Words of Wisdom

I was about 500 words into an a column couple of years ago, when I stopped to get a cup of coffee. When I came back and glanced over what I'd written I realized that it was awful -- so awful that it could tarnish the reputation of all poorly thought out drek. As I stared at it trying to decide whether I should attempt to repair it or throw it away, I flashed back a few decades to the time I helped my Great Uncle Rudy build a fence. I held the boards, he drove the nails.

After a while he hit a nail wrong and bent it. He straightened it and tried again. It bent again. He straightened it and bent it twice more.

“Why don't you just get a new nail?” I asked.

He stood up, braced one hand against the fence post, stared at me from beneath his magnificent, bushy eyebrows and said, “Anyone can drive a straight nail. It takes a carpenter to drive a crooked nail.”

“I wish I'd said that,” James Whistler once told Oscar Wilde.

“Don't worry, you will,” replied Wilde.

For me, a perfect phrase, is a breath stopper. The best are re-quoted so often they become cliches.

I am not a carpenter, so instead of trying to straighten out the column, I decided to assemble some of my family's words of wisdom that have not yet become cliches.

Don't feel like you're making progress just because you're moving forward. My grandfather said this after watching my brother trying to mow the lawn. He had taken the blade off the lawnmower to sharpen it and accidentally bolted it back on backwards. The mower was flogging the hell out of the grass, but it wasn't mowing.

You don't follow a furrow that's crooked as a hound's leg. I was about 12 years old and my grandfather had put me on a tractor and told me to disk up a part of a field that he wanted to plant. I tried to keep a wheel right next to the previous furrow, as he'd told me to; but by the time he came back to check on me, my furrows were looking like a longitudinal graph of President Obama's approval ratings.

If they could suck as hard as they can blow, they wouldn't have a problem. That was my father's reaction when I told him I'd attended a meeting of governors from southwestern states that wanted to pipe irrigation water down from Canada. The problem: The cost of pumping it over the Rocky Mountains.

Be cautious, but don't live in fear. This came from my mother-in-law. I don't know the original context, but I love it. I tend to repeat it whenever someone suggests that we Americans need to compromise our values so we can protect ourselves from people who hate us. Perhaps they hate us because we keep compromising our values.

Just circle around, fire a couple of shots in the air and head home. My wonderful, octogenarian Aunt Daphine, down in rural South Georgia, said she does that when her daughter calls at night and says she's home alone and hearing funny noises. Aunt Daphine isn't speaking metaphorically; she actually grabs Grandad's old pistol, climbs into her golf cart and heads over to her daughter's farmhouse half a country mile away. Daphine has been living alone on the old family farm ever since Uncle Ben died a couple of years ago, but she claims she doesn't worry about her safety. “Everybody knows I'll shoot,” she says. I believe her.

You can sleep when you're dead, old man. When my daughter was still in elementary school, she used that line to get me out of bed on Saturday mornings and to keep me from napping on Sunday afternoons. It's the perfect antidote to my grandfather's observation: If you just lie down for a few minutes, the notion that you need to run out and do something will pass.

I'll close with one of my own, the shortest of the lot.

It's my ball! I screamed that at the top of my lungs during a high school football game. It was late in the fourth quarter, we were close to the goal line, I hadn't caught a pass all night and the oversized kid who'd been kicking my butt since the opening whistle had my jersey in one hand and the pass I should have caught in the other. Then came an Incredible Hulk moment. I shouted, “it's my ball”, tore the ball away from the kid and carried it and him into the end zone. Forty-plus years later, saying “it's my ball” still seems to help when I confront a challenge. Shouting it seems to help more.

So as the new year rolls out before us like a blank canvas, I humbly offer these few words of wisdom:

As you move through the year, don't feel you are making progress just because you are moving forward; look ahead and make sure the furrow you are following isn't as crooked as a hound's leg. Be cautious, but don't live in fear. If you do become fearful, just circle around, fire a couple of shots in the air and head home. Everyone needs to know that you'll shoot.

Have a great 2013. It's your ball.

That New Job Smell

The best jobs I ever had were the new ones –  every new one. Since college, I've had 16 different jobs with 11 employers, and on the first day of every new job it felt like the best job ever. The first week is magic; make a wish and it is fulfilled: a special desk chair, a new dictionary, a really cool staple remover . . .

The answer to every questions I ask comes with an exclamation point. 

Can I re-design the website? “Sure!” How about we start a weekly newsletter, I can edit it. “Go for it!” How about we convert everything to touchscreen apps. “Great idea!”

Then comes month two when the foolish enormity of my bravado becomes apparent and I realize that Superman, Green Lantern and Steve Jobs combined could not fulfill the promises I've traded for the honor of having a new stapler.

In a few days I'll become the head of the IT/IS department for an entire county. The data under my control is measured in terabytes. We have servers with 16 multi-core processors capable of sifting through tens of thousands of records in nanoseconds.

I'm getting a new X-Pad, mobile Wi-Fi and the self-inflicted expectation that I will do nothing less than revolutionize document management, video conferencing and remote customer service; and usher in a new era of transparency in government.

The challenge has some quirks. The county consists of an odd collection of islands where high-tech entrepreneurs retire and Luddites take refuge. A place where the latest Gen wireless technology is considered mandatory by some, while others protest any new source of radio waves is a threat to livestock and human health. Not surprisingly, cell phone coverage and high speed Internet is as unreliable in the county as a brother-in-law's lawnmower.

Nevertheless, my 17th new job looks like it's going to be exciting, challenging and fulfilling. Maybe I've been around this block a few times, but whenever I walk into an office and breathe in that new job smell, springtime blossoms in my soul.

Shampoo - a Short, Short story

Joni gave a great shampoo and an okay haircut. I'd been to her often enough that we'd adopted the comfortable barber/regular customer tone that invites intimacy. So, on this particular day when I sat down in her chair and asked what was going on in her life, I expected a good story. Joni did not disappoint. She smiled a slightly wicked smile and reported that she'd had a blind date.

“How'd it work out?”

She leaned the chair back, laid a towel across my chest and set up her tools and shampoo before answering. Finally she said, “He seemed nice enough; so I let him kiss me good night and all; but when I went back and parked across the street from his house the next night, you know what I saw?”

“You had a date with him the next night?” I asked.

“No, I just wanted to check him out, you know, just to see what he did when he thought nobody was watching.”

She was shampooing my hair and she had very strong hands.

“About 8 o'clock he brings this woman back to his house, can you believe that? This was one night after his date with me.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, I went up and knocked on the door and when he opened it, I told him that I didn't like sloppy seconds and he should never to call me again or I'd have my father pay him a visit. I said it real loud so his new girl friend was sure to hear.”

