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Thoughts on: The TSA’s decision to allow small knives on airplanes

. Current events . , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments

When I first heard of the Transportation Safety Administration’s decision last week to allow passengers to carry small knives on airplanes, my knee jerked and I had a reaction — “what the hell are these guys thinking,” I said out loud. Then I recalled something that happened to me a few months back.

My wife and I had just returned to Florida from a trip to New Jersey. Our flight had taken us through both Ft. Lauderdale Hollywood International airport, and Newark Liberty International airport. We’d just gotten home and I was in the process of unpacking my carry-on bag, when for some reason, I opened one of those zippered exterior pockets, even though I hadn’t recalled packing anything in it. You know those pockets, they’re too small to stash a magazine, and too big for a cell phone, so they are rarely used.

“Hey, look what I found,” I said to my wife. “Right here in this seldom used exterior pocket in my recently landed, carry-on bag.” Well, I said something like that.

“Isn’t that your ‘road corkscrew’,” she said, recognizing the dangerous instrument immediately. She looked at me like I’d just pulled a loaded Glock 9 out of the bag.

Now just a bit of background – my ‘road corkscrew’ had been missing for quite some time. I had purchased it in an outdoor store in Springdale, Utah, just outside of Zion National Park, years before. It had a really nice wooden handle with a corkscrew that snapped securely into place when extended, not like those cheapo $1.99 throwaways you can pick up by the beer cooler at 7-11. No, this one was nice, and it had served me well. I had taken it on camping trips, business trips and road trips. Anyone who has ever found themselves staring down an unopened bottle of chardonnay in a remote Econo-Lodge in central Nebraska, on a rainy night, after a long day on the road, will appreciate the value of a ‘road corkscrew’.

Anyway, the other end of my road corkscrew’s handle contains a folding knife. Not a locking blade knife, but a very sharp knife. It can make fast work of even the toughest lime – its blade is just a bit under 2.5 inches.

“How long has that been there?” asked my wife. I could only shake my head, because I had to think about that one.

For the record, neither my wife or I are frequent fliers. We are far from it, but we do make, on average 4 – 6 trips per year by air. But, as nearly as I could determine, this instrument had criss-crossed the United States multiple times in my bag, passing through not only Ft. Lauderdale Hollywood International and Newark Liberty, but McCarran International in Las Vegas.

This isn’t a knock on the TSA. These guys have a huge job on their hands, and in spite of the bad rap they get for strip searching us, rummaging through our bags and confiscating our shampoo, they’re all just trying to make sure we all get to our destinations in one piece. So for that I applaud the TSA.

I also am well aware of the fact that the biggest weapon in the 911 hijacker’s arsenal was one of surprise. It think it is highly unlikely, if not downright impossible, that an airliner will be taken by anyone with ‘road corkscrew’, or a pair of nail clippers. What I do see, however, increasingly, are unruly passengers. Justifiably, the folks most upset about this new ruling are the flight attendants. They have to deal with the surly, obnoxious and most often inebriated passengers. I’m talking about the arrogant jackass who just polished off six rum and cokes at the airport bar and is enraged when the flight attendant refuses to serve a seventh to him at 35,000 feet.

It seems to me that keeping this ban in place just makes sense. I mean, we are already scanning and confiscating an assortment of other items. Until someone ensures me that an air marshal is riding on every flight, then the sky is a rather lawless place to be–and just for the record, my ‘road corkscrew’ will be traveling in my checked bag from now on, or it will be staying home.

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Thoughts on: Yahoo’s C.E.O, Marissa Mayer, pulling the plug on home workers

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Last week, when I heard the news that Yahoo’s C.E.O., Marissa Mayer had decided to end the company’s work at home policy, it hit a nerve. As a home worker myself, although not for Yahoo (but for a company just as large), I had to go digging for the reason behind Ms. Mayer’s decision. It didn’t take me long to find it. It seems her decision to terminate the Yahoo work at home policy was based on data gathered by reviewing company VPN records. Without going into the more arcane details about VPNs, they allow workers to access company resources when they are in a remote location (like home, a hotel room, Starbucks, etc.).

Apparently, Ms. Mayer didn’t like what she saw in the VPN data report. Home workers were not accessing the network with the same fervor as their cubicle dwelling counterparts. There was no mention of any other indicators of declining productivity – such as missed delivery dates, delayed projects or late reports. (That may well have been the case, but it was not mentioned in any of the online articles I reviewed.) It appears that quite a number of Yahoo work-at-homers simply were not, well…working. Who could blame Ms. Mayer for doing what she did. Confronted with such data, she hit the problem with a large hammer – gather your laptops you work-at-home slackers, and report to the office tomorrow at 9, and don’t be late (or something to that effect).

