By the Book

I tossed the last of my framed journalism awards and plaques into the trash this weekend. I found them while I was cleaning out our storage shed. They were packed in a retired cardboard pet carrier that bore tooth marks from our dear departed cat, Janet.

When I was in television news I won a lot of awards. People in television spend a lot of time giving each other awards. Since leaving television, I don't believe I've won any professional awards. Of course, there have been times when I haven't been sure what profession I was in, so perhaps I just didn't know where to enter.

But I'm pretty sure there are no awards for best ghost-written speech, best PowerPoint presentation, best original campaign management software, best staff report to a local legislative authority, or best series of news releases headlined, “Council Postpones action on . . .”

In any case, honors do not age well. Every time I get off the ferry in Anacortes, Washington, I pass a restaurant that bears the banner, “Voted best chef, 5 years in a row.” The sign looks sad, hanging over the entrance of a restaurant that closed years ago.

One of the award plaques I tossed out was “Best Documentary” from the New York International Firm and Television Festival. The awards show was emceed by the comedy duo, Stiller and Meara –  Ben Stiller's parents. Back then, they were still doing edgy stand up.

Another award I pulled out of the box was a gold-embossed “Broadcast Media Award” for consumer reporting. It was dated 1977. There are reporters on Seattle Television whose parents had not even met when I reported on whatever outrage it was that prompted the judges at San Francisco State to honor me that year.

I remember being a 20-something street reporter in Miami, Florida; standing out front of a place where a boatload of Haitian refugees were being processed. The refugees' boat had washed up on Palm Beach at sunset, so it was late at night by the time they'd been gathered up and bused to “Freedom Tower” in downtown Miami.

The only locals out in that neighborhood at that time of night were the alcoholics, addicts and schizophrenics who made themselves invisible by day, but took over the streets after dark.

One fellow with a bottle of cheap wine protruding from his side pocket, kept threatening to kill me if I didn't leave immediately. Finally I told him that my boss would kill me if I did leave. He nodded sympathetically and said he'd let me live this once.

Then another fellow walked up to me and complained that our government was spending all this money on refugees, but didn't give a damn about people like him. He said he'd been a police detective in New York, but his partner had gotten killed and he'd lost his house in a divorce, then lost his job because he started drinking. Now he was living on the street in Miami and nobody wanted to even look at him. “What the hell's wrong?” he asked.

After he walked off, I pointed him out to one of the Federal agents escorting the refugees and said he'd claimed that he'd been a cop. I'll never forget his matter-of-fact tone when he looked the wino up and down and said, “He probably was.”

In the day-to-day world, nobody really cares a whole lot about who or what we used to be but are no more.

I thought about that as I tried to decided what to do with that box of faded glory. We all know that the past is prologue, but it's hard to tell what part of the story we're in now.

Looking at the classic story structure, I'm either approaching my journey's end – settling down to let my wounds heal while I enjoy the rewards won in my life's battles; or I'm fast approaching the point in the story where the hero has to face the ultimate antagonist, and in doing so, face his own worst fears and internal demons.

If it's the latter, then the protagonist must strip down to the essentials and be prepared to use the lessons he's learned, the allies he's made and the weapons he's acquired to face the challenge the whole damned, convoluted story has led to. In a novel, it's usually something unexpected that the hero has held onto that tips the balance in the final battle.

I did feel as if a plot point was passing as I tossed that box of awards into the trash. A little while later, I decided to hang onto a box containing my collection of FBI Wanted posters from the 1960s and early '70s. Someday they might be of some value.

The protagonist never gets to know in advance.

The Moving Finger Writes

I'm on a train halfway between Portland and Seattle, sitting at a table with three people, each of whom is absorbed in an electronic device – one texting on an IPhone, another watching a movie on an IPAD, another playing Words with Friends on a Kindle.

I'm packing two laptops, a Nook and a cell phone; an MP3 player is pumping golden oldies into my ears . . . and I'm writing this in a paper notebook with a fountain pen.

