Category: Life

Wow, it’s been seven years since G.J. Meyer published his book Executive Blues: Down and Out In Corporate America and detailed how much it sucks to be laid off from a six figure salary and how he couldn’t find a job.

Now Fortune is reporting it’s still tough when you’re white-color unemployed. Especially if you’re white-collar and formerly of high title and high salary.

Once, when I was a young man in college, sitting in the lobby of one of the halls that house classes on the campus of Marquette University, peddling doughnuts to support a fledgling literary magazine, and undoubtedly trying to win the affection of one of the interchangeable English-major blondes, a security guard imitation cop stopped at the imitation doughnut shop and gave me a bit of advice for which my upbringing and general outlook had prepared me: always have more than one potential source of income. Actually, he probably said “Have more than one pot on the fire,” or some other cliche, but as a recovering English major, I hate to repeat it verbatim.

I can, however. summarize the lesson. The gentleman related his life story, or at least his C.V., while eating a doughnut. He hadn’t gone to college, but he’d joined the National Guard. Throughout his tumultous employment career, he’d had the one-weekend-a-month-two-weeks-in-summer pay as well as a variety of part-time positions in addition to whatever full-time job he held at the time. Although his life, to that point, comprised the period from the 1960s to the early 1990s, he’d seen enough ups and downs to know that the world didn’t owe him something since he was present.

Of course, he didn’t have the $40,000 parchment, so one could easily dismiss the ramblings of an overweight rentacop in a grey parka. But when a security guard talks about security, and not just in the physical sense, perhaps one should heed. As both Meyer and the heroes of the Fortune piece could attest, parchments and titles don’t offer true security in a turbulent, evolving world.

Personally, I have held innumerable positions in numerous fields, including printing, shipping/receiving, grocery stores, IT, and magazines. I have a handy mix of blue collar skills and mad money skills. Whatever the job market, I will find something, even if it means something less than what I have now. I have also dodged the bullet of getting an superdooper title. Many cash-strapped companies will give you an esteem-building title instead of giving you a raise. Becoming Vice-Mechanic of Doc-U-Matics would make it much more difficult to simply be a Doc-U-Matic somewhere else, and I have deked when appropriate.

So I doubt I’ll ever have time to write a book or talk to another writer about being out of work and suffering without my ludicrous paychecks coming twice a month. I’ll be too busy working.

(And as my esteemed spouse has indicated, she has some mad 733t skillz at transcription and biscuit making, so no matter how the economy turns, we’ll have a hovel to call home.)

The only gift I could think to give would be another long, long day fishing, maybe 13 years ago.

It was Father’s Day. Love them if you’ve got them. Tomorrow, too.

James Lileks, known to bloggers for his daily Internet column The Bleat, wrote a long piece in 1996 about his mother’s death from cancer. Go forth and read “October at Home“.

And if you want a shorter take on losing a parent to cancer, read my doggerel “But through fifth floor hospital panes….” in an old PDF edition of Prolog. It’s no One True Thing, but it got published.

My dear esteemed spouse asserts that Jewel rhymes with fool and drool. Of course, she’s referring to my NOE (near obsession experience) with the newly techno-confected songstress Jewel Kilcher.

However, I must point out (in a “I am superior, but I am not acting superior” tone of writing) that jewel has two syllables. It rhymes with crewel and, well, cruel, but not fool or drool, or for that matter, joule.

Of course (:: sniff!::), as a former practitioner of “free verse” poetry, you’re not as aware of these subtle distinctions as a writer of real poetry.

Thought for the day:

“Being a marionette is worse, because at least a puppet gets the warm personal contact of a hand up its, ah, bum.”

I AM THE KING GEEK!

Some geeks can do an impression of Agent Smith from The Matrix.

Some geeks can do an impression of Gollum from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

But I have perfected my impression of Agent Gollum. Ask me sometime, and I shall do it for you. You might be asked to provide a token Guinness Draught or two beforehand, and please do not ask me to do it in front of my esteemed spouse.

I am the king geek, and I will creep out any challenger for the title!

(P.S. It’s probably almost as good as the “Dying Tauntaun.”)

In my never-ending cycle of market research (can it be a market if I never sell anything?), I picked up a copy of Gentlemen’s Quarterly (save yer click, no content, just “offer” of a subscription and the cover), which somehow gets published every month. Aside from the eyecandy cover phototeeenay on Eva Mendez, ranked SOTSF (Some Of That + Small Fries), GQ includes some articles, a piece of criticism, and Heaven help me, a Short Story.