Now I know what some of you are thinking…those of you who go to work every day to do things like put out fires, arrest criminals, teach children, build roads, attend the sick, minister to the masses, cut lawns, plow fields, drive the big rigs, and sell beauty products door to door – you people are probably saying to yourselves, “those cry baby corporate drones are a bunch of whiners. Somebody makes them change out of their bathrobes and report to work in an office, and they act like it’s the end of the world.”

In some cases, I might agree with such thought, as some of us are whiners. But most work at homers, including myself, will tell you that spending your day chained to a computer in you own home isn’t as inviting as non-home workers believe it to be.

Some years ago, when I told someone that I worked at home, I would get one of two reactions, one being, “you are so lucky. I wish I could find a job like yours,” or, “oh I see,” wink-wink, “you’re working from home,” with the wink-wink emphasis on the word ‘working’ – catch my drift. As years passed, and more and more companies allowed, and in fact encouraged, workers to work from their homes, the novelty apparently wore off. Today when I tell someone that I work from my home I rarely get a response of any kind.

So here is what I have found so far, based upon several years of home work:

First – I find that I work longer hours than I did in my cubicle back at Corporate. Since I have been relieved of the time consuming task of preparing for, and driving to, an office, I can spend that time…working. And for the record, I have never worked in my bathrobe.

Second – home work is lonely. Occasional face to face time with co-workers is mentally healthy. Everyone needs to complain now and then, and we need someone to listen to us and nod, and tell us that they have been feeling the same way about the way management has been off-loading more work on those of us left after the last layoff…blah, blah, blah…you don’t get much time to complain sitting in a room by yourself with a laptop.

Third – and this is a huge giveback to The Man that  flies completely under the corporate radar: Nobody gets sick anymore. Or at least they don’t where I work. Back days of yore, before I worked at home, I could spend those occasional days when I didn’t feel ‘up to par’ on my couch, feet propped up with a box of tissues in hand, watching daytime TV. It was called, ‘calling in sick’. Not so today. It is not that people don’t get sick, of course they do, but the bar has been raised on what warrants complete and utter absence from work.

Last week, shortly after I logged into work from my home office, an email popped up from a co-worker. The subject line read: “Still not over the flu – will be checking email throughout the day.” That email arrived a little before 7 AM. I knew that my co-worker had been suffering with the flu for a few days, but every day she dutifully logged it to check her email, and every day she continued to ‘work through’. I called her at 4 PM and she was still online.

“I thought you were going to get some rest today,” I said, “you must be feeling better.”

“Feel like crap,” she responded, “I’m going to lie down in a little while.”

One email had led to the next, then a series of instant message exchanges with our London office, followed by a conference call with the development group in San Francisco, and the entire day had melted away.

So there you have it – my communique from the work-at-home front line. I am not here to defend Ms. Mayer’s lay-about, home workers. I certainly don’t have enough information to say her decision was wrong. Indeed it seems she had a very good reason for herding the sheep back into the corporate fold. I am wondering though, if the same work habits that made these people ineffective home workers will simply follow them into the office.

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Thoughts on the Camel’s nose…gun control…and a proposed dog ban in Broward County

. Gun control, Politics . , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments

Awhile back, I came across an old Arab proverb. I didn’t know what to do with it at the time, but I liked it, so I wrote it down in my blog-notebook for future reference. I filed it under the heading “Camel’s nose proverb”. It goes like this:

“If the camel gets his nose in your tent, his body will soon follow.”

The gist of this quote, of course, being the old saying,”give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile.” Gun control opponents are quite familiar with this chain of thought. It goes like this: “If they outlaw my AR-15 with its 55 round clip, then next they’ll come for my AK-47 with its 30 round clip, then they’ll want my Remington 12 gauge goose gun, and then they’ll want the .22 single shot, and after that Granddad’s antique muzzle loader…soon we’ll be left with a slingshot and a sharpened spoon to defend ourselves against the marauding gangs that will be roaming the streets in the wake of the inevitable upcoming  economic collapse…, and since marauding gangs will be armed to the teeth with illegally hoarded guns, the shit will have truly hit the proverbial fan…”

This is the oh-so-familiar ‘slippery slope’ argument. Once you begin to slide, there is no turning back. You have to tumble all the way to the bottom.

Personally, I have never (until recently) bought into the slippery slope line, at least when it comes to gun control. I have always thought that certain types of firearms, especially those that can be fired very rapidly and without reloading are too dangerous for the general public. Maybe we don’t really need armor piercing ammunition either – at least not in the hands of anyone with a wad of cash or a few bucks of credit left on their MasterCard. I have always held that the law and the legitimate ownership of guns could coexist. I mean…can’t we all just get along?