“You'd slept with him?”

“Do you think I'm the kind of girl that would go to bed with a guy on the first date?”

She stopped what she was doing and stepped around so I could look at her. She was in her mid-thirties, trim and had a pretty face, but there was something about her that reminded me of that line from Jaws where Quint says, “The thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes.”

As Joni used a straight razor to square off my sideburns and shave the back of my neck, I wondered how many second dates she'd had in her life, but I didn't ask.

A Matter of Life & Death

        I'd rather die fast than ever live slow
            --Melissa Etheridge, The Shadow of a Black Crow

The great thing about depression is that it takes away your fear of death.

In the heart of winter, living just  half a degree latitude below Canada, it's dark when I go to work, often damp and gray all day, then at 4:00 P.M., it starts to get dark again.

During my first couple of winters on San Juan Island, I couldn't understand why darkness kept gathering inside my head. At times even trivial problems and setbacks made my life feel almost hopeless. I was never  suicidal, but if the grim reaper had walked into my library, on some evenings I'd have offered him a comfy chair and a brandy.

Luckily, a friend recognized what was going on and, with light therapy, exercise, vitamin D and meditation, winter depression is now little more than a nuisance. But the darkness did leave me a gift: the ability to think more dispassionately about death. And on reflection, the distinction between life and death doesn't seem as simple as it once did.

People who do data processing are familiar with a concept called fuzzy logic. They use it to make sense out of things that don't fall into neat categories. Is an apple with a bite out of it still an apple? Perhaps so, but at some point, as it is being eaten, the apple ceases to be an apple. Fuzzy logic provides a system to estimate how much appleness exists at any point in the transition; so if your challenge is to report how many apples there are in a room where people are eating apples, fuzzy logic can help you come up with an answer.

Applying fuzzy logic to human life, one might define a 100% live human being as a self-aware creature, capable of locomotion, taking care of its basic needs, rational thought, and understanding and communicating abstract ideas. Using that definition, a new-born baby would score fairly low for humanness, but most will progress to perfect, or near-perfect scores within a few years.

At the other end of life, the humanizing process starts to reverse itself, and we start shedding those human characteristics, often one by one.

Franchised “retirement communities” apply their own brand of fuzzy logic to the aging marketplace, promising to take care of us in the most appropriate surroundings as we go from a time when our needs are primarily for golfing and bridge partners until, at the end, the time when we need a safe environment where our physical creature can survive, while our essential humanity –  ability to understand, communicate and care for ourselves – fades away.

A couple of thousand years ago, the Stoic Philosopher Seneca, contemplated his own impending suicide and proclaimed: “A wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can.”

I choose to believe that a wise man will keep living until he can't truly be alive. If we linger on the fact that the light is fading, we squander the light that remains.

Hope is the light in our lives and fear the darkness. The statement, “Where there's life, there's hope,” raises the question: “Does life continue after all hope is gone?”  Some people radiate hope, others are so afraid of losing it, they they are afraid to use it.

I recently found a great on-street parking space while visiting Northwest Portland. It's right in front of where I was staying and there is no meter or time limit. It's a parking space of such amazing quality and convenience that most mortals will not find such a place in a lifetime. Once I possessed it, my inclination was to not move my car during the whole visit, because if I used the car, I'd lose this incredible space. I actually walked, in the rain, to a couple of places I might have been inclined to drive to because I was afraid of losing my great parking space. For all the good it did me, my car might as well have been impounded.

My own fear in life is not that death will come and take me; it's that I'll park my hopes and aspirations somewhere safe and comfortable until it's too late to set them out on a new adventure.

At funerals I find that my emotions correspond to the amount of life the guest of honor still had when death came. When someone filled with life and hope dies, a light goes out of our lives. But there is only relief when a heart stops beating inside a body whose humanity had long since departed.

My own hope is that when the final words are spoken over my ashes, my loved ones will be able to follow Dr. Seuss's advice: “Don't cry because it's over,” he said. “Smile because it happened.”

The Granny Test

I had a client tell me once that he had decided to retained my company for a computer job because, when he asked how fast an Internet connection he needed I answered, “You just have to make sure that you can blow as hard as your customers can suck.” He said that was the first thing a computer person ever told him that he could understand.

I sympathize. I recently inherited responsibility for an Information Technology department and now I'm receiving commercial emails with subjects like: “ERP for Growing Companies”, and “Best Practices for Managing 3PAR Thin Provisioning.”

I'm hardly a babe in the digital woods – but the subject lines of those emails are gobbledygook before my eyes. That's not to say that the content is worthless or incomprehensible. Computer technology is just one of the multitude of professions that use jargon that is a combination of verbal shorthand and shibboleth – it facilitates communication among the initiated while being incomprehensible to outsiders.

Unfortunately jargon also helps mask incompetence or laziness. An alarm should go off whenever someone says, “It's too complicated to explain to someone who doesn't have training in the field.”

When I was a journalist I heard that sort of thing a lot, but I was struck by the fact that I didn't hear anything of the sort from any of the group of Nobel Laureates or particle physicists I interviewed at a conference on sub-atomic physics, or for that matter from any of the scientists I spoke with who had done groundbreaking work in a particular field. 

Albert Einstein famously said, “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.”

Most people feel that they have a stake in making other people believe that what they do is difficult and requires a lot of skill and intelligence. The irony is that, as a rule, the people with the most knowledge, skill and intelligence, make what they're doing look easy.

Do Cows Go to Church?

As I was making breakfast this morning I looked up to see a house wren fly up and perch on the bird feeder we have affixed to our kitchen window. It looked at me for a moment, then took off in a wild, noisy flutter of feathers. It took me a minute to realize that the bird had seen me frying an egg. I'm just glad it hadn't seen me carving our Thanksgiving turkey.

That got me thinking. What goes through a cow's mind when it sees someone drinking milk? What would you hear if you could sneak into the back pew of a bovine church? Perhaps it would be the lowing voice of an old bull reading from 2nd chapter of the Book of Holstein:

“Beware of consorting with humans. They may say they only want to play with your teats, but they will get you pregnant, drink your milk and EAT YOUR CHILDREN.”

I've always been leery of anthropomorphizing animals. Both sets of my grandparents and all my great-grandparents and great uncles and aunts were farmers. I once helped my uncle butcher a hog and often helped load steers onto trucks and looked into their big brown eyes, knowing that they would soon be steaks and roasts and hamburger. But at the end of the day, I have to say that they were mighty tasty.

I've been away from farm life for a lot of years now and I rarely come face-to-face with livestock or poultry unless it's shrink-wrapped and labeled something like “flank steak” or “chicken strips.” It's easier it ignore the obvious if you don't know your main course's real name was “Pedro” (the pet turkey that became Thanksgiving dinner in Giant) or “Eddie” (The delivery boy who became dinner in The Rocky Horror Picture Show).

