microsloth Monster
and all they can say is, "But can it play GAMES?" And I'm saying, but
you can run a website in your bedroom and sell 5 gigs of space for $20 a
month and you'll graduate from High School knowing enough to earn $100K
your first year and so finally they're starting to listen to me, but
somehow I've lost the momentum and I can't go back and say that the
twenty cents a song they should be paying that grungemetal hiphoppist
band from New Jersey really makes a difference and if they don't figure
out a way to make sure the poor bastards get paid they're gonna wind up
workin' in a gas station and spend the rest of their lifes in san
berdino.

So I want my genius kid to be able to make a living from his brain if he
cares to. That's why I think we need fair use backed by fierce penalty.
Take away the fuckin' smart card, that's what we'll do. Disable the
digital signature. No Amazon for a month! I will turn this SCSI bus
right around, mister!

2002-03-07T01:18:00.000-06:00

Small Pieces Loosely Joined A new book by David Weinberger
Co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto
Perseus Books, April 2002

Not a maze of twisty passages, all alike, but a new medium with, perhaps, a new message? I just read the preface. The first couple of chapters are online, and from what I've seen, it's worth getting sucked into. Plus, you can sign on and do online commentary, making you either one of the Early Adopters, or one of the Soon-to-be-Forgotten Wannabes. Only time (or space, or something new that exists only in the realm of the web) will tell....

2002-03-07T00:24:00.000-06:00

What Wasn't In the Milk

I was picking up some items at the Wild Oats the other day
and remembered Allie asking for milk;
They didn't have the familiar plastic cartons I had resisted for
years and now bought thoughtlessly, but ultra-expensive
old-fashioned cartons of Organic Lowfat 1% Milk.

I actually weighed the seventy-five cent difference against the
time and effort to stop at another store, the extra 1%
milkfat I would get with the plastic kind,
the uncomfortable feeling of the unfamiliar purchase
of the otherwise everyday household good.

I bought in a paroxysm of extravagance.

Here, I said to the kids, it's Organic Milk from Organic Cows
I thought if you like it we might start buying it.
It tastes the same, said Livi.
It's milk, said Max.
But Livi got some more, which neither ever does, and Max
finished the small glass without encouragement or extortion, which
he often does not.

And so I tried it myself, late at night alone,
with some ginger snaps and a windmill cookie
and it was like tasting something that wasn't there.
Not the thing that was in the glass, but the thing that had been
in every glass before and did not have a name,
that thing that weighs down your life and you
do not feel released from it
until one day you suddenly
breathe and it is gone.

2002-03-06T00:54:00.000-06:00

Meanwhile, back at the Polder

I also get credit from David Weinberger, Pundit and Cluminary, for recommending an article by Richard Dawkins; a site which I just now visited for the first time in mememory.... Oh, well, maybe it was the other Martin Jensen. Did someone say something about Multiple Blog Disorder?

2002-03-06T00:32:00.000-06:00

Somebody who isn't related actually reads this thing?

I willingly admit that I started this blog in part to adress my infrequent yet wholly unsatisfying ego surfing -- attempts to find references to "Martin Jensen" on the WWW that weren't Danish Ministers of Somethingorother. Imagine my surprise to go to Daypop tonight and find this, from Doc Searls:

Bleverage
The poet Martin Jensen has posted wisely to the Cluetrain list:
> Kind of cool, isn't it, when we overthrow capitalism with CAPITALISM, as evenly-armed competitors in a formerly one-sided contest?
Yes, very.
His blog is fulcrum and his blogrolling list is "A Plague of Blogs," which made me laugh so hard a few minutes ago that I may have awakened neighbors.

Thanks, Doc. And I liked learning that Firesign Theatre birthed your participation in the writing of the Book That Dare Not Speak Its Name. I think we're all bozos on this bus.

2002-03-05T23:58:00.000-06:00

It's for reasons like this that I need to add Frank Paynter to my Plague of Blogs:
Sandhill Trek Let's put the rat bastard greedball stick-it-to-everyone opportunistic twizzledicks out of business by opening up a new space for communicating truth, revealing beauty, and damn it! - leaping tall buildings with a single bound.

Is that poetry, or what?

2002-03-05T23:21:00.000-06:00

I heard about this site on To the Best of Our Knowledge today...

> Philip Milano is the author of "Why Do White People Smell Like Dogs
> When They Come Out of the Rain?" and founder of the controversial Web
> site, YForum.com. He tells Anne Strainchamps
> his goal is to increase understanding between the races. He thinks we
> have to have a full and open discussion of all the embarrassing,
> niggling questions the races have about each other before we can make
> real progress toward harmony.

An interesting comment he made toward the end of the segment was that he felt these small questions were more important than the big ones. Sort of, "How can we talk about welfare reform when you can't see past my hair?"

2002-03-04T23:40:00.000-06:00

Another Whiny Outdated Post
From an email response to my nephew Dave, who made the mistake of saying something like, "When are you going to quit your day job and become a writer?" Okay, so he is neither that ridiculous nor that encouraging, but you get the picture.

A great Elvis once sang, "Every day I write the book."

Writing that note (two hours of writing separated by 36 hours of agonizing) made me realize (again) how little I have retained of my life in my memory. I'm not even sure if what I am writing is what I experienced at the time, much less what it may have to with any objective sense of reality. Whenever I try to tell a story on myself, I am constantly being interrupted by another witness to the events. "Don't you remember that X happened first? And that X happened because Y because Z?"

Well, no.

It's daunting when I think maybe I have something to say, that I will not remember what it is I know. I don't know whether to chalk this up to a brain defect or a defense mechanism.

I'm not sure how much sympathy I have for people like me. I hear stories about people that grew up in circumstances of serious abuse, physical disability, material need. All I am is the seventh child in a diseased but relatively gifted family.

I just finished the "Anti-Oprah" book -- The Corrections. This is the one where the author, Jonathan Franzen, thought being an Oprah book was too low-brow. That the great middle-western unwashed could never appreciate the high literary art he had created. It's about a seriously f-ed-up family where everybody blames everybody else for their own f-ed-up lives. One of the characters is, of course, a writer and he is, of course, a snob and he is, of course, a loser.

Story didn't seem that obtuse to me. Maybe I'm just living in the wrong city.

Anyway, the writing, which is to say the style, is pretty good, and I'm reading along trying to either see why I should care about any of these characters or how I can write a commentary on this author and his ungracious attitude. But as it's going along, I am carried into the story. Even though I don't care about them, the narrative is compelling. Even though I hate the characters and the author and the plot by the end of the book, I am staying up and reading it for hours.

I remember Gardner saying that you shouldn't write to compete with other authors -- most other books are trash, and most people won't read them anyway. You should write to compete with the circus -- like a Romanian circus with the real acrobats who work without a net, not one of those cheap commercial American imitations. People should rather stay home from the circus to read your book.

So I'm reading this damnable book, and I'm thinking, at least this guy actually wrote it, and who am I to criticize him? So what if he kills this character off at the end of the book and the whole family is transformed as if the sins have been lifted from them, even if the character didn't do what they imagined, even if their faults are their own, even if they are not fundamentally changed -- they get to change their lives. This, I probably don't need to tell you, is an authorial sin, one of several transgressions the author makes.

So I'm not writing my life story (or writing from my life story) because I barely remember it. It's like images shifting off the surface of the water when the objects they represent are hidden behind a windowshade. All I see is the glimmer on the water, and only in those moments when the air is calm. And because I am busy doing "real work" and raising kids and doing, doing, doing. Sometimes I have a fantasy that I have lost my incredibly well-paying job and so have to live by my wits but instead of pounding the pavement I pound the keyboard and somehow get my shit together all at once and become a famous author without missing a house payment.

When I find myself thinking that way, I perform the mental equivalent of sticking my fingertips in my ears and whistling.

Picture me now, bicycling up a grade, fingers in my ears, lips pursed, just ahead of a screaming monster labelled bankruptcy. If I stop pedaling, even for a moment, I will lose my momentum and the bike will swerve and fall. If I pull the fingers from my ears, I will be distracted. I will hear the monster and my muscles will freeze; I will lose momentum, swerve and fall. If I stop whistling, I will become fearful; I will become distracted, hear the monster....

That is why I do not write my book.

That, or I am basically damaged goods, not facing up to the wounds I have sustained, not dealing with my own not-dealing-with-the-problem.

Yeah, maybe that's it.