Lately, I've noticed that I end up working just as quickly with pen and paper as with a laptop because I make fewer first draft mistakes. I'm also beginning to think that I may belong to the last generation that can do that.

I'm running into a lot of 20-somethings who never learned cursive writing. They can text on a smart phone faster than I can write, and I can certainly keyboard faster than I can write in what used to be called “longhand.” (My wife leaves teenagers gape-mouthed with her ability to write, and read, shorthand.)

I've loved technology since I met my first Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, but I can type very fast and my fingers get bored waiting for my mind to catch up with them, so they get sloppy. I'll think: “I should write home,” but my fingers type: “I should right home.”

Homophones like right and write, here and hear, or tear and tier pop out of the keyboard with annoying frequency. And commas? Sometimes it looks like someone spilled a bucket of them on the screen.

Raymond Chandler once advised writers who find a story starting to get dull to “have a man walk through the door with a gun in his hand.” As for me, when I'm at the keyboard and a poorly constructed sentence bogs down, my fingers just start poking dashes between independent clauses.  That doesn't happen as much when I write with a pen.

Why a fountain pen instead of a pencil?

For one thing, pencils make it is too easy to erase and re-write. You can bet Omar Khayyam had a pen in his hand when he wrote:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Why not a ballpoint? Most ballpoints are expendable. A good fountain pen is something of value. It feels good and looks good in your hand. It glides over the page and the words literally flow from it.

Writing on paper encourages logical, linear thought. If you want non-linearity, you can write on note cards and move them around. But in our world, time, like fingers holding a pen, moves across the page in one direction.

Changing technology won't allow most of us to get very far out of step with the changing times. I'll have to keyboard this into my computer if I want to publish it anywhere. The computer has become the undisputed best tool for final editing and formatting. But as a writer, I like to think of myself as a man who walks through the door with a pen in his hand.

Watch This!

In one of his stand up routines comedian Jeff Foxworthy reported that the most common last words spoken by redneck men are: “Watch this!”

Last summer I was ready to pull out of our driveway onto the country road where we live, and I sensed something was out of place – our mailbox was missing. Someone had pulled our mailbox, on its concrete-anchored 4” X  4” cedar pole, out of the ground and dragged it behind a bush several feet away. I stared at it for awhile trying to reconstruct what happened.

I'm pretty sure the incident involved at least two mating-aged males. And I'm pretty sure it started out in a moving vehicle with a conversation that went something like this:

“Bubba.”

“What?”

“I bet I can pull a mailbox out of the ground.”

“Betcha can't.”

“Yeah? Well just pull over right here and hold my brewski.”

“You're crazy.”

“Okay now, watch this!”

(A little grunting and growling.) 

“Whoa stud! You have just committed a federal crime!”

Doing stupid stuff may give you something to talk about at the tavern on Saturday night; or in the county lock-up on Sunday morning; but it doesn't normally attract much of an audience unless your stupidity shows some originality.

A few years ago, here on San Juan Island, there was a spate of mailbox vandalism. Rampaging vandals with baseball bats smashed mailboxes as fast as they were repaired or replaced. (Okay, rampaging vandals is a little strong for bored small-town high schoolers.) The outrage came pretty much on the lack of creativity. One mailbox smashed in a beer-drinking, hormonal rush may show passion, but a pattern of attacks on what are essentially tin cans nailed to posts shows only a desperate, but profound, lack of imagination.

A few years ago, as I was walking home at night after working late in my office in downtown Portland, I came upon a teen-aged kid spray-painting his initials on a building. I walked over and asked him if he thought it was his right to make the world uglier. He said he thought it looked better with his name one it.

I told him that he should make something of his own if he wanted to sign it, because signing someone else's work was plagiarism and it defaced the view on my walk home. I may have raised my voice, I seem to recall that I was getting a late night voice-of-god-like echo off the surrounding buildings.