So the plot of “Side Angle Side”, this month’s obra, is: Married middle-aged editor of an alternative weekly paper goes for an illicit weekend with the young hot pants up-and-coming writer. They share some joints and some sex, and then she gets weird on him and they get kicked out of the cabin they’d rented, he drives them home, she’s weirder on him, he goes home to his wife and young child, and hot pants writes something weird and resigns. I didn’t count, but it looks like it took several thousand words.

This story seemed like deja vu all over again. Didn’t I just read that story in Harper’s? No, wait, it was a college professor going off with a student, or maybe a struggling writer and a teenage bookstore clerk.

Let’s face it, literary fiction in the slicks is too much like Mad Libs for the intelligentsia in mid-life crises. Aside from the occasional sprinkling of pieces containing Cause-of-the-Week imaginings of what it was like to be an oppressed member of the opposite sex in the past or some sort of deviant (sorry, rebellious oppressed spirit), old-dude-sleeping-with-hot-young-chick again (or for once) is all they got. It’s the snooty equivalent of a Penthouse letter, and not as titillating.

As every single protagonist in literary fiction could tell you, Thoreau said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Because life is the constant struggle against the entropy that the cold universe offers as the only alternative, I guess the desperate struggle sort of makes sense. But it’s the quiet part that might bug literary authors. Perhaps they, and their protagonists, would rather rage, rage against the dying of the light by fornicating and affecting adolescence. Here in the Midwest, we rage against the dying of the light by getting up in the morning and going to work.

Maybe once, or twice, this problem, undoubtedly first discovered by Literary writers, of growing older and the hypothesis “struggling through casual sex is good” could have been interesting. If the protagonist had grown, or learned something, or maybe just regretted. Instead, the drugs, booze, and sex have just become Largest-Ball-Of-Twine tourist attractions in the same landscape of quiet desperation that other people, with real jobs, travel through without making those particular stops. Instead, each writer goes through his or her (paging Ms. Jong) own struggle, which includes a lot of humping with no resolution. The protagonists, and the authors, don’t seem to get past it.

While I wait for some writer to arise, somehow fighting through the tenured culture of the established writers and established subject matter for the dogmatic slicks and orthodox university presses, to go all Hemingway on the literary bunch and break their walking sticks of his or her head, I’ll continue to prefer the genre stylings of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. The types of short stories and novels wherein the protagonists confront a problem and overcome it. Well, not always, but the struggle’s admirable.

Of course, I could start the revolution, but I don’t have time. After I finish meddling with this sci-fi piece I have open in another window, I have to get to bed. I have to work on Monday.

Got a hard-to-meet diversity quota? No problem! Rent-a-Negro to the rescue!

Maxim, a magazine whose print edition I occasionally read for its informative articles (particularly its investigative photo-essays of women of achievement in the film and print industry), this month featured a number of extremely high-performance cars in its column The Ride (link is to pictures and multimedia, some by subscription, which augments the print piece).

Expert advice provided by Lamborghini technical advisor on how to properly use the Lamborghini Murcielago, which sports a 6.2 L, 575 horsepower V-12 engine that can propel the vehicle from zero to sixty in 3.8 seconds (2.7 seconds Canadian):

“Try to keep the yellow side up.”

Words by which to live.

As the beautiful wife and I have begun landscaping our beautiful suburban home in Casinoport, Missouri (an inner ring suburb of St. Charles, Missouri), I needed to replace the repeatedly-run-over hose with something that continued to fit onto spigot. We replaced the old Sentry Hardware $1.99 Long Straw model hose with the $2.99 (inflation) Ace Hardware Long Straw model hose. But when it came to the nozzle, I insisted we purchase an heirloom-quality water flow control device. I warm pleasurably with the thought of my great-grandchildren spraying each other as they wash the aerocar using the nozzle I bought.

So of course we chose the Nelson Model 2280 Industrial Metal nozzle. This nozzle includes a long list of features, including: Water pressure rated to 100 psi. Granted, my Long Straw hose cannot handle that, and my spigot would rather sprinkle the basement than spit out anything beyond 1 TPS (Trickle Per Second), but just in case we get a nuclear-powered water pump in the future, we will be ready. Hot water rated to 160°F, which is what the Azalea prefers. Unfortunately, this model cannot handle water that’s actually boiling, but when we need to scald the petunias, we can continue to use the tea kettle. Heavy-duty zinc construction. It’s not titanium or Kevlar, but when it oxidizes, it will double as a sun block. THERMOGUARD insulated for hot or cold water comfort. You don’t want Anything less than THERMOGUARD, like THERMOBARKINGDOG. Reinforced brass stem and nut. Although it sounds slightly dirty, it’s not, but merely sounding phallic is feature enough. Crush-resistant glass-filled nylon handle. Because crushable glass-filled Rayon handles are for wussies. Threaded tip for hose accessories. Definitely a plus, since the type of person who buys an industrial water nozzle will be easily influenced to buying additional accessories. Lock-on water clip. I haven’t tried it yet, but I assume this means something like a tone like the fighter pilots hear for those exact moments when I have the rose bushes lined up for a primary “soak shot.” All of this for just $11.99, which is much more than I paid for the hose, but worth it. For aside from the features denoted above, the nozzle has the word Industrial right on the handle. Each time I grip it, I will remember I am above the hoi polloi who use lesser water nozzles.