2002-02-25T07:51:00.000-06:00

An old poem

Eating When Hungry,
      Sleeping When Weary

Bought flannel sheets for my bed
Like a woman's skin to my cheek
They are twice what I thought I would pay
But reward my dreams four-fold

And I find myself
Moving from one appropriate moment
      to the next
My purse always clean
My rooms piled high with gifts

9/24/85

Another Old Poem

Taking Monday On

I am paid too much by the hour
The ticking clock slowed and amplified
To thud heavily against any
Small tinkling of idleness

Idolatry – that putting up of
      image as grander than the
      true thing – rears its gargoyle
      clockfaced head
I smash it with a thin book of verse,
The point
      of this pen
A deliberate taza de café
Reinvigorating the tiny God-within-
      my-nearly-ruined-temple
With an hour, a full morning of
      wasteful worship
Flying in the face of the metronomic sabbathday
      of workweek

January 1998

2002-01-29T13:40:00.000-06:00

The Answer to His Question

I sent my brother some harmless note
which released from him a flurry of non-sequitor:
Religious screeds,
umpteenth tellings of embarassing moments of my history,
and ultimately a libertarian manifesto
in support of universal handgun ownership.

Do I remember the day?
And would I be interested in meeting
at the firing range?

That night I dreamed a cabin, a table, a rifle.
Smooth in my knowing hands.
The well-crafted tool;
precise machine of oiled walnut and blued steel.
I lifted it to my shoulder and,
just to feel the action, squeezed.

The bullet shattered a window, splashing
its obscuring reflection into shards
on the floor and teeth
in the frame.
What had been hidden was my wife
standing on the limb of a tree
beyond the dusty glass.
She now looking down;
the bullet embedded in the tree.

2002-01-21T20:35:00.000-06:00

They Say Prayer Is Good

Marty: In response to your post of 1/15/02:

I'm not a religious guy. You know me, Marty, and will chuckle at the
understatement. However, I have had some experience with quasi-prayer. Since
I prescribe to no form of god whatsoever, this means that I'm an atheist
(since we all must be something, and human nature abhors negative space).
So how come I pray?

Well, let's not call it prayer then. I have a mantra. It's typed neatly in
Windows Notepad, and there's a shortcut to it on my desktop. They say you
should never share your mantra, so I won't. While I do not have a god, I do
believe in They. In fact, I wonder if most people believe more in They than
they believe in gods. And, just as with God, They is losing followers
lately. They has become dispersed across a much wider Body of They. They is
losing its singularity. I blame the Internet.

While some people look to go for answers, I tend to try Google first. When I
hear that They say something, I check it out. Often I find no definitive
authority on Their subject, and wind up suspecting that They made it up.
And what better place for revisionist reality than the Internet?

Let's look at the phenomenon of the Affirmation. As I understand it, the
idea is to keep repeating wishful thinking out loud until it comes to be
reality, until it gets absorbed into the Collective Hunch. Afficionadi of
the Affirmation insist that the Universe is listening. Oddly, I subscribe to
this concept wholeheartedly. I'd like to cite a half dozen thinkers in
philosophy and physics to show my letters, but if you are as skeptical as I
am, you'd want to check them out, but wouldn't bother, and would wind up
presuming that I made them up. Let's just say that the likes of Fritjof
Capra, Michele Foucault and many others in such diverse fields as
philosophy, mathematics, physics and brain science are toying with the idea
of an interconnected Universe that IS listening, after a fashion.

So I have a mantra. And I have some suggestions about using one that may be
helpful. I suppose you can also modify these ideas to work with prayer, but
I wouldn't know much about that:

1. Make a mantra like you would a poem. Pack it densely with gossamer.
2. A mantra doesn't have to be a nonsense syllable you can chant in order to
get those Cords of the Universe vibrating on your behalf. I like English.
3. It should say what you are in essence. Plato had the idea that every
object in the world has an essence, the ''idea of the thing.'' This is where
you get to extract the idea of you.
4. Don't put appeals in your mantra. This isn't the place where you ask the
Universe to make your dick bigger. (See Google on "prayer.") This is the
place where you say what IS.
5. Leave it alone. Write it then live with it. I've had the same unedited
mantra for three years now.
4. Keep your mantra at hand so it will catch your eye once in awhile. I hide
copies of mine in my top dresser drawer, under stacks of papers, and put a
shortcut to it on my desktop. Once in a while I email it to myself. I love
surprises and I have the uncanny suspicion that the Universe does, too.
5. Don't overdo it. It's an essence, not a logo. I know an ersatz Buddhist
that had his monosyllabic-style mantra embroidered on his towels. Secrecy
seems to be important in matters of the spirit (unless you're a
Fundamentalist, I guess).

The Internet presents some interesting possibilities for viral affirmation.
One can imagine a device that cranks out random emails containing encrypted
text (for secrecy, like the idea of the Roman Catholic Church and the
Elizabethans that you must speak to ghosts in Latin) in the bizarre hope
that it will get absorbed somehow in the Cords of Cyberspace. Spriritual
spam. The closest thing, I guess, is the weblog, and it is far less
annoying.

Therefore, hidden in this message is my ecrypted mantra, first translated
into Latin, then encrypted within the message text. If the Universe is
listening, and if it has Internet access, then I have been affirmed. They
say it never hurts to try.

Please feel free to post this reply. Like They say, it couldn't hurt.

Michael

2002-01-15T12:51:00.000-06:00

The Power of Imperfect Prayer

Early in my personal spiritual quest I began to encounter people and books who offered what I have come to describe as a "prayer prescription." The prayer prescription takes one of three forms: "Pray for X minutes a day and you will see miraculous results;" "Pray using this Y-Step Technique;" "When you pray, say thus-and-such, don't say so-and-so." The common elements of these admonishments are a foundation in discipline, order and rules.

Needless to say, I have been a complete failure in the use of such techniques. It's not that there is anything wrong with them. It's just that they do not suit my personality type. I am creative, introspective, spontaneous and I have a short attention span.

So I have given up any further attempts to pray by prescription; my march to Jerusalem has been called off. Along my meandering path thus far, however, I have plucked a few flowers that I'd like to share with you. These prayer tips are descriptive, not prescriptive. No warranty, expressed or implied, including merchantibility or fitness for a particular use.

Password Affirmations: Change all your computer passwords and PINs into one-word affirmations or prayers.

Keys to Prayer: Tell yourself you will remember to pray when you hear your car keys jingling. Especially helpful during rush hour.

Pray for Others: I have a hard time praying for myself. But I'm pretty sure when I pray real hard for someone else, a little of that good stuff splashes back on me.

Shower Meditation: When I had small children and a smaller house, the bathroom was the only private space and the white noise of the shower the only relative quiet. You can close your eyes, but don't drop the soap.

Set Yourself Up: Tell yourself you will remember to pray. Then remember to tell yourself.

I guess the basic idea is to not wait for the right conditions or a major change in personality traits -- pray where you're planted. And don't worry so much if you don't "hold it" long enough, or you get the steps out of order, or you don't stick the dismount. God is not so far away.

2002-01-07T23:41:00.000-06:00

So I'm in this discussion group, and everbody's talking about "voice" and what it is and what it isn't and whether there has to be an ear to catch the sound and where voice comes from and what it means and whether it means anything. And pretty soon they're turning it into equations like "voice = tone + inflection" or "voice = inspiration + attitude" and okay, so that's not really what they said, but they really were making equations, and I make fun of them a little, then just sort of toss in, "Voice is what, when you hear it, you recognize it.."

But see, that is it. Voice is so fundamental to our nature that we recognize it as a natural expression of ourselves. Not in the trivial words-on-page or breath-in-throat sense, but that pure outflowing of creation that pours from us like a perennial spring. There is no way to quench voice -- the only thing powerful enough to quiet us completely is our own fear. Even in the most ominous extremity, we can speak silently and hear ourselves, if we will.

So I leave off and don't tease or prod for awhile, then the equation generator turns to passion and we're getting "passion = love + rage" and "passion = curiosity - inhibitions" or some such things and some guy actually comes on and says that we have passion because in the end we know that all is lost. We are passionate because we die.

And I'm thinking, this guy must be great at a party, and I'm thinking, this guy has it all backwards because, you see, the thing that pops the cork on passion is life and the fullest appreciation of it which includes that giant swan dive into eternity which we are making all the time whether we open our eyes or not and which is doomed not to failure but to success, in spite of our tiny protestations of uncertainty in a universe devoid of doubt and working so inexorably toward our overcoming. Yeah.

2001-12-20T00:42:00.000-06:00

The Pickup Truck, the Trailerhouse, and the Star

José and María were halfway across West Texas when the pickup’s right rear tire began to whine.