On a day-to-day basis now I see cartoon cows and pigs more often than the real thing, and somehow these silly images of humanized animals makes thinking about killing and eating the real ones a little uncomfortable.

Of course we know animals feel pain, show affection and – if you've ever watched lambs leaping about in the springtime or a horse or dog running across a field all-out, ears laid back and  dust flying, for no apparent reason – you know that animals have a sense of play and of joy.

Do animals have souls? Does God get ticked off when we kill and eat them? It's certainly food for thought.

For the sake of our own souls, I believe we must treat all of God's creatures with respect. But after we pay our respects, I think it's okay to eat them.

There is a real circle of life, though sometimes it seems cruel, inappropriate, illogical and poorly thought out. Perhaps the Almighty rushed it a bit at the end of the sixth day, while looking forward to a well-deserved Sunday off – but it's the way the life survives and renews itself.

All of that said, how would you like your eggs this morning? We can draw the curtains.

People Who Need People

She said she didn't need a relationship. Hadn't had one for nearly 10 years. Oh, she has friends, they get together and party and drink and play dress-up, but a committed relationship with a man? Not for her.

She was finishing her second martini. Early fifties, big laugh, flashy silver jewelry, neither attractive nor unattractive.

She's had relationships, just never managed to make one last more than a couple of years, and she's sure that she could never have a lifetime relationship, even at this stage of life. “I'm too high maintenance, I know what I want and I know how I want it done.”

She worked her way down the row of olives on a long cocktail skewer. “I've had a same-sex relationship once or twice. But they were just sex, you know, friendships but not really relationships.”

“Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have somebody come along and take care of me. I've always had to get my own car fixed and figure out the taxes and pay the bills. When I had my son I was a single parent, so I had to do everything – buy his clothes, get him to school, get him to the doctor – everything.”

She finished her martini and motioned for another.

“I had a relationship that could have worked,” she said. Her eyes began to glisten in the dim light. “He was younger – nearly ten years younger than I was, but it was good. It could have lasted, but then my son died – he was just 18 and I went someplace else, I just went into another mode.”

Her voice quavered and she took a quick sip of her fresh drink and composed herself. “He said he could handle it, but he couldn't. I don't blame him; I couldn't handle it. It's not the way life's supposed to work.”
She touched a cocktail napkin to her nose and smiled, fighting a losing battle with her tears.

“Anyway, I just don't make myself available for relationships right now. Men can sense that I wouldn't be receptive, so they don't even try.” She shook her head and took a big drink. Her mouth came away from her glass smiling.

“But I'm okay, I have lots of women friends, and I have family. I like being near family. My mother's going to come stay with me awhile – she's 75 and we still get along great. She got divorced when I was young and hasn't been in a relationship since then. My father was abusive and she didn't put up with that. She divorced him."

"I used to ask her why she didn't go out, go down to the bowling alley like the other mothers did, but she said she had enough foolishness taking care of us. But she used to sit up late reading. She'd read those romance novels, she loved romances.”

Her eyes were shiny again. “I've got to go smoke a cigarette,” she said. She picked up her coat and her purse and told the bartender to keep her tab open, she'd be back after awhile.

Then she looked at me and said, “Maybe you'll be here when I come back, maybe you won't.”

I wasn't.

Bad Noir - Where Leftover Metaphors Go to Die Slow, Excruciating Deaths

The Country Cave was a greasy dive off old highway 66 where rednecks came when they wanted cheap booze, a plate of jerked pork and maybe, a choked chicken. Parked out front, next to all of the mud-covered pick-ups and rusty Toyotas, Harry Gold's shiny black SUV looked like it had wandered away from a motorcade.

Harry had his butt glued to a bar stool and it looked like he was trying to undress the chanteuse on the stage with his eyeballs.  He was three martinis into the struggle and still trying to figure out the catch on the back of her gown. Harry fancied himself a promoter, but in a business dominated by early birds, most often Harry was the early worm.

The songbird, Marla Mackie, was his latest ticket outta here. He'd told me she had Trisha Yearwood's voice, Shania Twain's cheekbones and Dolly Partin's boobs. He'd promised her Nashville, Hollywood and New York, but right now she was singing love songs to hillbilly horndogs in a half-empty hellhole in suburban Rat Snatch, PA. Harry meant well, but if the road to hell is paved with good intentions, nobody needed a GPS to figure out where he was headed.

Harry lit up like a gas plume when he saw me walk in.

“C.J., you look amazing!” he shouted, “Have you lost weight?”

“Yeah, I had to have my jaw wired shut for a while and the pounds just melted away. You should try it.”

“No can do, you know God gave me the gift of gab, can't interfere with it.”

I told the bartender I wanted whiskey, neat and she slopped three fingers worth out of a Rebel Yell bottle with a label that looked older than the juice inside.

Harry nodded toward the bird on the stage. “That's the horse I'm riding to the big time.  Is she great or what?”

I opened my eyes and ears. She was easy on both. She was as hot as advertised, dressed in low-cut black silk with a skirt slit up the side to show a right leg that could create chaos in a cardiac ward. Her bluesy voice grabbed hold of something in my chest and squeezed it. I looked back at Harry. “She's good. What's she doing with you?”

“I found her pulling pints for lumberjacks in a bucket shop in Roseburg, swear-to-God.” He swore to God a lot. I doubt the Almighty appreciated it.

He turned toward the stage and caught Marla's eye and shouted, “This is C.J.”

She made eye contact and gave me a smile that made me feel light-headed, like all the blood in my brain had rushed to my crotch.

A minute later she wrapped up her set with an elegant bow and the boys with the tattoos and spit cans went wild, but the place went dead as soon as she started to walk off. She may have been the embodiment of grace standing behind the microphone, but when she walked, the painful-looking hitch in her get-along made her look like poultry in motion.

I shot Harry a look. He shrugged, “Her boyfriend chainsawed her right leg to keep her from running around. He got out of prison this week. Five years early-- budget cuts. That's why I called.”

“You think he wants another piece of her?”

“Marla got the call last night – he's on his way.”

He looked over my shoulder and I saw Marla limping up to the bar. She ordered club soda with a twist and slapped an eyelock on me.

“Harry said you're supposed to be tough,” she said. 

“You believe everything Harry says?” I asked.

“I believe he has a car and enough gas money to get us to the East Coast.” I waited while she took a sip of her fizzy water and looked me up and down. I've had less intrusive body cavity searches.

“Tell me about your boyfriend,” I said.