Of course, when we bought it on Saturday, the nozzle became an instant part of our family. Lawrence, as he prefers we call him, instantly bonded not only with me, but also Heather and the cats. He’s moved right in and has adjusted to life outside of the hardware store and outside the blister card with eager anticipation for what each new day brings. Freed from the NASA-style sleeping arrangement hanging from a hook in Ace Hardware, Lawrence prefers a medium-firmness pillow and likes to sleep late on Sundays. Although he sleeps late, Lawrence is not lazy. He’s ready to get to work dispensing water to the parched flora (and occasional fauna if one of those “cute baby rabbits” gets too close to any of our hundreds of dollars on nursery-bought flora). He understands the impact of the rain, which has left him on the bench this week, but he’s encouraged when we tell him that July and August are coming, and with them, the annual unprecedented drought. In our conversations, Lawrence and I have developed a deep respect for one another. Although we don’t always agree on the finer details of some issues, such as how long to deploy a spray upon an individual perennial, we agree that water is an absolute necessity for flowers, and that when April showers are a distant memory, it’s only our teamwork that will preserve the order we have established with weedblock fabric and mulch. And that’s enough to make our relationship start, and undoubtedly it will grow over time.

Lawrence Sleeps In Lawrence waits for the sun to come out so he can get to work

Some people wondered how a cosmopolitan, artistic, urban soul like me would fit into the rustic, drive-to-the-strip-mall life in Casinoport.

I fit right in, thanks.

In my previous days as an experienced Estate Sale Con-E-Sur, I spent a lot of times scavanging the homes of the well-to-do who acquired their, well, to-dos in the 1950s and 1960s. One thing that struck me besides, and often beside, the ovens built into the walls at an ergonomic height, was the hard-wired intercoms within some of the ranch homes, many of which could have fit the 13 x 65 mobile home in which I spent a couple of years into their basements. What a remarkable concept, I thought. But the idea died out in the 1950s, perhaps fifty years before these homes’ owners ended their retirements. My beautiful wife and I bought a home that lacks one, and the house was built when Lyndon Johnson was president.

Never fear, IM is here! Although my wife’s office and my office hide on opposite ends of different floors of our split-level home (no coincidence), we can get the benefits of the anachronistic knob-and-speaker assemblies in the Ladue and Town and Country homes. “Honey,” she types, “I am going to bed,” and I hear her voice within my imagination more clearly than I would through fifty-year-old vacuum tubes. “I’ll be right down,” I type carefully, examining each key carefully as I peck out the response to make sure each letter is where I left it. And I go, to kiss her good night and ensure the bed is adequately feline-occupied for her slumber.

The TCP/IP packets leave not detritus, though, and somehow it’s somewhat less satisfying to think our communication leaves no residue, unlike those lines hard-wired and ostentatiously-wrought in 1954.

Oh, bay bee! I don’t know if you all remember the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe or the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Update ’89, but they were encyclopedias of the almost all characters that had appeared in Marvel comic books since the beginning of time.

Looks like the Marvel Directory, a fan site with some claimed support from Marvel, has brought the whole thing online. I am weeping happy geek tears.

Which reminds me: I forgot to look for Stan Lee in X-Men 2. Sorry, honey, but guess where we have to go this weekend?

I received two unsolicited e-mail messages this afternoon, on my home account no less, from some punk outfit calling itself DarkSoft Group wants me to give them twenty bucks for an anti-spam remedy! Here’s the message, courtesy of some other guy who thinks as highly of them as I do.

The ad claims you can download the product from the #1 download site on the Internet. Let’s be frank: I don’t know how to discover any psuedo-scientific rankings, but I’ve always been a doubting Thompson, and I doubt that whoever www.sil00001.com is, they get a lot of casual traffic from people who type sil00001 into the Address bar to find software.

Let me see, give my credit card number to one or more punks collectively known by a name more suited to some 733t h4x0rz than a software company, and probably then provide them with the names and passwords to all my e-mail accounts? What’s not to like about that deal?