“Madre de Diós!” José moaned. The truck began to shudder and he pulled off onto the gravel beside the two-lane.

María smiled. “You can fix it, my big strong man!” She winked. José left the cab, muttering under his breath.

After several minutes of clanking, thumping and uttering expletives expressed in the rich colors of the mother tongue, José let out a sigh, then turned and leaned against the side of the truck. María had been watching closely in the side mirror. She stepped down gingerly from the runningboard and joined her husband, reaching out and caressing him behind his ear, just below the brim of his hat.

“It’s no good,” said José. “The spare is flat also.”

“It will be fine, querida,” María replied. “It will be fine.”

“I guess Christmas with the in-laws is cancelled,” José said, and for the first time he smiled, after making sure his wife was looking away.

“Honey, look! A star – a shooting star!” María’s eyes widened at the sight. Directly in front of them, just above the horizon, a golden light streaked down. Instead of fading, it brightened and seemed to stand in the air for several seconds. For a moment, even José was transfixed.

“It’s just dust, you know,” he observed finally. “Just comet dust.”

“Silly husband. A star is a star.”

“Wait!” said José. “Look over there. That place.” He gestured. Just below the point where the meteor had fallen sat a little trailer, isolated on the vast, empty expanse of sand and sage. The tiny trailerhouse was dark, but it was the only sign of human habitation they had seen in the many miles before the truck had broken down.

As they approached, they caught sight of a figure stooped over some dark apparatus. It was an old man peering intently into the eyepiece of a telescope. Behind the trailer lay a large shed, surrounded on three sides by livestock fence.

The old man looked up. “Did you see it?!” he exclaimed. “Did you see that meteor? It must have fallen within a kilometer of here! In all my days, I’ve never seen a Geminid land so close. The city folk, they get all excited about the flashy Perseids in summer and the reliable Leonids in fall, but Geminids are Christmas stars -- rare and precious.”

María grinned. “See, José? They are stars.”

“Well, comet dust really, my dear. Asteroid dust, in the case of the Geminids. But they’ve flown around the universe for billions of years, just to make their presence known for a bright, beautiful moment in our atmosphere.” The old man’s eyes twinked in the starlight. “Stepping out into the night and taking notice seems the only responsible thing for a man like me to do,” he chuckled.

José removed his tattered straw hat and shifted his feet. “Sir, our truck, she’s broken down. I was hoping, maybe, we could sleep in your barn? My wife is very tired.”

The old man took notice now of María’s rounded belly, the weight riding low on her hips.

“Nonsense,” he said, “I’ve got plenty of room inside. I’ll make room.” And without pausing for further introduction, he hoisted the telescope to his shoulder and led the way to the door of the trailerhouse. Some distance away, coyotes turned their angled snouts heavenward and set up a song.

Learn more about the Geminids of 2001

2001-12-11T00:26:00.000-06:00

An Occasion for Poetry

I have been unfaithful to my blog. Nearly a week without a post.

Tonight at dinner, Allie said she had heard Terri Gross interviewing someone -- she didn't know who -- about blogs. The commentator said something to the effect that bloggers were, "people with too much time on their hands and an overdeveloped need for exhibitionism." [Editorial Disclaimer: All quotes, except those cited by link, consist entirely of hearsay, malefactions, and poorly-conjured misrepresentations. Gist for the mill, as they say. Any resemblance to actual statements is clearly accidental.]

Olivia chimed in, "You don't have too much time on your hands, Daddy. You don't have time for lots of important things." Like what? "Like haircuts!" At that point, I let her off the hook regarding her further observations of shortcomings in my time management skills.

I'd been thinking about that poem about the reader at the coffee shop. How it was more about me and my perceptions than the subject of the poem himself. (More than that, it was about me observing my perceptions, selecting certain ones to share with the reader to reflect upon, etc.)

Then Cassidy and I went to hear Robert Pinsky, former US Poet Laureate, read and talk at a local college. Pinsky read a piece by another poet about an old man in a cafe. The old man is falling toward death, filled with creaky pains and bitter regrets. After reading the poem, Pinsky explained that the writer was a young man when he wrote it. That it was about his own apprehensions about living an unfulfilled life. He referred to the old man as being, not the subject of the poem, but the occasion for the poem.

Pinksy then went on to read a series of his own poems, which used the objects in his studio as their occasions. So much for writer's block.

And after he had read another series or two or so, he invited questions and requests from the audience of two hundred gathered Tulsans. There were the stock, "How much do you edit?" and "What do you do about writer's block?" queries, answered with familiar, yet patient replies. Then, my friend Bill Zaschang asked what his take on Slam was. He made a number of conciliatory feints at the subject ("better for a society to honor and revere performers than dukes and titleholders") before settling into the deeper truth, which was, to him, that Slam was more a movement toward literature than a movement of literature.

I let a few more tiresome questions fly before I had to raise my hand. In my business suit and neatly trimmed beard, I must have cut an interesting figure. He called on me immediately. I started to ask a question. "Some friends of mine and I have noticed independently, then commented on collectively, the lack of skill with which some 'professional poets' read their own work--"

He intterupted to go on a rant about how the poem is an art formed in the ear of the imagination -- there was no auditory cognate for "visualize" but that was what he meant -- and if we insisted that a poet be also a performer, we would have lost to us the works of Dickinson and Bishop. He answered at length the question he thought I was asking, then went on to another question.

After the end of the event, I told Bill that what Pinsky was saying to him was that it was no big deal if an amateur poet could read their own work well; and to me that it was no big deal if a "professional" poet sucked at it. Bill explained that he knew in advance what Pinsky's opinion was of Slam, but he wanted the rest of the audience to hear it, too. As for me, I was not insisting upon anything. I just wondered why so many poets would go on NPR and read at so many workshops without giving the audience, much less their own craft, the respect to learn how to read in public. I'm not talking about Richard Chaimberland, or even Richard Widmark. But for crying out loud, couldn't they discreetly enroll in Toastmasters for a few months?

With all Pinsky's degrees and accolades, this self-professed working class kid from New Jersey has become, I fear, more professed than self. I applaud his 200 poems project, but every night in the bars and cafes in cities across the country, there are 2,000 poets reading for love out loud.

And love, as Bill Z. will tell you...

...ain't nothin'
but a little-bitty bug
that crawls in your ear,
and digs a hole right into your brain.
It tickles and it itches,
but no matter how you try
you never can reach in
far enough to scratch it.
So, it hides in there. Inside of you!
And it slowly drives you mad
as it burrows in deeper and deeper
until, finally, it lays
eggs! in your dreams....

2001-12-05T00:04:00.000-06:00

Community of Ideas Post 911

I see a young man in the bookstore coffee shop
poring over some text. His dark
balding head down, crown
my way, showing skin of
olives, skin of caramel.
He glances up quickly, revealing
hooked nose, almond eye, then bends back
over his book as over a prayer mat.

He is short-haired, clean shaven
his clothing is drab, nondescript,
devoid of cultural clue.
He blends in almost,
as if by instruction.

He rises furtively and turns to go:
He feels eyes on him.
He tucks the book under his arm,
“Pediatrics.”
There is another book also.
A book I cannot read.

2001-12-04T07:19:00.000-06:00

Cow Story
by Olivia Jensen
November 30, 2001

Janus was a girl whom no one understood. She always wanted to plow the fields, harvest the crops, and wear overalls. She was what we would call today a “tomboy,” but in 1878 simply no girl behaved this way. Her brother, Pete, always sneered at her whenever she wanted to do the things he and his friends did. “What? Do you wanna be a boy, Janus? No one will wanna marry a girl who plows the fields and wears overalls. They’ll wanna marry Emily Johnson. She cooks, cleans, and she’s pretty. Not like you in your pigtails.”

This hurt Janus’ feelings very much. So she spent most of her time with the animals. The sheep were friendly, and the hens laid eggs for her to cook with.

One day, the family went into a money crunch. Janus’ father gathered the family around to tell them. He said, “Everyone, I don’t want you to be scared but all our crops were destroyed in the cyclone this spring. And –er-er, I don’t know how to tell you but, uh—we’re runnin’ outta money folks. Your ma and I decided here in Oklahoma there’s only one kinda job—“

“Papa, I don’t wanna be a cowhand!” exploded Janus.

“It’s the only way, “ said Papa.

“But Papa,” said Pete, “Janus is—is—is a girl.” he finally stammered.

“I know she’s a girl,” said Papa. “New laws have allowed women to be cowhands. The job pays well. And if both er ya go we’ll get twice as much.”