“Ex-boyfriend, I decided to stop seeing him shortly after he cut off my leg and fed it to his dogs.”

“You're not a dog person?”

“I was really attached to that leg.” She didn't smile and didn't blink.

“You're a tough kid, ” I said.

“How tough are you?”

I shrugged. “I'm a professional thug, pain amuses me.”

The expression on her face said she couldn't tell if I was kidding. That made two of us.

“Josef – that's his name, like Stalin, - he likes pain too. You two ought to get along.”

On stage, her smile was infectious. Up close she looked like other parts of her probably were as well.

“Maybe Josef has learned his lesson.”

“My sister saw him yesterday. He said he was going to spatchcock me like a Thanksgiving turkey.” She put up a brave front, and the plunging neckline of her gown showed a lot of it.

Harry stepped between us. “Let's not get all emotional over this thing, the man's psycho, but C.J. can handle him – you've handled a lot worse haven't you C.J.?”

“Seriously, he threatened to spatchcock you?”

“Yeah, he saw Martha Stewart do a turkey on TV while he was in the joint.”

Harry jumped in, “Martha's show does huge numbers at Statesville, even though the demographics are skewed. A couple of years ago they tried to stick her in a time slot opposite re-runs of Pee Wee's Playhouse and they had a riot on their hands.”

“Stop fooling around Harry, what do you want me to do, kill him? Scare him off?”

He went pale and developed a twitch. The way he squirmed around without talking, I started to worry that  he was turning into a mime. 

Finally, Marla goosed him and he blurted it out. “Marla wants you to bring her his left leg.”

I turned and gave her a full frontal glare. Most people start to beg forgiveness when I do that. She looked as happy as a clown in hell.

“Mid-thigh all right?” I asked.

“Right about here,” she said, pulling her skirt aside and revealing the prosthesis attached to what was left of her own left leg. It hadn't been a smooth cut. The saw had gnawed and shredded its way through flesh and bone about four inches above the knee.

“Bring me his leg, cowboy, and I'll do for something you." She paused and looked me up and down again. She stopped about halfway down and said, “Ever been stumped, cowboy, I mean really stumped?

Before I could answer I heard a something unexpected behind me, like the sound of a third shoe hitting the floor.

On Thanksgiving - My Favorite Things

How many things do I have to give thanks for? Too many to list, but these are the first 58 that came to mind on Thanksgiving morning:

1. My father, who considered being a parent a serious responsibility.
2. My mother, who made my Halloween costumes, fed me, and was proud of me.
3. A high school football coach who taught me the difference between a pain and an injury.
4. Mary T. who let me touch her bare breast when I was 17.
5. 25 years in journalism, where deadlines were absolute and every tomorrow was a clean slate.
6. My first big city news director for setting standards that did not bend and for scaring me so much that I never thought twice about confronting mobsters, alligators, cobras and pissed off cops.
7. The chance to meet some of the great heroes and villains of our time.
8. Mark Knofler's guitar solos in Sultans of Swing
9. A beautiful and creative daughter with a wicked sense of humor and a remarkable son-in-law who collaborated on the production of the most beautiful granddaughter in the world.
10. A granddaughter who walks with me in the woods and whispers to the big trees.
11. The winds of fate that have blown me from city to city and career to career.
12. Being married to a woman who is strong enough to take care of herself, confident enough to have her own interests and loving enough to stay up all night with me, burning candles, drinking brandy, solving the worlds problems, and laughing.
13. The bartender at the Elephant and Castle who wouldn't serve me a Budweiser before I'd tasted the microbrews.
14. People who show honest emotions.
15. People who can argue about politics without getting angry.
16. Public Radio News, whose dedication to fairness seems to some, almost quaint
17. Leonard Cohen, Kathy Mattea, K.D. Lang and Emmy Lou Harris
18. People who have a desire to do good things, and an ego big enough to get them done.
19. The English language, which never ceases to surprise me with its wit and beauty.
20. The Oregon Writers Colony whose workshops have taught me as much about myself as they have about writing.
21. A life that has forced me to do things that frighten me.
22. Libré Office
23. People who know how to hug a friend.
24. Good stories.
25. Freshly baked bread
26. Sincere and graceful apologies
27. The Internet.
28. Café mochas on cold mornings
29. People who accept responsibility
30. The dark, salty chill of winter mornings on San Juan Island
31. Home grown spinach and onions
32. People who laugh easily, but not too easily.
33. Strangers who smile when we make eye contact on the street.
34. The smell of peppers and onions simmering in butter.
35. Smart people with southern accents.
36. Diana Krall
37. People who don't confuse facts with opinions or opinions with principles.
38. Sharing a smile with the only other person in a room who gets the joke.
39. Knowing that the thing that embarrasses me today, will be the story I will enjoy telling tomorrow.
40. People who know the difference between playing notes and making music.
41. Willie Nelson
42. A good audience
43. People who respect a good audience
44. Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward in Tremors
45. Good smile lines.
46. People who give you their best game, even if you aren't very good.
47. The warm, magical moment before sleep erases the world.
48. A life that has let me start fresh – over and over again.
49. Metaphors
50. My new running shoes that make me feel like I can fly.
51. Star lit runs on our country road.
52. The Godlike pleasure of catching a hummingbird that has flown into the house, then releasing it in the garden.
53. Inanimate objects that glow with the emotion and love that went into their creation.
54. Nutrisystems for bringing me back to my own size.
55. Living six decades without having more people discover that I've been faking it all along. 
56. A big black dog who is happy to see me, no matter what.  
57. The chance to live in one of the most beautiful places on earth in a home filled with art and books.
58. The freedom that comes with realization that life's final destination is death, so all that matters is the journey.

The Top Ten Reasons Why I Hate Numbered Lists

I'm afraid that, as a society, we are in danger of enumerating the well-written article out of existence.

Here's a sample of headlines from newsletters I've received in the last couple of weeks:

• The 7 Rules of Picking Names for Fictional Characters
• The 3 Worst Mistakes You Can Make When Remodeling Your Kitchen
• 5 Tips for Writing Historical Fiction
• The Top 3 Tools for Securing Your Business Network
• 6 Attacks That Can Bring Your Website to Its Knees

At the turn of the 21^st Century, when lists of facts were needed, bullet points were the norm and no one bothered to count them. The boss would just call and say, “Give me a few bullets on re-organizing purchasing.” But in the last couple of years, writers seem to have ran out of bullets and started slamming numbers into the breach.

10 Hidden Gifts of Rejection Letters

I've always been a sucker for top 10 lists – best selling movies, books, songs, cars, best dressed, best restaurants, richest people, even for the worst best and worst opening lines (for a book or a singles bar).