The kid started to stuff his spray can in his pocket and I asked if I could borrow it so I could sign his ass. He asked if I was crazy. I told him that people do ask that from time to time.

There are street artists in our world that create amazing, illegal works of art on blank walls. (Google Banksy's images). But scrawling your name or gang sign on the side of a building – like being the 10th person on a small island to smash a mailbox – isn't creative, it's just stupid.

That night, I followed the kid with the spray can for a block or so, asking questions that he pretended not to hear. After a while I lost interest and headed home.

I suspect that lone kid with the silver spray paint was just looking for a shortcut to lay claim to being a bad-ass. He didn't seem to have a statement to make, he just thought he needed to have his name on a public place. What little damage he'd done had been scrubbed off by the time I walked by the building the next day.

I'd like to think he stopped at some point since that night and reflected on what I'd said, but I know it probably just made him feel more angry and isolated.

It's 6:30 a.m. now and the frogs out by our pond are celebrating another sunrise. A doe has wandered out of the woods and will likely try to nibble on our camellia. And somewhere down in Portland, there's probably a young man lying in bed chuckling about the time an old guy followed him through downtown Portland babbling about creativity.

What the hell just happened?

“In a way, I kind of wish something had gone wrong at my wedding,” she said. “It seems like all my friends have great stories about awful things that happened at their weddings and I've got nothing.”

Catherine sat across from me on the train. She's been married to the same guy for 20 years -- happily, she said; but she still regrets that they didn't have to bail the best man out of jail, and that nobody puked on her wedding dress and no one got caught groping the groom's younger sister in the cloak room.

She was traveling on business with Keith, another member of her company.

Keith mentioned that he'd recently been bitten by a brown recluse spider. First, the bite had turned red, then purple. By the time he went to the doctor, the flesh around the bite had begun to turn brown and die. Even after the doctor finished cleaning it up, it looked really disgusting.

In fact, he said, the area around the bite looked so spectacularly nasty that he decided to show the damage only to his best friend at work. But before the end of the day, people were practically lined up outside his cubicle wanting a peek at his nasty, putrefying flesh. Now that he's healed, he's known as Spiderman and his co-workers want to know how he can sleep in his apartment, knowing the spider could still be there.

Personal crises, bumps, bruises, and amputations seem to be life's way of pulling us out of the audience and putting us on stage.

Inertia is a powerful force in my work as a bureaucrat. It's easy to go with the flow, take things as they come, and let things fester that have been festering for years; but that can get really, really dull. A couple of weeks ago I discovered a great short-term project that (in my opinion), would save a lot of money and benefit everybody --a classic win-win deal. But in order to do it, I had to sell it to the County Council in a public meeting at a time when we're transitioning to a new form of government and half of the council's members are campaigning for re-election and the other half are limping and quacking.

As a young man growing up in a small Midwestern town, I remember being counseled on the importance of humility. “It's the nail that sticks out that gets hammered,” the adage went.

I opened my presentation to the Council by saying, “This item really should have been on the consent agenda.” It's been a long time since I got that big a laugh out of a group of elected officials. 

In keeping with procedure, I produced the obligatory singing dog and dancing pony, then brought in some department heads and subject matter experts for a half-hour of back-and-forth and up-and-down with Council members. After deliberating for a while, the Council came to a conclusion on a split vote and gave me direction. As I stepped out of the hearing room into the fresh air, one of the people who'd worked with me on the project asked, in a voice that was a little louder than it was judicious, “What the hell just happened in there?”

The answer is obvious: Amid the pain and collateral damage, a story happened in there.

Every story has to have a protagonist and an antagonist. Each has to have something at stake and there has to be a conflict – both sides can't get everything they want.

The conflict might be between a prissy mother of the bride and a randy aunt, the bride and the groom's drunken frat house buddy who can't hang onto his lunch during the wedding march, an individual fighting forces of nature or a political candidate who needs to make a headline and a bureaucrat convinced that his motives are pure and intelligence perfect.