When the time came to leave they said their good-byes quickly and hitched up the horses. The journey through town was uneventful. With people booing and snickering as Janus passed.

When they got there. The man at the gate told them, “You’ll be travlin’ to Kansas—is that a girl!!!” He said. And fell off balance and quickly stopped leaning on his pitchfork. (Don’t ask me why he had a pitchfork.)

“No, I’m a boy,” Janus said sarcastically.

“Just go!” the main said, getting his balance back.

Herding cattle was hard work. The cattle wouldn’t move. Janus thought there was no point in her even being there. Then she remembered the money, and gritted her teeth. “I can do it!” she roared.

“That’s the spirit,” said a nurturing voice behind her.

“Who’s that?” she said, scared. Then she saw a beautiful cow. She was purr white, with large brown, velvety spots and deep brown eyes. She was #66,

“This must be some kind of joke,” Janus usured herself.

“No joke,” said the voice. “The trick to these cows is you need to talk to them.”

Er- okay,” she said. And feeling silly, she said “I’m not gonna hurt you. Go on. Go on.”

In no time at all she lead the way to Kansas, with #66 at her side. #66 continued to help Janus over 3 years of herding.

When she had earned enough, she went back to her family, with Papa’s open arms to greet her. She had kept half of her money on Papa’s request. She set off to Kentucky (because that’s where #66 was shipped) to buy #66. Janus never married, preferring to protest for women’s rights. Coming home to find #66 curled up by the fire.

2001-11-28T23:21:00.000-06:00

The snow fell in Tulsa today. My kids all had smiles on them. Despite the magical nature of the first fall, I found myself drawing inward. I have seen enough snow, I heard myself say in my head. What does that mean? Is it simply the de facto state of a northerner fled south twenty years? Or is it something deeper, perhaps more sinister? It is like the first resignation of being on the downward slope of life. You let go of the snow first; the joyful things that have the clearest downsides and consequences. I always thought of dying as something that happens suddenly, but this feels like a slipping that will, God willing, take years, decades.

The kids want a snow day. Max sees the snowplowman on the road and shouts evil at him. Olivia turns her pajamas inside out on the advice of a teacher. Cassidy lightens his step and calls an old friend. Something about being stranded urges us to reach out.

We collectively curl up and peace descends on the house. At last, I am the only one awake. The yard glows with memories. My shoes crunch on the back porch. A moment after I stand still, the sound of some creature's halting footsteps carry to where I am standing.

Dad turned eighty on Sunday. He said my aunt and uncle had already bagged their deer for the season. He described where they were standing in the woodlands of my youth. The landmarks have changed but the place of sense remains. I can see the stark outline of blue steel against unriven snow; catch the crisp rush of air in my nostrils.

I hear the creature approaching. I shift to see if I can catch a glimpse under the trees. But no, it is behind a fence: a mere dog in a yard; a restless neighbor remembering the hunt.

I push back into the heat and comfort of my home, turning the bolt resolutely behind me.

Soon I will climb the stairs. Soon I will slip into bed.

2001-11-20T00:26:00.000-06:00

The Guybrary, the Turntable and the Twenty-Inch Stud
So you all know I just moved into this big house (see Chapter 1 and Chapter 2). In fact, it was almost bigger than we knew what to do with. Had one especially big room upstairs, with a ceiling fan, two closets, and a fireplace. Son Max was lobbying for possession (we call him The Dealmaker), but cooler heads prevailed. Actually, we offered it to him, but he couldn't afford the rent. So I made my move. Allie got a studio downstairs, so I wanted the upstairs room for my books and stereo. Delusional from the effort of moving, I made a pronouncement: It would be the only room in the house where I would not have to consult my artist wife for decorating consensus.

We had to move a lot of books, up a lot of stairs. Friend Michael collapsed on the couch after one of these trips and said, "This room needs a name." We discussed several options before settling on "The Guybrary." He offered "Studly," but that was vetoed by my daughter Olivia. I thought later about calling it "The Jefferson Room," after George, not Thomas, but by then Guybrary had stuck. So up went the books, the stereo, all the photo albums, the hand-hewn cedar buckboard seat fashioned by my wife's grandfather and a Remington print of two men paddling their birchbark canoe fiercely upstorm while a woman and her baby huddled in the center for protection. I threatened to buy a stuffed moosehead.

One of my first decisions was to purchase an actual stereophonic turntable for my Guybrary. Twelve dollars at the Salvation Army. Amazingly, it worked! Not so amazingly, the new, 100-watt-per-channel Sony receiver didn't have a phono input. By plugging it into Aux and cranking the volume all the way up, it becomes recognizably audible. Now I have to find a pre-amp, or, Michael corrects, a well-matched ohmulator. Used to be able to get them anywhere for twenty bucks. Neither device lists an impedence, in spite of the obvious poetic symmetry of such a statistic. So for now I'm getting the same lousy sound I got when I heard the records the first time.

Two-and-a-half months later, I get to shelve my wall. The room is wide enough that the ceiling slopes down to a four-and-a-half foot wall that runs twenty feet on either side. One side is interrupted by the fireplace; the other gets the bookshelves. Michael convinces me that "the easiest way to do it" is to buy components for an all-assembly-required bracket-and-shelf system. Just find the studs and screw the supports in, but get brackets shorter than the actual shelf width. You drill a little hole into the underside of the board, see, and the nub of the bracket fits in there and stays hidden away instead of sticking out all ugly. Yeah, but what about twenty feet of unsupported books? Simple. Just drill three holes down through the ends of each shelf and slip in some dowels from top to bottom. Makes a nice visual, and the dowels support the books all the way to the end of the shelves. You don't go broke buying bookends.

I'm always looking to save some money.

Did you know you can spend $300 on cheap shelves if you try hard enough?

Well, I did my checkbook math, and you can. You can also make plenty of bad assumptions if it turns out your studs are 20" apart, instead of the sixteen inches everyone tells you. Even the little bag of screws in the shelf department say the studs are sixteen inches apart.

Jensen's First Rule of Home Ownership: "These things are all standard. Except this one you have here." (NOTE: Pause between first sentence and second includes the time it takes to drive home, unload supplies and tools, attempt impossible feat of engineering, return to hardware store, and display the object in question to the helpful associate so he can complete his thought.)

The Easiest Way to Do it did not take into account that I would buy shelves of different widths and stagger them between my 20-inch studly joists (to get that much-desired "floating effect"), nor that the dowels would not quite "slip down" into the holes because the holes were exactly the same size as the dowels and the slanting headbanging ceiling was in the way.

So my Saturday project turned into my Saturday, Sunday and Monday night project. With help from my two sons (Livi helped earlier, when there were power tools involved), we got the dowel rods into the shelves while we held them in mid-air (that floating effect is definitely an illusion) and all the shelves in place onto their sturdy, studly brackets.

I had played the phonograph once or twice earlier (starting with Coltrane's "Living Space," my move-in tradition), but this was the first time I was able to log time in the Guybrary with enough initiative to bypass the CD remote and play a full set with those antiquated twenty-minute obsidian wafers. I started with Side 1 of Elvis Costello's second album, then both sides of Peter Gabriel's first. After ten years in hot storage, there wasn't a ripple. Prayer works. By the time I dropped the stylus on Jorma Kaukonen, I was unboxing the last of Mark Twain, Chaos, and Ovid's Erotics.

God, I love being a man.

2001-11-19T16:53:00.000-06:00

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.” - Bertrand Russell

2001-11-19T11:42:00.000-06:00

Wanderlust
I'm not sure what clicked to make me understand this. Perhaps it was the commentator saying that if the tragedy at LaGuardia had turned out to be caused by a terrorist act, it would have meant "the end of the airline industry" as we know it. Perhaps it was the comparison of back-end airline security as "swiss cheese" and yet, the assertion that traveling by air was still safer by far than by car. Maybe it was simply the sonorous memories of trips made, alone or with my family, that continue to resonate. Suddenly I knew that I wanted to go.

Or, more precisely, I want to be able to go. I don't really have the budget to travel now, having just purchased a house. But I'm not going to let some bloody terrorist dissuade me from my God-given American right to pack bags and have stressful visits with distant relatives, enjoying the sites as I grit my teeth.

Wanderlust is a well-journaled aspect of the American character, but the freedom of movement that makes it possible is often overlooked. We are a nation of movers, travellers, migrants. Our history is full of motion, most of it voluntary and optimisitic, with some notable exceptions: The crime of slavery; the forced relocation of Native American populations. Part of the upwelling of support for the Civil Rights movement came from the growing outrage that there were public places that certain citizens were simply prohibited from entering. While that certainly still is the case, in fact if not in law, we do, as Americans, presume that this is our country and we are free to move about.