7 Unknown Risks and Your Corporate Policy

But in our nothing-succeeds-like-excess world, enumerations are running amok. The explosion of enumerated list may seem like a harmless fad, but I fear it may be a symptom of the spread of social Darwinism. Bullet points are unordered lists. Though they read top to bottom, they are basically a collection of equals. Putting a number in front of a list item implies ranking – winners and losers; and selectivity – only the top X items made the list, the rest don't even get a participation ribbon.

When I saw the headline: “7 Ways Splunk Improves Visibility in Virtual Environments” (I'm not making that up), I started wondering how the author settled on a list of seven. It's an unusual number to stop on. Three, five, ten or twelve items seem normal. My suspicion is that the eighth thing Splunk did was too embarrassing to include – like maybe the eighth way Splunk calls attention to your virtual environment is by unleashing a loud, malodorous fart when someone gets near it.

 The Top 5 Reasons to Refinance Your Mortgage Now

The numbered list has become a sorry, tired cliché. Please, editors, give it up. Try commissioning a few articles with an inverted pyramid structure, smooth transitions and arguments that build on each other.

5 Tips to Speed Up Your Writing and Skyrocket Your Quality

Like all Crocs and Beanie Babies, this fad will fade away eventually. I think I may have seen a harbinger of its decline this week when I received an emailed newsletter from Writers Digest bearing the unselfconsciously ironic subject line “12 Clichés all Writers Should Avoid.”

I'm hoping that the number one item on that list is: “Avoid numbered lists like the plague.”

Born to Run - Overheard on the Anacortes/Friday Harbor Ferry

Please, no running!

Why?

You might hurt yourself.

No I won't. Is it because you can't run?

I used to run when I was your age.

Did you hurt yourself?

Yes, I did.

I won't hurt myself.

Don't run or I will have to spank your bottom.

Is that how you got hurt, you ran and your daddy spanked you?

No. I fell down.

If I promise not to fall down, can I run?

You can't promise that.

Yes I can, I promise.

Why do you want to run so much?

Because it's fun. Didn't you think it was fun when you were a little kid?

Yes.

But you fell down and hurt yourself.

Yes.

Do you ever wish you could run now?

Yes.

Are you crying?

No.

Yes you are. Why are you crying?

Because I want to run.

Slicing and Dicing

Mitt Romney is the President of white male America.

-- Maureen Dowd, New York Times Columnist

Amid the post-Presidential election head shaking, while analysts are slicing the electorate into statistical racial, ethnic and economic slivers to try to determine why Americans voted the way they did . . . I noted the passing of a man who incited a major and discomfiting political debate over the real differences between racial and ethnic groups. 

Arthur Jensen died just a few days before the 2012 Presidential election at the age of 89. He was the University of California, Berkeley, psychology professor best known for his efforts to prove that the average member of some ethnic groups come into the world equipped with less “general intelligence” than the members of other ethnic groups, including whites.
In his book, Straight Talk about Mental Tests he enumerated two of his tenets:

(1) In human populations there is a well-recognized trait that can be called general mental ability or intelligence, in which differences among persons can be measured with a fair degree of accuracy by appropriate tests (often called IQ tests);

(2) Observed differences among persons in this trait are largely attributable to genetic inheritance.

He did not include in the enumeration another of his conclusions, but neither did he back away from it: Because the average IQ scores of some minority groups – including African Americans and Hispanics – are measurably lower than whites and Asians, most members of those ethnic groups are born with less mental ability than whites and Asians.

In 1980, I spent an uncomfortable 15 minutes on live television interviewing Professor Jensen after the publication of his most ambitious book, Bias in Mental Testing. In the book, Jensen phrased his conclusions carefully and narrowly, wrapping them in 786 of pages of statistical analysis and complex calculations that were virtually incomprehensible to the average reader. But a good portion of the popular press and some groups with questionable agendas grabbed hold of Jensen's conclusions and ran with them. Period. Too bad. Deal with it minority people, you can't fight science.

Jensen's argument was seductive in its mathematical complexity. There is no debate about his statement that African-Americans and Hispanics consistently have lower average scores on certain sections of standardized tests than other groups, including people with Northern European and Asian ancestors. But he set off fireworks by resurrecting a theory and terminology created by psychologist Charles Spearman in 1905, concluding that the statistical clusters of test scores within ethnic groups are an accurate measure of the group's hereditary mental capacity.

In our televised interview, Jensen spent much time emphasizing the dangers of reading too much into his conclusions. Unfortunately, too much time was spent parsing words, and I'm afraid the interview generated very little heat or light. But on paper, though the mathematics strewn throughout his book is intimidating, Jensen's conclusions are comfortably simple and intuitive.

The outcome of an IQ test is straightforward – a single number that is meant to represent a person's innate mental capacity. It's a number that can and has been used to compare one person's mental worth to others. The best schools, the best opportunities are often made available to those with the highest numbers.

The use of numbers to quantify intelligence is hardly new. Even before the development of standardized tests, intelligence researchers devised formulas that ranked innate mental capacity based on the physical size of the brain. Looking at those numbers, researchers deduced that women could never be expected to function at the same intellectual level as men.

In 1903, statistical researcher Léonce Manouvrier described the effect those numbers had on the debate about women's place in society:“Women displayed their talents and their diplomas. They also invoked philosophical authorities. But they were opposed by numbers. . . . These numbers fell upon poor women like a sledge hammer . . . Theologians had once asked if women had a soul. Several centuries later some scientists were ready to refuse them a human intelligence.”

In first four decades of the 20^th century, American developers of “I.Q.” tests had an overt political agenda. Their test results were used in a successful campaign to get the U.S. Congress to tighten immigration quotas to keep the country's gene pool from being polluted by ethnic and racial groups with a hereditary lack of intelligence. Among those excluded because of their limited intelligence, as demonstrated by I.Q. tests, were Jews and Asians. That policy had tragic implications for many Jews seeking refuge from the Holocaust during World War II. There is bitter irony in the fact that Jews and Asians are among the groups with the highest average “general intelligence” scores on today's standardized tests.

Until I began preparing for the interview with Professor Jensen, I had never given serious thought to the question Jensen's research and writings brought to the forefront: Can we rely on modern intelligence tests to tell us something useful about a group of people? Professor Jensen, in claiming the thing standardized tests measure to be innate “general intelligence” implies the answer is yes.

But can it be used at a group level to predict performance or success in school, work, or life in general?

In a report sponsored by the Ralph Nader's organization, author Allan Nairn produced data showing that the results of standardized Scholastic Aptitude Tests (the “SAT”) had a higher correlation with the household income of a test-taker's parents than with future academic success. In fact, parental income turned out to be a better predictor of how well an individual will do on standardized tests than ethnicity.