Along the way, things have to go wrong and the protagonist can never see the worst of it coming. No one worthy of being a protagonist ever sets out to lose.

At the end of the struggle, somebody wins and somebody loses – or everybody loses. (Everybody can't win, that's one of the rules of storytelling.)

And when the smoke clears after the climactic battle, justice has been served or tragedy has triumphed; and we have learned a new survival skill – whether it's the importance of getting medical care for a spider bite, the advisability of requiring groomsmen to take a breathalyzer test, or the consequences of saying “this will improve code enforcement” to a group of libertarian politicians. But we don't love stories because they teach us, we love them because they entertain us and excite our emotions.

We are all grateful that catastrophic disasters and sanity-threatening traumas are rare, but we should be equally grateful for the weird, bruising, embarrassing, and unexpected day-to-day events that season our lives.

Life must be awfully dull for the nails that never get hammered.

The Saga of Taco Marv

Because of allergies in the family, I didn't grow up with furry pets. For a time I had a boa constrictor named BC. It was an okay pet - huggy and pleasantly cool on hot summer days, but it was slow and never really wanted to play. After I got married, I gave BC to my former high school science teacher and, a short time later, my former pet found a way to slither out of his cage in the school's biology lab and he went missing for a couple of months. When they finally found him curled up in a drawer, he was hungry, but otherwise no worse for wear. Boa constrictors don't demand a lot of attention.

My current pet, Marv the dog, is different. If I sit too long at my desk, he comes over and puts his head on my lap and reminds me that it's time to get out and toss the tennis ball for a while. If I get up before daylight, he insists that we immediately go outside to see how the weather is, if there are any foxes to play with, or raccoons or ghosts to chase by moonlight.

My wife Susan (I got the marriage thing right on the second try) found Marv at the local animal shelter shortly after we moved to San Juan Island. I was out of the country at the time and had warned her to stay away from the shelter until I got back, though I didn't expect that she would. Growing up, she'd never been without a dog and one of the traumas of our whirlwind courtship was that she had to give custody of her jointly-owned, totally undisciplined Airedale to her ex-boyfriend when she accepted my proposal.

The puppy she found at the shelter was a black Lab with paws the size of saucers. His nom de shelter was “Sarge," but the name didn't seem to fit. He got his new name when Susan misread a sign in a TV commercial for “TACOMA  RVs.” Before Susan realized it was an advertisement for recreational vehicles, she'd decided that Taco Marv's was a lousy name for a Mexican restaurant, but Taco Marv was the perfect name for a puppy.

She visited Marv daily while I was 12 time zones away and, in emails and phone calls, she gave me lengthy accounts of their walks and the cute things he'd done. “If you decide you don't like him, we don't have to adopt him,” she'd say in a voice that sounded like I might as well figure on spending the rest of the winter in Armenia if I didn't want a puppy in the house when I came home.

Of course, as soon as he moved in with us he started chewing up everything he could get his teeth on, which I thought was unconscionable. Susan doesn't believe in disciplining pets, but we did enroll, as a family, in an obedience class led by an inexperienced but well-meaning teacher. (It's a small island.)

Despite our ineptitude, Marv loved us in the unbounded way dogs do, and he is smart enough to figure out what we want him to do most of the time. Despite being big, strong and alpha, he is gentle and has a good heart. Every now and then he'll pick up an injured bird in his soft mouth and bring it to us with a look in his eyes that says he hopes we can fix it.

Last summer, Marv and I were walking in our woods when we spotted a deer curled up on the ground. When deer run, Marv usually runs with them, but this one just sat and looked at us. Marv walked over to the doe until they were nose to nose, and looked at her as if to ask what was wrong. Then he looked over his shoulder at me as if to ask if I could help. Apparently the doe had been hit by a car and it had broken her shoulder. (I called the angels over at Wolf Hollow, our local wildlife rescue center, to come check her out.)