So hear I sit, at the convergence of The Mother Road and the Trail of Tears [Real Audio], thinking, "Who are these guys to take my peripatetic heritage away?" But of course, any travelogue confers the understanding that our forebears took greater risks than we assume by submitting to low-wage scanjockeys working under contract. Lewis and Clark were protected by a teenage Shoshone girl and her baby, not a Federal Air Marshal.

And I think we all will figure this out, in time. Maybe we will see fewer "leisure miles" logged on airlines, but the American "urge to traverse" will not be daunted. So, Florida needs to deal with a billion dollar budget shortfall. But maybe people will look closer to home to satisfy their traveling jones. I can see the economic impact -- the development of hundreds of little "Rustic Belts" around the population centers. Places that the interstates bypassed, that the coastalites refer to as "flyover communities" -- or used to. Suddenly they're destinations. Micromarkets on the atomic scale.

Merriam-Webster's Thesaurus Entry Word: vagabond
Function: noun
Text: a person who wanders at will or as a habit <a park full of vagabonds sleeping on benches>
Synonyms arab, ||bindle stiff, bum, canter, clochard, derelict, drifter, floater, ||gangrel, hobo, piker, roadster, runagate, ||shack, street arab, ||sundowner, ||swagger, ||swagman, tramp, tramper, ||traveler, vag, vagrant, Weary Willie
Related Word roamer, rover, wanderer; boomer, migrant, runabout, straggler, stray, transient; bohemian, gypsy, picaro, picaroon; ||casual; stiff; beggar, rogue
Idioms knight of the road

2001-11-14T23:03:00.000-06:00

Blogging a Stairmaster to Heaven
Find a city / Find myself a city to live in So now I'm dreaming in blogspace, writing in HTML, riding the crest of the wave breaking just short of Las Vegas. Gotta tell you, I was skeptical about the concept of the growth of microcommunities within the walls of corporatia; that voice would find a home there. Doc or Tom or somebody smart was talking about the difference between identity (which Microsoft owns) and self (which is multifaceted, and can present in different ways that you choose). Well, I got it wrong, it was David Weinberger in JOHO, excerpted by Doc who linked to Tom who blogged in the house that Jack built. See what's happening here? The whole thing's going fractal on me. And you, too. Point is, are you willing to let your self out on the job, even if given permission?

The power of voice is so strong, and the nature of weblogging (not exclusive of other technologies, but unique among them) is so ennabling, that I don't think the community will wait for the corporate world will get on the train. We already saw this happen on the web when web pages were a lot harder to build; now it's going to ramp up and out.

Here's the deal, though. We are in an economic transition (that's how we talk about things now, with that clintonian optimism that has bouyed us through the bubble and beyond).

I got some stories to tell about my adopted hometown of Tulsa OK. In the early 80's, the oil market went bust. Small wells lost money every day and had to be capped. Companies that made equipment, laid piplines, refined crude, sold gasoline -- all laid off and many pulled up stakes and left. Left some opportunities. One group of engineers bounced out of a rig manufacturer took their expertise, looked at the market, and invented the Stairmaster. Another had laid thousands of miles of pipe but then had nothing to push through it. They laid fiberoptic through the tubes instead, taking advantage of all the sunk costs and dearly-acquired rights-of-way. Sure, you say, but Stairmaster just tanked, and telecomm is fading into dark fibre. How long did you want the good times to last? Besides, the best part is that the town finally turned away from the dance partner what brung us, and now has a more diversified economy that rides out the vagaries of the oil market without all the slash and burn.

So now we've got this alignment of forces -- the questionable economy, layoffs, fear, war, pool reporting, terrorism, patriotism, aerophobia and blogspace. How does it all converge? The revolution will traverse the blogspace. Did you hear that rumble? We've already seen the impact of the "rightsizing" of the eighties. The Company broke the contract, and when they wanted a new deal, we got better terms. What we're seeing now is the perspectivizing of the oh-oh's. How would you spend your time today if you thought your life mattered?

So now I've got a bunch of friends now looking for work. What do I tell them? Use your voice! There's nobody in the world like you and there's no time like now to tell it. Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose. Speak. Link. Vent. Commune.

Word.

2001-11-14T17:37:00.000-06:00

I said previously that a blog is not a conversation. I sit corrected. A blog is like a conversation taking place at a large corner booth in a busy diner. Lots of noise -- you can only hear about a quarter of what's going on -- but the company is good and the chrome is shiny. Every once in a while, somebody drops a glass and the whole room cheers, except the shlemeil who spilled it and the schlomazel he spilled it on. (Sorry, my Yiddish spellchecker has gone kaput.) You want fries with that?

I think there is some element in us that is looking for the slashdot effect, only perhaps distributed across all of blogspace. "This says here that there were 5,000,000 blogreaders last week, and I got twelve of 'em!" Maybe I'll put up a hit counter....

More important than this ego gratification (such as it is) is the sense of community. But it's more fun than that, because it's a community in a new modality. It's not the feed store, it's not the coffee shop. Hell, it's not even what we traditionally think of as "the net with a capital n." It's more disjoint than that, more idiosyncratic. I write what I don't even know if anyone will read, so it's fundamentally an act of faith. As Neil Young might say, "there's more air in there."

PS Send this to everyone you know.

Tom Matrullo put some interesting thoughts out there about blogging, bloggism, bloglodites, whatever. He posited some interesting concepts in his numbered list about making blogreading more efficient (that wasn't the word he used, but it will serve). After all, with any idiot capable of blogging up a storm, it's going to be increasingly difficult to get through the fluff, don't you agree?
This brings up some scintillating possibilities:

Every time Rageboy uses the term "profligate" in a blog entry, I get a linked flag.

If he subsequently uses the term "chicanery," the flag goes back off.

"Wildebeest" on any blog gets a priority one flag. I love that word.

The use of the words "possum," "poontang," or "peritoneal" gets a blogsite off the search list entirely.

"Righteous" is acceptable within certain thresholds. If it appears more than once a week, it's off the include list. If it ever appears immediately before the word, "babe," it goes down the memory hole.

Anyone who uses my name gets a link immediately added to my page and a dozen roses via Teleflora. I might even read what they said.

2001-11-14T16:48:00.000-06:00

Chris Locke quotes himself, saying, It’s a Zen sort of thing you could say. I could say; who’s to stop me? Finger indicating moon-illuminated finger. The thickness of life as life is lived between the inexorable poles of birth and death. "Man is an animal suspended," says Geertz, "in webs of significance he himself has spun."

This is towards a theory of blogspace? We're talking mental recursion on a megalomaniacal scale, here. Webs of significance in webs of significance in webs of significance.... Zen and the Art of Bloggery. Word.

2001-11-12T02:05:00.000-06:00

Funes, the Memorious Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details. - Ibid.

2001-11-12T02:02:00.000-06:00

Funes, the Memorious He had not written it down, for what he once meditated would not be erased. The first stimulus to his work, I believe, had been his discontent with the fact that "thirty-three Uruguayans" required two symbols and three words, rather than a single word and a single symbol. Later he applied his extravagant principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, Brimstone, Clubs, The Whale, Gas, The Cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In lieu of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a species of mark; the last were very complicated. . . . I attempted to explain that this rhapsody of unconnected terms was precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration. I said that to say three hundred and sixty-five was to say three hundreds, six tens, five units: an analysis which does not exist in such numbers as The Negro Timoteo or The Flesh Blanket. Funes did not understand me, or did not wish to understand me. Jorge Luis Borges

2001-11-12T00:17:00.000-06:00

Generalist Rant

My name is Martin Jensen… and I’m a (sob) generalist. I know that the first step is admitting that I am powerless over my generalism.

That’s the scenario. The term “generalist” is almost a disparagement these days. It’s explicit sometimes: “Just a _________.” “A mere _________.” More often, it’s implicit. Unless you are a specialist in the field of x, your opinion does not matter. Unless you can rightfully append a series of letters after your name, you don’t get a place at the table.

You see it in the discussion groups online, where participants pump themselves up with with their many accomplishments, in listservs where the emailers denegrate the outclasses. The very language that is used is laced with jargon designed to exclude.

I have worked in the sphere of technology for nearly twenty years, and I have thus far managed to avoid the narrowing labels, the restrictive job titles, the paths to certification that just didn't appeal to me. I’m not suggesting that this is what everyone should do – I know the value of the specialists, and I laud them for their skillsets. But give me my due. I know what I’m talking about. More importantly, I know what you’re talking about. And I can explain it to someone who doesn't.