In a 2009 paper entitled, “Reflections on a Century of College Admission Tests*,” former University of California President Richard Atkinson and Saul Geiser of UC-Berkley's Center for Studies in Higher Education concluded simply, “High-school grades are the best indicator of student readiness for college, and standardized tests are useful primarily as a supplement to the high school record.”

Still, psychologists and social scientists are uncomfortable dealing with criteria where they can't control all of the variables. Some schools have higher standards than others, some schools offer more activities, and some teachers pack their grade books with A's, others with C's and D's.

In theory, a person making hiring or college admission decisions based on standardized test scores should be bias-free because the decision-maker's mind is uncluttered with biases about whether the owner of an individual score is black, white, Asian or Latino; rich or poor, short or tall, attractive or homely. The flaw in that theory is, the test itself seems to have a good general idea about which groups a test-taker belongs to.

In their paper Atkinson and Geiser cited a study of admission applications for the University of California that found when UC applicants were ranked by SAT scores, only half as many Latino, African-American and American Indian students appeared in the top third of the applicant pool as when the same students were arranged by high school grades. Whatever their other virtues, standardized tests appear to put some racial and ethnic groups at a competitive disadvantage not supported by other criteria.

In The Mismeasure of Man, Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould observed that, historically, efforts to rank intelligence by group “invariably find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups – races, classes, or sexes-- are innately inferior and deserve their status.”

If Jensen had called his statistical clusters something like “ethnic\racial testing differential” his work would likely have been largely ignored outside of the testing community because it would have been considered a characteristic of the test. But calling it “general intelligence” assigns the characteristic to an entire, identifiable group of people, providing a reason to regard that group as qualitatively different from the norm.

Leaping back to the subject of electoral politics, remember the 47 percent of all Americans who were characterized as “takers”? Pundits have spent much of their post-Presidential election energy defining individual ethnic groups by how they voted. Certainly, common attitudes within an ethnic group is a valid thing to study, but I would suggest that we not allow ourselves to become distracted from looking at the most obvious characteristic that defined the largest group of voters in the 2012 general election: They favored a politically moderate President and rejected candidates who were on the extreme fringe of the political spectrum.

As analysts and statisticians sort individuals into narrower and narrower groups, I like to keep in mind one characteristic we all share. When things go wrong and it's fight or flight time, we instinctively divide the people around us into just two groups: Us and them.

This year, Republican strategist Karl Rove discovered how costly it can be to use the wrong criteria to define us.

* The Atkinson/Geiser paper is available online at: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/docs/ROPS-AtkinsonGeiser-Tests-04-15-09.pdf

Metaphorically Speaking

The latest word from sub-atomic physicists is that everything in the universe is made up of tiny strings vibrating in 10 dimensions. 

Actually, that's not what they mean any more than Robert Burns meant his love was “like a red, red, rose” or George Orwell literally thought “advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket” – it's a metaphor.

Physicists create metaphors (they call them models) to describe or predict the behavior of things they can't see. String Theory is just physicists' latest attempt to explain why little bitty stuff seems to behave differently than big stuff. Apparently the math says that if everything is made of dancing strings, it's okay if some things appear to behave erratically and be in more than one place at the same time – how many of us have not observed that very phenomenon on a human scale in a disco?

For politicians, there's an unfortunate danger in using metaphors because it's easy for pundits to take cheap shots by simply pointing out that a metaphorical statement isn't literally true. (If they were literally true, they wouldn't be metaphors.) Political opponents had a field day with former Senator Ted Stevens's characterization of the Internet as “a series of tubes,” even though it was a pretty good way to explain how huge volumes of spam email can cause slowdowns. The techno-cognizati never refer to the Internet as "tubes". They call it a "pipe".

Scientists consider a metaphor valid as long as it predicts behavior, but a dud if anyone can cite properties or behaviors that aren't consistent with the model. The rose metaphor for Robert Burns' love doesn't really work very well. While one would expect it to turn brown and lose its petals in pretty short order, Burns contends that his love will still be going strong when the seas dry up. 

Accepting the wrong model can be, and often has been, disastrous. In the 1600's the Catholic Church's enforced acceptance of the earth-centric model of the universe caused Galileo, one of the greatest scientists in history, to spend the last 10 years of his life under house arrest, forbidden to publish any of his work. 

But the best metaphors can succinctly put things – scientific and social – into context, as Howard Cosell did when he observed: "Sports is the toy department of life." 

 

My father once stopped me cold with a metaphor when I was complaining that I couldn't catch up at my job because I was constantly having to put out (metaphorical) fires. "Perhaps the problem isn't that you are a firefighter," he said. "Perhaps the problem is that you are a pyromaniac.”

Taking a good metaphor a step further than usual can provide both humor and food for thought, as Isaac Asimov did when he observed, “Life is a journey, but don't worry, you'll find a parking spot at the end."

 

What happens when we push the String Theory metaphor a little further to see what it tells us about the nature of our creator? If the universe is made up of tiny, dancing strings, then it appears that God is a cosmic D.J., and scientists spend their lives trying to discover what's on his play list.

That works for me.

Ernest the Frog. A Mostly True Story

I once worked in a television newsroom where the assistant news director was a huge Italian guy named Benny; a stereotype that should only exist in mob films and bad sitcoms. He was the kind of guy who celebrated even the most meaningless success by shouting “Bada-bing Bada-boom!” followed by a string of sexual metaphors describing the various ways we'd humiliated the competition.

So I was surprised to see him walk into my office uncharacteristically subdued one day. He shook his massive head and said, “Doesn't anyone around here have a sense of humor?”

“Whoever gave you that necktie does,” I said. I've never been good at comforting people.
“I was just kidding with Jake – told him I'd can him if he told another Italian joke. Before I could say, badda bing badda boom, he was on the phone and had the shop steward headed down to file a grievance. It was just a joke for God's sake!”

“Ya know,” I said, “It would have been funny if you threatened to fire me because you can't fire me. But it's not funny when you make a threat you can carry out.”
He looked puzzled.

 “It's like that old saying,” I said. “Boys throw stones at frogs in sport, but the frogs die not in sport, but in earnest.”*

Benny pondered that for a moment. “So you're saying Jake's the frog and I'm one of the boys?”

“No, Ernest was the frog, you're a rock.”

“So who's Jake?” he asked.

“Jake's the guy who's filing the grievance.”

I'd love to think that conversation had a long-term effect, but everyone and everything in the world of television news has a short life span. Today's screaming headlines don't even whimper tomorrow; people who were intellectuals last week are caricatures this week, and frogs die in earnest at the top and bottom of each hour.

But the lesson wasn't totally lost. Ever since that day Benny has called himself “Rocky.”