I just don’t have the twenty bucks.

By the way, Jay Weber and Bob Dolan are the best morning radio duo in the world!

I have listened to them off and on in the last couple of years via the Internet stream, and they’re always entertaining. Check them out, and get not only entertainment, but a taste of the city that spawned me.

MSN’s got a complete list of manners for the gym.

Rule number 1: Put the weights back where they belong, in order by weight.

I took four years of El Espanol en la….I mean, in high school, and then a year and a half in college. I got to use the language in a real world situation this weekend when I scrawled a “Felices Cumpleanos” on a birthday card for a friend whose party was at a Mexican restaurant. It’s a good thing that the party wasn’t held in Mexico proper; “Felices Cumpleanos” is about the extent of the extant vocabulary within my Spanish repertoire. But although the Spanish vocabulary and much of the advance conjugation and syntax have passed into the memory cells waiting to be recycled for Pink lyrics, I still retain some of what I picked up in Spanish classes. No, I met the lovely and talented Heather elsewhere. I meant I learned something in Spanish class.

Of course, early in my educational career I knew I was an English Nerd (Geek would have paid better). After all, I graduated from high school with ten credits of English, the equivalent of ten years of English classes, and I accumulated almost enough English credits in college to render me ineligible for an English degree. Although the typical high school grammar-indoctrination courses were geared to beat the rules of English grammar and syntax into my head, I didn’t really grok the point until I started fumbling phonics in another language.

Trying to speak another language helped to abstract the principles of written, and to a lesser extent oral, communication. For example, take the simple question “Could you run to the store?” Although common enough in the common vernacular, the content of this simple sentence relies upon a number of peculiarites of the idiom. To whit:

• “Could” represents the conditional tense, which means that a condition must be satisfied for the statement, much like in computer programming. I could, if that damn pit bull hadn’t gnawed my leg of at the shin–bad Otis!
• “run” is the English equivalent of “go” and can stand in for run, walk, drive, or whatever means of locomotion is appropriate.

The roles of the different parts of speech, and the different verb tenses (past or subjunctive? conditional or future?), stopped being the goofy impositions of the great grammarian overlords, the honorable William Safire presiding. Instead, they became the Legos brand toy building blocks used to build sentences, paragraphs, and communication between two or more people. Not immutable laws, but they’ve got their uses.

Of course, I came away with this insight only because my natural predilections normally predilecked toward the uses of languages. I’m not so sure the others who similar classes came away with a similar appreciation for the subtle art of speaking and writing clearly. Most of them still like to mix the red blocks with the blue blocks when making a tree, but they’ve had every opportunity to know which pieces are green.

In line at the hardware store with the artist formerly known as hli, I saw the most saddening thing I have seen in some time: a tennis racket that’s electrically configured to zap bugs. Although the thing says it’s not a toy, it’s designed and packaged to be used as a tennis racket with insects as the ball, and their deaths as the result.

That’s right, boys and girls, it’s specifically a toy to kill insects. This is ohsovery wrong.

Swatting bugs inside the house or upon you when you’re outside is necessity in preventing parasites from using you for lunch or preventing insects from consuming your grain. However, to simply go out of your way to kill them is kind of sick. They used to perjoratively say that a bad seed was the kind of kid to “pull the wings off of flies.” Now some bunch of yippie skippy Ron Zapeils come along to make it fun for the whole family.

Some PETA gum flapper might come along and say it’s just like huntung, but it’s not. Responsible hunters consume what they harvest. I assume these wannabe bug batters are not. If they do, and they’re putting moths, beetles, and bumblebees on the table for dinner, I don’t have a problem with it. But you’re not going to see Ted Nugent kill it and grill it (in one convenient step!) any time soon.

Fortunately, there’s not been a craze or anything, which proves either we’re in a recession and people cannot afford the finer things in life like a battery-operated taser-set-on-kill toy, or that America’s not slid so far into irreverant decadence that mainstream people want to kill something anything, other than virtually through video games, for fun. When I get a warm fuzzy glow after a pitcher of margaritas, I can convince myself it’s the latter.

At the local Casinoport grocery store we attend, a giant green monstrosity sits just beyond the cash register. A Coinstar machine. A machine designed to count coins and dispense almost as much in dollars as you put in in cents.

There’s a business plan for you. To build a machine that counts coins for Americans who are too lazy or who cannot count their own coins and takes a 7% vig right off the top.

When I tried the old, “Do you have a quarter for two dimes” trick in elementary school, I couldn’t find any takers. I should have, instead of using the “human touch” factor, just built a cold machine to do the same thing. People pay for that sort of convenience.