I know enough about network design, enough about computer hardware, enough about databases and webservers and interfaces and software deployment to be in a position to help make sure all the pieces fit together.

I also know a little about non-technical stuff. I know something about advertising, presentations, poetry. I know something about nonprofit management and government and environmental issues. I know something about parenting. I know something about blendered families and mental health and living with diabetes. I know something about history, war and peace, new wave, jazz and string theory.

You probably know a lot more about at least one of these things than I do. If so, I want to talk to you. I want to learn more.

Or you may be saying, “Big deal! That list doesn’t contain anything special. I got more than that in my bag.” Great! Get in touch with your inner generalist.

But don’t tell me I have nothing worthwhile to say because I don’t know as much about your favorite topic as you do. I’ve got a lot to say, and I have a point of view you may find useful. And that’s why I’m venturing an opinion. Because when it comes to the design of your new technological innovation, or the principles of your new management approach, or the way you want to change the world, you are in a far better position to make things happen than I am. I can offer only what my range of experiences and my unique point of view provide in the way of insight.

I’m the wall that bounces your ball back at odd angles, sometimes with more force than you have thrown it. That’s my value proposition, man.

2001-11-11T23:00:00.000-06:00

For everyone who's been asking, and apparently, for those who haven't: Meme Central - Memes, Memetics, and Mind Virus Resource "Memes are the basic building blocks of our minds and culture, in the same way that genes are the basic building blocks of biological life." - Richard Brodie

2001-11-11T18:25:00.000-06:00

Fifty Veteran’s Days Later, I Say Thank You

    by Martin Jensen
    November 11, 1995

Today I took my son,
    needing style and warmth,
To the resale shop for
    a military overcoat.
The fine wool, I knew,
    would cut the wind,
Protect him from the elements
    like a father’s steady hand.

How could I know,
    a CO like me
Would turn so easily back
    to your example?
A young man in love, you
    willingly deferred your exemptions
Put college and future on hold
Endured the questioning of
    your German heritage
And travelled West to East to serve.

You lived a history you never volunteered
    to tell
But was filtered down to me, its
    result and beneficiary,
In tidbit tales
Passed on, second hand,
And hung in my heart like ribboned medals;

Today and fifty years ago today
I ride with you through the wasted city
The beautiful eyes you passed to me
Survey the blackened rubble
    of a people and their dreams
The light-and-darkness of the bombflash
    flows straight from our eyes
    to our hearts
Which harden-and-soften
    in secret places
For our sons
For hanging ribboned medals after us.

2001-11-11T16:39:00.000-06:00

How God Makes God This description of Peter Small's CD-ROM is the only thing that has ever made me wish I have a Macintosh. Alas, it's not quite enough.

2001-11-10T01:18:00.000-06:00

Okay, so I can hear all you "real" bloggies getting pretty po'ed, if you didn't already quit reading. Blogs are supposed to be pithy and short, and definitely composed in real time -- it says so in the blogger bible. Not to mention I changed the default so that my days' entries read top-to-bottom chronologically, not upside down (most recent first) like the rest of the bloggies do it. Problem is, I tend to think of things from beginning to end, and that's how I want it to end up on the page. So I've posted essays instead of blurbs, sequence instead of instance. What's next? Am I going to exclude the prerequisite expletives? Expletive no!

2001-11-10T00:53:00.000-06:00

The Psycho Realtor From Hell, Chapter II
The Closing - October 6, 2001

Well, despite ALL THE TIME I've had to think about it, I really don't know how to tell this story in a funny way. If the lessons of the past few weeks have taken hold, then maybe I should just keep typing, and assume it will all work out in the end. Unfortunately, it is so late in the evening my realtor, my closer, and my lender are all probably asleep by now (or at least celebrating at a safe distance from their cell phones), so I can't call them for advice, as I have so many times in the past. So I guess it's just me and you, dear reader.

It would be hard to tell the story of how many times we were prepared to close, scheduled to close, arranged for kid pickups and work excuses and routes back and forth across the city during rush hours. Hard because there were so many times, and hard because I forget easily, even now, hours after I quit banging my head against the wall of the new house.

Suffice to say the latest false alarm came last Friday, when the seller suddenly discovered (so many discoveries, perhaps a descendent of Columbus?) that the money set aside to pay the lender was not properly reflected in the payoff amount, and couldn't be transferred to the title company to pay off the difference because the funds were designated in thus-and-such a way. Oh, and they were a little short on the remainder, as it turns out.

At some point I talked to my realtor, who said he had finally turned the contracts over to his father, who happens to be a retired attorney. The father makes a couple calls and finds out what we could have surmised -- the bankruptcy (that one that the Psycho Realtor From Hell said was "over, six months ago -- no problem" before we made an offer on the house, "just a formality" as the first closing date approached, "preventable" when she miscalculated the estimated cost to close and postponed the closing with 36 hours notice, "who told you there was a bankruptcy?" when she threw her fit in our insurance agent's office on the day we were supposed to move) was actually a full foreclosure, with collection costs, attorneys' fees, a trust account to pay off creditors and back taxes, all in line ahead of us in our real estate transaction.

The father also looks at the contract and says, "but look here -- the modifications to the Early Occupancy Agreement say they can't throw your client out for the seller's inability to close, and they have to let them live there rent free. (Other than these emails, they were the most significant thing I've written lately.) "Tell your people to sit back and wait for them to get their act together." Only, I don't think he said "act."

So meanwhile, the extension on our loan approval is about to expire. The new date for the closing is scheduled is the very date of that expiration. October 5, 2001 (Note to numerologists: 10052001 looks the same right-side-up as upside-down. I'm sure I don't have to explain the significance of this fact to you, of all people.) That's Friday afternoon, at 4:00. (Note to readers of arcane books of gnostic prophecy: If you know the significance of this day and time, please don't explain it to me. I don't care.)

So by now, I am not only on a first-name basis with my realtor, my closer, and my lender, but we have nicknames for each other. My realtor is "Beamer" -- not because he drives one, but because his name is Scott, and I keep hoping he will transport me off of this unfriendly planet; my closer is "Patience," for her willingness to go through each of the closing statements with me, line-by-line, over several phone calls and many protestations; my lender is "Greenspan" -- she never actually lowered her rate, but she did help me bridge the gap between what I could afford and what I ended up having to pay. For me, they ascribed a common nickname. I was "You Again."

They also had things to say about PRFH. Greenspan said PRFH would not take her word that our loan was approved -- she insisted on having everything in writing. She also asked for a copy of our appraisal. Greenspan said that the appraisal belonged to us, that she could not and would not provide it. PRFH then asked if our rent-free status constituted an "unreasonable inducement to purchase" that would prevent the lender from being able to give the sale their blessing. Wasn't there a law passed to that effect a few years ago? Greenspan told her no, they were fully prepared to lend us the money, and she had never even heard of such a law. PRFH said "you had better check with your legal department on this one."

Of course, I was gratified to hear the news that the seller's agent was looking out for our best interest in this way. Why, if we weren't able to clear this mortgage hurdle, the contract would fall through, and she might have to sell the house to someone else at a higher price!

Beamer, of course, was the chief engineer of the operation. "She's a battle-axe fa'shoor! The photon torpedoes air seemin' ta have nae effect a tall, an tha shields air daen ta three. One mair d'rect hit, an' we may be doon foor!" He then proceeded to spew forth a stream of Hibernian vulgarities potent enough to penetrate even the hardiest of corporate email cursefilters.

Of PRFH, Patience observed sweetly, "My, she sure does call here a lot!"

No news being good news, we received the best of news all week.

On Friday morning, I tried Patience. "Yes," she said, "they're supposed to be wiring the funds. I have a message in to their closer." Tick-tock. "You Again? Yes, the funds were supposed to have been wired. I have left a voicemail and an email for confirmation." Tick-tock. "You Again? Well, it takes some time for the wire to get routed properly." Tic. "Look You, you might as well just come on in. The wire is supposed to be on its way."

I left work early and headed to the bank. I had them write a check in my name for more money than I had ever held in my hands before, but at this point I was too befogged to appreciate it, much less to consider the myriad of alternative uses for it. The closest I got to a realization of anything was when I asked the teller for a paperclip, so I could prevent the draft from flying out of the folder I clutched in my quivering fingers as I traversed the windy parking lot.

I suspend my hatred for all drivers who use cell phones for those specific moments when I need to make a call. I rung up Allie. "You have Livi? Good. I wanted to warn you against taking Harvard. The construction is still a mess. I'm a few blocks away, but you'd be better off taking Riverside or Peoria. See you in a few. Bye."