Obama’s proposed ban on ammunition clips in excess of 10 rounds sounds sensible to me, but who the  hell am I? I’m not a really big gun guy. But should this become law, and somewhere down the line you could ask the eleventh potential victim in a crazed maniac’s line of fire what they think of such a law, he or she will probably say that it was a very good law indeed. But now we are going down the road of why a crazed maniac has access to any weapon, and that is not where I want to go here.

What I want to say is this. I was perfectly comfortable with my opposition to slippery slope arguments, then that camel pushed its nose into my home turf, Broward County, Florida.

We have a big problem down here with dogs. Not just any dogs, but specifically the pit-bull breed. In the past 2 years, there have been 225 pit-bull attacks in Broward County. That is a lot of dog attacks. Couple that with the 269 calls to the county authorities (over the same 2 year period), to report pit-bulls roaming ‘at large’, then you can see why some people around here are upset. That’s why today, February 26, a hearing is being conducted at County Hall in Ft. Lauderdale to consider a ban on the pit-bull breed in Broward County. Don’t think folks are taking this lying down. Nothing gets the public more politically engaged that issues related to animals. Emotions are running high on both sides of this proposed pit-bull ban. A Facebook page has been set up to help save the breed, and a crowd of people on both sides of the pit-bull issue are expected to descend upon County Hall to make themselves heard in the democratic process — as they should.

So I was discussing this pit-bull issue yesterday, with my friend Patrick who works at the same place I do, the place where I go to write stuff and get paid for it. Patrick knows that I am a huge dog lover, and dog owner. He also knows that I am not the biggest fan of the pit-bull breed. He cornered me at the water cooler yesterday.

“Where do you come down on this pit-bull ban,” he asked. Then before I could answer, he went on to say, “it’s high time if you’d ask me.”

“Well,” I said after thinking a bit. “I’m opposed to it. It makes absolutely no sense to ban a breed of dog, just because some owners are irresponsible. I mean, people who are going to abuse animals and teach them to fight aren’t going to be deterred by the law. What we need are laws to hit irresponsible dog owners where it hurts – in the wallet. If we ban pit-bulls, then next it’s going to be Rottweilers, then German Shepards, and maybe Labrador Retrievers – who knows where it could end. Wait until they ban your Yorkie, Patrick.”

“I see,” said Patrick. “It’s kind of like the slippery slope argument. Once you ban one breed, then it becomes easier to ban another breed.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s sort of like that.”

“It sounds a bit hypocritical,” he said, “especially after you said that the slippery-slope argument made no sense when it came to gun control, remember?”

I did remember saying that…I confess to some hypocrisy. But nobody is perfect. I still believe that guns can be effectively regulated with well thought out legislation, and I still believe that pit-bulls should not be banned in Broward County, Florida.

If you believe that the President’s gun control proposal is sound policy, then contact your Congressional representative and make your voice heard. If you believe pit-bulls should not be banned in Broward County, then make your way down to County Hall at 11:30 AM today and join the fray

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Remembering Hunter S. Thompson

. What I'm Reading . , , , . 1 Comment

February 20th marks eight years since the death of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson (HST). On that date in 2005, HST dropped the hammer on his .357 magnum revolver for the last time, thus ending his life at Owl Farm, his ‘fortified compound’ near Aspen, Colorado.

[NOTE TO READERS: Gonzo journalism can be defined as a journalistic style that does not claim objectivity. Fact and fiction are often blurred, as the reporter becomes part of the story…or that’s what I make of it anyway…]

I was shocked by the news of HST’s death.  I had followed his career for many years, my first exposure to gonzo journalism being the pop-culture, balls-to-the-wall saga of the 1972 Presidential campaign: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972. HST’s alcohol fueled account of this historic campaign was, and still is, the best book about the Nixon/McGovern presidential campaign of 1972 ever written. His interview with George McGovern at the end of the book is priceless, as is the dialog between Hunter and Nixon as they spar on the only common ground they would ever share: professional football.

I went on to read the often emulated, but never equaled, Hells Angels, The Strange And Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Books about motorcycle gangs abound today, but most are written by law enforcement officers who infiltrate gangs as undercover officers. HST went straight in as a journalist, and captured dialog and feeling for subject that you won’t find in any of the cop’s books. Read today, this classic is also as much a testament to the sixties in San Francisco, as it is to the Angels.

So for me, it was inevitable that I would become a fan of HST, as we had much in common. We both shared a passion for writing, a keen interest in politics and current events, contempt and hatred for Richard M. Nixon and the Vietnam War, distain for the military industrial complex, a healthy distrust of the U.S. Government, and admiration for writer Ernest Hemingway. Also, inexplicably we both shared a somewhat bizarre interest in the inner workings of outlaw motorcycle gangs.