For much of the year at this latitude, it is dark when we get up, and dark when we come home from work. We're miles from the nearest street light, so unless there is snow on the ground, on moonless winter mornings the darkness feels dense enough to swim in, and it simply absorbs our shiny black dog as soon as we step outside. It's always a bit of a surprise when his wet nose suddenly brushes my hand while we are walking, or his pale glow collar appears out of the darkness and bounces toward us – as if it was being worn by an invisible dog.

I've never been a dog person; probably never will be, but Marv's not really a dog. He's just part of the household – the mischievous part that barks at people who wear hats and likes to roll in something smelly before we have guests over for dinner. The one that walks right behind our granddaughter, picking up the stray Cheerios and cheese snacks that cover the floor whenever she's around, and the one that likes to go outside at 5:00 A.M. to see what kind of day God is preparing for us.

Marv just came over and laid his big, warm head on my lap. I guess I've been sitting too long. Or maybe he just thinks the word count on this is a little high for a column about a pet.

The Only Thing Wrong Syndrome

My parents took parenting very seriously and provided a lot of guidance. It wasn't an unloving household, but it was a place where there was a lot of course correction and very little praise. So I grew up believing that the best way to show someone that you care is to tell them how they can improve their work.

As a young adult, starting a career in a very competitive business, I practically begged my supervisors and co-workers to tell me everything that was wrong with my work. Praise made me feel a little uncomfortable. I felt as if the person giving the compliment didn't respect me enough to properly critique my work.

That pattern of thinking served me pretty well until I became a boss. I remember a day at the public television in Dallas, Texas, when a producer brought me the rough cut of a documentary she'd been sweating over for months. A couple of scenes needed some work, but it really was a damned good piece of work, so I gave it what I thought was high praise. I started out saying: “The only thing wrong with this doc is . . .”

That's about as far as I got before I saw the producer's face fall and her eyes tear up. This had been her life for months, she was sleep-deprived and she'd risked a lot physically and emotionally to get this story on video; so I was surprised that she wasn't in a mood to accept my compliment.

Later, I told the story to a friend and kindred spirit who published a local political tabloid. As I recall, my friend gave me a serious look and said, “You know, most people aren't like you and me. Most people really like getting compliments, and even little paper certificates they can hang on the wall and brag about. That's important to a lot of people.”

Honestly, that had never occurred to me. (Most of the awards I'd received ended up in a box in the garage.)

Over the years I've learned to give compliments more freely – though perhaps not as freely as I should. I've learned to open every critique session with a compliment, then give a straightforward criticism, followed by more positive words. It works most of the time. Sometimes people even thank me for my critique, rather than just eyeing me sullenly as they did when I was a less experienced boss.

There is no saint like a reformed sinner. Now I am easily outraged when I hear insensitive criticism. And I really do believe there is a lot more insensitive and mean-spirited criticism than there used to be.

I blame that on a couple of things: The anonymity offered to trolls by the Internet, and the relentless reduction of political discourse to sound bites and bumper stickers - a thin, sharply-defined line between friends and foes. (Others might chalk it up to the lack of forced prayer in the schools, the use of science texts that conflict with the King James Bible, and the increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage.)

But for whatever reason, it's not just Internet yahoos; it's highly visible people in powerful positions who are acting as if they grew up in households that never grasped the concept of constructive criticism. Their criticism is both intentionally hurtful to the target and insulting to our intelligence. It is not meant as guidance, but wielded like a chain saw in an attempt to reduce others to the critic's self-loathing level.

There is a surprisingly large, apparently approving and horribly obnoxious audience for today's verbal bullies. Rush Limbaugh, the cadre of talk radio provocateurs, Fox News's shills and others who wield sharp, poisonous tongues are making an indecent living by dissembling, bullying and – in general – showing off their bad manners.