I arrived at the lobby of the title company. The harried receptionist informed me that Patience was in another room, working on another closing. I mentioned that I had talked to another woman when Patience had been on another line, or in another closing, out to lunch, nursing her old football injury, etc., and could she check with that person to see whether the wire had come in? The receptionist picked up the phone, struck a few keys, and announced my request. "Umhm? Umhm. Yes. Yes. Him Again." She looked me straight in the face and said, "The wire is supposed to be on its way."

There was a cluster of chairs. Magazines spread out across a couple of low tables. I sat down.

I got up. I had left the contracts in my briefcase, and I felt a linusian need to hold them close to my body. "I left something in the car," I explained to the receptionist, as if she might be disappointed if the long-awaited wire came in and I were not there to share the moment with her. In a moment, I returned with the fragmented envelope and the sacred texts it contained. She regarded me archly and returned to her phone bank. "I'm sorry, every room is full. No, he is in a closing. She is also in a closing. Can I send you to her voicemail?"

I waited a full ninety seconds. "While I was away, did you happen to receive word about that wire?"

My cell phone chimed at my hip and I grappled with it, finally subduing it and bringing it to my ear. "Honey! Are you all right? Is everything okay? What's that? QuikTrip? Diet Pepsi? Yes, Diet Pepsi is fine. I'd suggest you pick up a Dr. Pepper for Max. Well, he'll want one when we pick him up. It's a small investment with a large return. See you in a minute. Okay. Bye."

I check the contract. I linger over the Early Occupancy Agreement, especially those inserted clauses. I check for the rental amounts and do some calculating on the back of the envelope. We are probably getting charged for a day or two of rent we do not owe, but it amounts to less than three digits, which, by now, is completely acceptable.

Beamer pops out through an office door. I find his presence reassuring, there being no maritime directive, prime or otherwise, that the chief engineer must go down with the ship. He sits and chats until Allie and Olivia arrive. Allie hands me my drink, then looks at her own and says, "Gee, Scott. I should have thought to bring you a Dr. Pepper." When you work with someone long enough, you know what they drink.

One of his partners swooshes through, and he is off, presumably for a last-minute calibration of the dilithium crystals.

The door to the street swings open and an icy blast pierces the lobby like a dagger. The woman enters in a tweed suit, platinum hair, spine straightened as if on a forge. She marches to the receptionist's desk and presents herself.

"Hellew. Lowanda Dirtedowne, PRFH. I'm here for the Jensen Closing. Yes. Thenk yew."

It's her. In the flesh, or whatever. The Psycho Realtor From Hell.

She hovers by the counter momentarily, as if she might have a question. As if she might see the half-dozen empty chairs on the other side of the lobby. As if...

"HELL-leww! You must be the Jensens! I'm Lowanda Dirtedowne! Sew glad to meet yew." She sits, less than spitting distance from all three of us. I did a little assessment to be sure.

"Looks like I'll be getting that Dr. Pepper now!" said Allie, and promptly rose and left the building. I've had some time to think about this, and I must say, I don't really blame her. It was not technically spousal abandonment, and it wasn't entirely that she thought she might haul off and smack the woman if she had to be near her. She just had the best first excuse and she used it. She's good that way.

Sensing weakness, the Shealtor turned to me.

"Sew," she began, "Lewks like you got a verry gewd deal," -- there was the briefest of pauses here, which filled immediately with all the words I might have used at that moment to describe the deal, none of which was 'good' -- "on the rent."

I had been consciously avoiding eye contact, but now I looked at her coolly. "We would rather have owned the house."

"Well, we can't always have what we want, can we? There are rules to follow, there are laws, professional standards." I looked for any glimmer of irony. She went on. "Why, you were lucky! That attorney wanted to throw the whole thing out -- cancel the whole deal and kick you right out of that house. I explained that he wouldn't get paid, we wouldn't get paid, they wouldn't get paid. He understood this of course, but he was furious. Why, in my life I never had a man curse at me like that!" Of all the fabrications, falsehoods and mendacities that this woman had perpetrated, this was, perhaps, the least plausible. Still, not wanting to compete with the aforementioned lawyer's superlative accomplishment, I said nothing in reply.

Presently, Allie returned from the car. Apparently Olivia had chosen a Code Red rather than a Dr. Pepper for Max, but this was not addressed. A good excuse, after all, needs no explanation.

Lowanda continued her attempts at chummy conversation (note to linguists: the word "chummy" is best understood here in its piscatorial rather than its collegial sense). "And this must be your daughter?"

"Yes." I said.

Olivia, with her unwavering sense of self and unerring faculties of character evaluation, did exactly what I hoped. She continued reading her book without looking up at The Bad Lady.

Finally she turned to Allie. "Lowanda Dirtedowne. I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name?" Allie, who until this moment had not even acknowledged the woman's existence, much less offered anything of hers for the woman to catch, spoke what was, to me, the most powerful word in the English language; my sword and my staff; the thing that had brought me thus far and would carry me through: In sotto voce, she said her name.

PRFH, by this point, was lurching forward, thrusting her hand toward my wife, who, holding her purse, portfolio and Code Red, possessed once again the ready excuse to wordlessly refuse it. "I'm sorry? Hallie? Ellie? Allison? Is it Allison? Allison then?" It was as if she thought my wife was unsure of her own name, or had somehow lost it, and needed one assigned to her immediately, for the sake of the closing. Ever helpful, Lowanda filled the need only she had the vision to perceive.

"Allie."

I really can't claim any insight into the power of women, much less the power that flows between them in moments such as this. All I know is that Lowanda, as if struck by a phaser set mercifully to "stun," fell back into her chair, silent. No more chit-chat. Her chum bucket had been overturned, and her nets came up empty.

Beamer sprinted into the room through an office door. "The wire! The wire came through!"

For reasons my masculinity prevents me from revealing, most of the papers needed to be signed only by Allie, not by me. She sat directly across from Lowanda; Beamer and I at a safe, consultory distance. Her artful signature graced page after page, until the tax form granting us the mortgage exemption came to the top of the stack. "Well, there's a problem," she said, "Allie is not my real name. On my tax forms it's 'Alice.'"

There was a flurry of discussion about how this might have happened, who could have made the mistake? Would it be okay? I pointed out that "Allie" was on our checks, and the government seemed to have no problem accepting such payments. Soon, someone produced a form that said "Name" at the top, and had a space below for "Also Known As."

Beside "Name," she wrote "Allie," a.k.a. "Alice C.," and the house was ours.

2001-11-10T00:43:00.000-06:00

The Psycho Realtor From Hell, Chapter I
In which I reply at length to my wife's optimistic change of address message, then send it to everyone I think might read it - September 5, 2001

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Allie Jensen [SMTP:alliej@att.net]
> Sent: Monday, August 27, 2001 12:20
> To: Allie Jensen
> Subject: New numbers
>
> Friday August 31st is moving day!
> Our new address is xxxxx South Hudson Place, Tulsa, OK yyyyy
> New phone 918-nnn-mmmm (which may or may not be hooked up on Friday)
> but we'll have our cells on ...
> Allie-918-ido-ntth
> Marty-918-ink-sooo
>
> You local types will be getting a schedule of the actual event as
> details solidify. Know that we welcome extra hands, and even
> curious on-lookers, especially from Saturday on. We are likely not closing
> until mid afternoon on Friday. Our computer will probably be in use
> through Wednesday, maybe Thursday morning, and then not again until
> the dust settles.
>
> So, Stay in TOUCH!
>
> Light,
> Allie

After Allie sent this message, a man from the phone company came and blamed us for the terrible static we had been receiving at the old house. He unplugged it and left.

I was all ready to forward this message from work on Wednesday morning when it occurred to me to call my realtor and make sure everything was "go" for the move. He said, "let me get back to you on that."

The closing was postponed. We tried to negotiate an early occupancy agreement, since it was the seller's -um- oversight that caused the closing delay. Friday afternoon, we were loading the truck at our old house with no idea where we would be going. The seller's agent, after a series of exchanges with our realtors, our closer, and our insurance agent which left everyone wondering about not only her integrity but her very sanity, did not like the wording of the insurance rider (which she insisted we buy, though we have no insurable interest in the seller's property), and would not give up the key. I literally hid in the back yard of the new house from the movers, who said they needed to unload the truck somewhere because it had to be returned by five o'clock.

We were in. The phone was on. The water was on. The pilot light was lit under the water heater.

But the water did not get hot. I crawled under the heater again. No dice. Tried to find a master valve to the gas. Nothing. It was dark. We went to sleep.