* Attributed to Bion of Borysthenes – 325 B.C.-250 B.C. It appears that the relationship between frogs and boys has changed little over the past 2200 years.

Venice has Issues

Venice is an attractive, middle-aged woman who cuts hair in an old-fashioned barber shop in Portland. She cut my hair a few months ago when I was visiting and did such a good job that I made a point of going back the next time I was in town.

When I slipped into her chair I remembered vaguely that she'd mentioned that she had a new relationship going with her postman, so I asked if her letter carrier was still making special deliveries.

She sighed and said the relationship was on hold because he had “trust issues.”

“You mean he's a jealous asshole?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said and starting snipping at my hair before she stopped herself, stepped back and asked how I wanted my hair cut. She was obviously having concentration issues.

Later that day I stepped inside a bank to report that the walk-up ATM machine wasn't working. The teller closest to the door shrugged her shoulders and said, “It's a new machine last week and it's been having issues ever since it was installed.”

So now I'm having issues with the whole issues issue. It seems like nobody confronts problems or acts badly these day, they just have issues.

Bullies have self-esteem issues. Drug addicts are burdened with dependency issues. I suppose serial killers are just dealing with life-taking issues.

Like many things, once you become sensitive to them, you start to see them everywhere. The other day I stopped into a neighborhood pub and found a nice-looking older woman named Rose holding down the stool next to me.

Rose, I quickly discovered, suffers from both “unemployed senior issues” and "latching onto strangers at bars issues”; but she was a good soul and I told her as much while I gulped my beer, then ran like a guy with "afraid to look back to see if he is being followed issues.”

I'm old enough to remember when people didn't have issues, children had disorders (“Oppositional Defiant Disorder”, “Attention Deficit\Hyperactivity Disorder”, etc.), often caused by genetic or physical problems; but adult problems without physical roots were complexes or syndromes. Post-first marriage baby-boomer men suffered from “Peter Pan Complex” and disillusioned women had a choice of either “Wendy Complex” or “Cinderella Syndrome.”

The diagnoses sounded to me like descriptions of behavior rather than symptoms of a disease, but people I knew talked as if it was because of their syndrome that they acted immature, too bossy, or had unrealistic expectations for relationships.

At the time, a psychologist friend of mine – who'd started seeing a lot of clients suffering from dysfunctions with Disney character names – told me he had identified a new dysfunction that he called: “Rumpelstiltskin Syndrome.” As he defined it, it is any anxiety-related condition which begins to clear up as soon as a therapist gives it a name.

I have no issue with that.

Too Many Different Kinds of Things

My favorite piece of advice for aspiring managers has always been, “Never admit that you know how to clear a jam in a photocopier.” It's something that invites even the lowliest employee to delegate grunt work to you.

It's perfectly logical, but I always enjoyed clearing my own jams, and creating my own spreadsheets, databases, and websites. When a new piece of software or hardware came into the workplace I'd always curl up with the manual until I mastered it. When a new programming language came out, I'd buy some books and take them with me camping on an isolated stretch of the Rogue River or at the fire tower overlooking the Three Sisters in central Oregon. I found it an exciting union of technology and nature.

But as time passed, my non-technical job responsibilities grew and new hardware and software started coming out faster than I could learn it; printed manuals disappeared, and instructions started being given in pay-to-play “webinars” -- a bastard of a word if ever there was one. Still, I hate not knowing how to take something apart and put it back together – at least in theory.

I remember attending a panel discussion where several great minds debated the relative merits of scientists having broad general knowledge versus in-depth command of a narrow area of study. The moment in that discussion which stands out in my memory came when one of the participants quoted a British academic chiding a confused colleague by saying, “The trouble with you sir, is you know too many different kinds of the things.”

The trouble with having too much technical knowledge is that it's tempting to spend your time clearing jams in copy machines instead of creating content, programming spreadsheets instead of running a business, or learning a new computing device instead of writing the great American novel. 

When I had a business that created custom software, I found that the hardest part wasn't writing the program, it was figuring out what the client wanted to do. It wasn't unusual to be in the initial meeting and have someone say, “What we need is a form with two drop-down boxes, a set of check boxes and a button . . .”

After the fourth or fifth time I confronted that kind of thing I started interrupting with, “Before we start talking how we're going to feed this thing, tell me what you want to come out of its ass end.” Often, it would take hours to figure out what the client really wanted, because they had been so focused on the tools rather than tasks.

If I had to divide people into two categories I would say there are: (1) Technicians – people who are fascinated with tools, and (2) Architects – people with a vision that cannot become reality without the use of tools. (There are also politicians, but I'll deal with them another time.)

Technicians always have the coolest toys and the best home entertainment centers, but most people's eyes glaze over as soon as they start talking.

Architects tend to do well at cocktail parties, but you can't sleep in a castle built of dreams.

The real danger of being too much the architect and too little the technician is falling prey to technicians who believe their ability to control the plumbing is a license to control the creative forces in society.

Several years ago I had a client who returned from a professional association conference with the pronouncement, “I'm convinced that within five years our whole business will be Internet-driven.”

I asked, “So what's driving it now? Telephones? Fax Machines?”

The Internet is, of course, just a data delivery system. Like airports and highways, it enables things to move around, but doesn't drive anything.

A pure technician sees a tool and looks for a problem it can solve. The danger in that is, as psychologist Abraham Maslow observed, “If the only thing in your toolbox is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

A pure architects sees a problem, thinks up a solution, then tries to find tools that will fit the solution. Architects and technicians need each other, but while an architect's hands may be on the steering wheel, technicians control the throttle and the brakes.

To offer a first-hand example: In the county government I work for there's an ongoing struggle for control of the budget between the elected official that controls the accounting software that holds the budget data and the appointed official to whom the county charter delegates responsibility for making budget decisions.

The appointed official can hold his breath until he turns blue, but nothing gets entered into the budget program until the independent department head approves. The result has been the creation of a parallel budgeting system – which, of course – adds another technical gatekeeper into mix.

How does one find a balance between the dreamers and the keepers of the tools?

Please don't look to me for an easy answer. I'm afraid that I know too many different kinds of things.

The Empty Page

It's been so long since I've put words on paper,

that I'm afraid that my words may have

become bored with me and fled to younger

more energetic minds.

I see young men and women

that look like children to me,

producing plays,

creating songs,

writing parody and farce;

with the thoughts and

restless lust for life

that I once owned, as if

I'd let them go for pennies

at a yard sale.

Writing is scribbling on a page
until the scribbles map
a corner of the writer's soul.

An empty page is

an unforgiving mirror.