The thing that is most disturbing to me personally is that I grew up believing criticism was a positive thing. Later, I learned how much more effective it could be when applied judiciously.

Now, it hurts to see criticism so often weaponized; transformed from the finely-honed tool of the wise to the brutish bludgeon of spoiled, boorish hypocrites.

The only thing wrong with that is – everything.

Where's Your Vision Thing?

A candidate for a local government office wandered into my office recently, so I asked what I thought was the obvious question: what does she want to accomplish if she gets elected.

She said she had no agenda other than “good government.” She wants to wait until she gets into office, learns the ropes, and sees what is possible before she starts pushing anything.

My response – and I believe this is verbatim – was, “Oh, shit.”

Politicians really do need what George H. W. Bush called, “that vision thing,” a strong sense of what they want to accomplish. Efficiency is not an end in itself. The Nazi death camps were, by most accounts, models of efficiency. In any system where there is a well developed bureaucracy and bad leadership the wrong things get organized and done. In systems without leadership, money and precious resources get wasted feeding systems that do little more than feed themselves, and often harm the people who are paying for it.

Speaking, without portfolio, on behalf of a large number of hard-working, dedicated bureaucrats, I would love to have some people at the top who can tell us where they want to go so we can get moving in that direction. There are a lot of smart, well-qualified, superbly talented public servants in this country who know how organize things and get them done. And a lot of them are frustrated right now because so many people in our society seem to have forgotten that, yes, when it's properly directed, our government really can do great things that can't – or won't – get done otherwise.

Remember what happened when President Kennedy said we're going to the moon within a decade? Dwight Eisenhower said we were going to build a coast-to-coast network of high-speed highways? Franklin Roosevelt said we were going to convert our peacetime industries to produce tanks, airplanes and warships to enter WWII almost overnight? Remember how we built huge dams to generate electricity and wired almost the entire rural U.S.A. within a decade? How we put unemployed veterans and Irish immigrants to work and completed a transcontinental railroad in six years?

Those things got done, not because someone thought about what was possible. They were visions – dreams of the way things should be. Political leaders got behind those dreams, mobilized the country, and armies of bureaucrats organized and engineered the projects and put American industry and the American people to work making those dreams a reality.

Afraid of government boondoggles? At one time or another nearly every major public works project in the country was called a boondoggle. The subway system in Washington finished enormously over budget, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) was another boondoggle, as was Boston's “Big Dig.” Now try imagining what traffic, and life, would be in any of those areas had someone not had the vision, and the courage to face the technical challenges and virulent criticism.

We're spending too much time standing around complaining that we have too many people out of work and saying we have to tighten our belts, lower our expectations, we can't do anything because we need to save money.

For crying out loud, all of those folks who are out of work have to eat, breath clean air and drink from public water systems. They receive health care, their kids are in school, they use cars and buses that use public roads, highways and bridges. We are already investing a huge amount of money and resources in people who are sitting on the sideline because, as a society, we're too timid to put them to work building the world we want the next generation to live in, and maintaining the infrastructure the last generation built for us.

The marginal cost of doing something with our human resources isn't that great, compared to the tragic waste of talent and the money it takes to keep people idle.

In the political arena, a “can't do” attitude should be unacceptable, and a politician with a “haven't decided where we ought to be going” attitude should give up his or her government health care and go to work for someone who does have a dream.

Every candidate running for office should be able to define good government in a sentence that begins “good government does . . .” rather than “good government is . . .”

Even if the dream is to keep things in your community exactly the way they are, the community's government needs to get organized and do things to see that happens, because there are forces of nature and armies of people hard at work every day trying to change the status quo.

Want to keep things as they are? What's your plan to keep people from building mega-malls on farmland? On the international level, how are you going to keep the number of nuclear powers from growing? How are you going to provide a stable workforce and a stable economy as the digital age, robotics and new communications technologies evolve?

No one should climb up onto a stage unless they want to put on a show. No one should run for office unless they are prepared to lead.