Next day, ONG guy came out. We wanted him just to turn on the gas and leave. First he asked to see the water heater (heart beats very fast -- heater not up to code!). I moved away the mattresses we had strategically placed in front of the door. "Pilot out, gas off. Good." (Glad I did that 15 minutes ago!). "You got a problem here. This is supposed to be eighteen inches off the floor." I glance up at the silver ductwork overhead, all of which will need to be relocated if he makes me retrofit. Is that a vapor hanging in the air? No, just dollar signs floating away.... "Yep. Eighteen Inch Rule. I can't light the pilot if it's not eighteen inches off the ground. You'll have to light this one yourself." The utility gods have shown their mercy.

He goes out to his truck. It takes him twenty minutes to fill out his forms, check his radio, smoke his cigarette. Finally, the gas man is gone and I can breathe again.

For the third time, I crawl on my belly in the garage and light the pilot. My nephew Dave has flown in from Syracuse to help. By this time, he has read the manual. There's stuff in there about scalding children and leaking tanks. "Some condensation is normal. If water flow is excessive, seek a professional." We both agree that this is good advice.

We move boxes, unwrap items, arrange furniture. Eat, drink, collapse. Allie has gone to back to old house for something (oh, other closing got postponed, too, for different reasons. This only makes a difference to the extent that having cash is useful in such situations.)

She comes back yelling, shaking me on my new sofa. "Wake up! There's water running out of the garage!"

Bleary-eyed, I assess the situation. Water is coming out from under the water heater. Water heater bad. Stop water heater before it makes me move boxes out of garage.

Dave is in the background saying helpful things like, "Earlier there was a toilet running upstairs, so I jiggled the handle." He carries ten times his weight in boxes, so we do not expect him to be bright.

I turn off the gas, then turn off the pilot. Amazingly, this has no effect on the flow of water. There is a valve on top of the heater. Either it is too stiff or I am, so I push a screwdriver through the holes in the handle and use my superior intellect to leverage the valve closed. Momentarily, the water stops flowing out from under the heater. The last surge of it seems to be carrying some dry leaves, but I realize, it is only dollar signs floating out into the driveway. Next week, I will seek a professional. Until then, I will have to rely on cold showers.

Next day, we start with bagels and decide to devote ourselves to making the house otherwise liveable. I am starting to become comfortable, though it has been several days since I have bathed. I take a moment to enjoy the new facilities, then return downstairs to join family and friends in our united efforts. I am going to get something out of the garage when, whoof!

The water is back, and with a vengeance. Now it has something else floating in it, and it's not dollar signs.

"Honey?" I call. "Remember what I said about fixing the water heater? Well, I've got some good news and I've got some other news."

She calls Roto Rooter. How much is a holiday/weekend emergency service visit? Oh. Do you take Visa?

She leaves Max and me to handle the situation and goes off with everyone with any sense to scrub thirteen years of accumulated grime from the walls and floor of the other house. I turn to Max. "I don't know how to say this son, but it could be awhile until he gets here and you may have to, um, mark your territory."

"That's okay, Dad. I already did."

Roto Rooter guy: "Waal, you gotta cleanout up their on the second story, and I'm gonna hafta radio for an upstairs man."

Not much question here. I definitely need help from the upstairs man. I consult my financial advisor, "Honey, remember what they said about holiday weekend emergency service rate? Well, now we need a two-man crew. It will only cost $260 unless it takes them more than an hour."

The good news: They did it in an hour.

The other news: They didn't find a root. They think my pipe may have collapsed, or been made out of orangeburg, or shimmed out of line with the city dipthong or something like that. Whatever it is, it will cost $2500, if that's what it is. Just see if it happens again. Nice house, by the way.

By Monday, we have hot water and flushing toilets. The dishwasher, questionable during the inspection, is working, as is the upper oven, which had been written off during the EMP. We set up beds. We move things around in the library (which Allie has dubbed "The Guybrary" since it is the one room I have requested be mine to decorate without her artistic input. My male friends, visiting later, anoint it "The Studly." Cassidy unwittingly plugs the computer into the phone line without realizing it doesn't work. It works. Things are going well.

On Tuesday, I return to work and 78 unread emails. Two scheduled conference calls and one unscheduled. The closing on my old house is to happen sometime Wednesday. That is, it was. I get a call at lunchtime asking if I can close at 5:00 today. Sure! Allie goes first and signs; I show up later and sign. My realtor will meet me there, wait for the new owners, and bring me a check.

We're in the title company office, laughing with Jennifer, another victim of the Psychotic Realtor from Hell. My realtor's cel phone rings and he stops laughing and leaves the room. Jennifer leaves too.

"It's just a minor delay. Wells Fargo. California. First thing tomorrow morning. I'll call you."

Today at lunchtime I call Allie. Heard anything? No. You?

I am trying to think of a way to close out this story. The phone rings. Allie says, "Jennifer says she has a check. She just needs
you to sign a termite certificate. She says you should stop by. Yeah. First thing in the morning."

2001-11-10T00:30:00.000-06:00

Already the Banality I Promised Not To Post

So now I’m fritterrin’ my time away with all these bloggers and listers. See, once you join in these online communities, you gotta invest the most precious thing you have – TIME. And time is precious, especially when you’re paid by the hour and you have this character defect that only lets you bill for the hours that you actually work. That’s the kind of chump I am.

Only, when I look into my heart of hearts, I know it is time well-spent, even if I have to buy it myself. I’m meeting people from Germany and Sillycon Valley and God Knows Where. They got the same kinds of issues I’ve got, only different perspectives. I know that I may or may not find some glory hole someday that leads to my overcoming this sense of “just around the corner”-ness that whispers into my every waking hour. But that’s not what it’s about. It’s about the moment. Today. This life, this message, this word, this work.

So now it’s midnight-thirty and I don’t really know what to say, but I’m compelled to write. That’s gotta be a good thing.

Doesn’t it?

2001-11-08T00:51:00.000-06:00

This is an essay I composed after having one of those, "Aha! I could win this one!" moments while listing to an episode of "The Savvy Traveler" on NPR last year. The contest was to answer, in 250 words or less, who you would choose to be stranded on a desert island with, and why? Here is my losing entry:

A Day in the People’s Republic of Paradise

©2000 Martin Jensen

At dawn, I rose to polish the chrome. Something on the beach caught my eye.

“Fidel! A message!”

Fidel yawned and scratched. I handed him the bottle, which he smashed against the fender.

He squinted. “South Pacific Bell. They no install DSL. 2700 miles to substation.”

Fidel spit. “Subjugation of masses by imperial oppressors.”

“Fidel, the only Imperial here is this ’57 Chrysler. And quit calling me ‘the masses.’ You know how I feel about my weight.”

“Very well. Is time for calisthenics.”

Fidel lit a cigar while I did jumping jacks. When he tired, he beckoned me. “Clockwise!” he commanded.

I chauffeured him around to the far side of the isle. At the mouth of the lagoon, I stopped to cheer. For three hours he held forth on our noble struggle. I got back behind the wheel.

“Nothing like spontaneous demonstration. Brings out – how you say? Eloquence.”

I drove. He leaned out the window, waving.

That evening, he called from his hut. “Piña colada, por favor!”

I brought the drink. Fidel told of our victories against the enemies of the Revolution.

“Uno más! And roll me another cigar!”

“Your ration is one per day. Any idea how much hibiscus nectar goes into a fifth of rum? And chill the stogies -- this hut stinks!”

He held out his arms. “Amigo!”

Three coladas later, he leaned forward and whispered, “Martín. Why you choose me as illustrious leader?”

“Stranded indefinitely on an island paradise? I went with experience.”

Agree? Let me know where you would send me.

2001-11-07T23:26:00.000-06:00

This site is about doing your/my best, whatever that is. See, we each get a lever, and we each get to choose where we put it. A friend of mine, who has worked with nonprofits for many years, bemoaned the fact that some of the greatest case workers he ever met had jobs as executive secretaries, while some of the greatest -- well, he didn't know if they were really good at anything, but they ended up as case workers for nonprofits. Of course, a lot of great case workers actually do work as case workers, a fact which we all should be thankful for, and hence give generously to some local charity.

But really, it was Chris Locke who got me off my butt (I have friends who would object to words such as "ass", so I won't use them in this blogger) and start publishing the things that I write. See, that's my lever. And actually, I don't really have friends who object to the word "ass" or even "Wankel rotary engine," for that matter. So I guess the gloves are off. Okay, enough farting around. I'm going to see how this bloggie thing works.