Pepper on my Eggs

My God he had an awful diet. You'd see him a couple of times a day loading up on the cheap peanuts and beef whips and the second tier candy bars they kept on the bargain shelf at the Ace Hardware. He'd been around forever, he and his rusty old flatbed tow truck with the words: “Terminal Towing – we'll get you There in the End” hand painted on the door. The way There and End were capitalized sometimes struck me as mischievous, sometimes as ominous.

There was something charismatic about him – he always had a smile and an aura of contentment, like he was pleasantly stoned but in control. He didn't talk much, didn't solicit conversation, but looked like he would be happy to pass the time with you if you wanted to.

He looked like that guy on The Woodwright Shop on Public TV, except scarey skinny; the kind of skinny where his pants hung straight down from his waist, no hint of a butt at all.

He died the other day. The County prosecutor, who doubles as the coroner, told me the news as we were crossing the street in front of the Courthouse. He said Gary, that was his name, had been in hospice care for a while. But I swear I'd seen the Terminal Towing truck parked in front of the Courthouse within the last few days.


Gary and his rusty truck and his dirty khaki pants and his long, tangled hair, and droopy mustache, and the friendly, contented expression on his face have been part of the landscape ever since I moved to this island. Like the sound of the sea breeze whispering through the tall trees or the dash of pepper on your morning eggs, you don't really notice until its not there.

As familiar as he was, I don't recall ever making eye contact with him. I'd see him park his truck as I was crossing the street, or see him digging in his pockets for change to pay for his jerky and candy at the hardware store, or walking down the street, always away from town, but I never really encountered him.

All this time he was dying and I didn't know it. He knew it, but I just had him pegged as an underfed, but contented stoner.

So last week my world shrank a little and lost some of its color. I never saw it coming.

I'll  miss you Gary. I hope that in the End you got There.

You Get Used to the Disembowlings

After working in the private sector for four decades, I'm five years into my first major outing as a government bureaucrat. At the outset I resolved not to turn into a stereotype of a government worker – uncreative, cold, by-the-book, just marking time until retirement.

Well . . . I'll be vested in the retirement plan in a few months. After so few years the benefits would be almost negligible, but it's a milestone and I have to admit that I'm worn down enough that it's starting to look like a finish line.

The sick economy and falling tax revenues have forced cuts at all levels of government. Positions have been eliminated, job duties combined, work hours reduced – the government work force in my county has dropped 15% since 2008. Also reduced: Health insurance benefits, cost of living salary adjustments and take-home pay, due to mandatory days off without pay. But citizen expectations and the need to provide essential services have not decreased.

Where once the goal was to provide better service to more people, now managers are hard put just to keep essential services running. One manager I know describes what he's doing as “playing Whack-a-Mole against an army of moles.” As resources shrink, crises multiply; paperwork piles up; and statutory deadlines start to scream like incoming artillery shells. A few months ago I made an emergency visit to the medical center with chest pains. I thought it was a heart attack. Turned out to just be stress.

Now, even as government's ability to provide basic services is being tested, a well-organized campaign has emerged that, by all appearances, is aimed at undermining the legitimacy of representative democracy itself.

On our little island of fewer than 6,000 souls, cartoons in ads placed in the local weekly portray the beleaguered County government as everything from a demon to a giant python squeezing the life out of property owners because it's doing a state-required update of land use regulations.

Anti-government activists as a group have adopted bullying tactics, calling out mid-level employees by name Our code enforcement officer has received abusive emails locally and from literally all over the country after a property rights group posted and promoted a video smear job online, along with the employee's name and email address. His offense? Sending a letter of inquiry to someone who was running a store in an unpermitted building in an area which was not zoned for the purpose.

It's worth taking a moment to stop and consider something: County employees live in the same community, attend the same churches, send their kids to the same schools, pay the same taxes and live under the same regulations as everyone else in the County. Anything they do might do that would hurt the community would hurt themselves and their families as well.

The ersatz video exposé, made by the “Freedom Foundation,” spun a story that the County had ordered the store operator, a hardworking farmer, to close down his store or spend tens of thousands of dollars upgrading the property. Even though all relevant “facts” in the video have been discredited the video remains online and people still send out links to it.

Public meetings on land use regulations increasingly, are packed with property rights activists, who take advantage of public access time to consume hours reciting talking points excoriating the County's planning staff and elected officials, seldom letting facts get in the way of a good jibe.

The public debate has increasingly become dominated by private citizens who openly scorn the community leaders they voted into office just months earlier, and denigrate the people who do the things necessary to keep the community viable, healthy and safe, and manage the infrastructure that allows commerce to take place.
In this atmosphere, it would be easy to take cover in the rulebook, not show any flexibility or creativity in dealing with problems, and to just hang on tight until retirement.

But few of us want to live that way. It's our community too.

Citizens, especially when they are in trouble, like to remind us that we work for them. We do appreciate that, and just about every government employee I know works hard for their fellow taxpayers. If we screw up, we expect to hear about it. But we are human, and we'd really appreciate it if our fellow taxpayers - the ones not employed in public service - tried a little harder during these tough times to be good bosses.

It's Okay, I'll Just Sit in the Dark

It's comical how dependent we are on the movement of subatomic particles through copper wires. Living five miles from the only village on an island 20 miles from the mainland makes it even more so.

When the electricity goes out, the phone and the Internet also go. Cell phones don't work out here anyway, and my battery-powered radio only picks up static, so I'm starting to feel a little isolated. 

Our car has a pretty good radio, but my wife drove out to the old gravel pit to let the dog have an early morning run before the lights went out. She probably doesn't even know that the electricity is off, since there aren't any traffic lights on the island and the only store between here and the pit opens late on weekends. 

We get our water from a well, so no electricity means no shower. I used what was likely the last lights-out flush before a coffeeless breakfast – orange juice and a packaged chunk of pastry that could have benefited from a few moments in the microwave.

I have Roomba vacuuming the living room, but he got off to a rough start because he can't communicate with his docking station. Unless the power comes back on, he'll just wander around wondering where home is until his battery dies. 

Most of our clocks are battery operated, so I amused myself by resetting them for the end of daylight savings time and feeling screwed out of an hour of sleep. 

My computer has about an hour's worth of juice left in its battery. I'd planned to pay the bills, but I do that online. 

Maybe I'll just toss this month's trash into the pickup and take it up to the transfer station. It's scheduled to be open today, but its scale and cash register are electric. 

The sky has turned dark, it's beginning to rain and the temperature is dropping. I suppose the mainland may have disappeared entirely. I could punch up the camera at the ferry terminal and see if there's any sign of panic; if I could get online. 

I'd better stop fooling around and check Facebook and Twitter and see if anybody's posting about the outage.

It sure is dark in here.