I think it is HST’s interest in Hemingway that is of most interest to me. Hunter was said to be so impressed with Hemingway’s work that back in the 50’s he once typed A Farewell to Arms in its entirety, just to try to capture Hemingway’s style — now that’s some serious stuff.

It is no wonder that HST travelled to Ketchum, Idaho in 1964, three years after Hemingway’s suicide to research a piece that he was writing about the death of the famous author. HST wrote the following about Hemingway:

“He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him – not even when his friends came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.”

Once someone asked me to name my favorite first and last chapters of any book I have ever read. I didn’t have to think about that one. My favorite first chapter would be Chapter 1 of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms.

My favorite last chapter of any book I have ever read is the last chapter of Hell’s Angels (chapter 22).

Coincidence – I think not…

With that, I close with one of my favorite HST quotes:

“Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.”

—Hunter S. Thompson – Generation of Swine:  Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80’s

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No more Saturday mail delivery…is this the beginning of the end of the USPS?

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When I heard that the United States Postal Service had decided to pull the plug on Saturday mail delivery I barely raised an eyebrow. Anyone who has been paying attention knew that this was bound to happen sooner or later. Ostensibly, this action will save the taxpayers 2 billion dollars annually. And why not…think about it!

Nobody writes letters anymore. Even my own mother, who is well into her eighties, sends me email instead of letters. And those credit card offers that I used to get three or four of every day —  the ones that offered me a MasterCard or Visa with a limit five times my annual salary — those aren’t nearly as plentiful in this post-housing-market-crash era (due to the fact that consumers have lost the ability to pay off large balances by taking equity out of their homes, but that is the fodder for another blog). Then my Newsweek magazine went into steady decline, soon to be eclipsed in content by my local Pennysaver. Finally, last October it breathed its last and was laid to rest, replaced by its online counterpart, Newsweek Global, an online magazine perhaps soon to be rivaled in readership by Ed’s end of the planet books. Of course everyone pays their bills online these days, and when was the last time you received a postcard from a vacationing relative — why mail a card from the Grand Canyon when you can just take a digital picture and plant it on Facebook.

And that my friend, is why the United States Post Office is stopping Saturday delivery — there is not enough mail to keep them busy. And it only follows, that if there is no work, why pay to keep those shiftless postal workers loafing around the mail rooms and napping in their mini-vans on the taxpayer’s dime, right…

I am not so sure. Like the right to bear arms, which we hear so much about these days, the Post Office is a Constitutionally mandated institution. But that may be where the similarities end. Don’t forget, the Post Office is staffed by those villainous American Postal Workers Union members, and we all know about the evils of unions don’t we.

“Oh come on,” you may say to me. “It’s only one day. These guys have five other days to deliver the mail. Go ahead and give them Saturdays off and save a buck or two.” To this I would answer — first, you are obviously someone who does not receive checks regularly in the mail as do many small business people, and second, that there is far more behind this than meets the eye.  I believe that the death knell of the Post Office may well begin on August 5, 2013, when Saturday delivery ceases, and its death will not be due to natural causes.

I think that there is a well orchestrated plot to shut down the USPS, a plot that began back in 2006. In that year, the Republican controlled Congress passed a law requiring the USPS to fund the retirement of future retirees for the next 75 years. And it required the  funding to be completed within ten years. This is the first and only time that a Federal Agency has ever been issued such an unreasonable requirement. The USPS is actually funding retirement accounts for employees that haven’t been hired! So I must ask myself: Could this requirement (enacted by a lame-duck Congress), be in any way tied to a movement to privatize mail service in the United States? Like most other privatization movements, like the current ones to privatize schools and prisons, and even the military, begin with dismantling organized labor.

So if you are thinking that you can live without mail on Saturdays, you are probably right. But if you see something more sinister afoot, I suggest you do as I plan to do and make your feelings known to your Congressman.

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Remembering Edgar Guest and some thoughts on the state of poetry today

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When I was a child we had a small, slim, blue, book of poetry in our house. The title of the book was It takes A Heap o’ Livin’, and it was written by Edgar A. Guest. The book, published in 1916, was one of Guest’s most popular. If you have not heard of Guest, here’s the brief bio: He was born in England in 1881 and died in Detroit, Michigan in 1959 – in the course of his 77 years, he would hammer out over 11,000 poems which would eventually be collected into over 20 poetic volumes.

Guest started out as a newspaperman, first working for the Detroit Free Press where he would quickly rise through the ranks from copy boy to reporter. Somewhere along the way he started writing poems and published his first in the aforementioned newspaper on December 11, 1892. Guest would go on to become a naturalized American citizen in 1902, and he quickly developed an earthy poetic voice, steeped in local dialect that would captivate rural America.

Guest’s poems were usually sentimental, sometimes inspiring, always rhyming, and most often corny, but they were written for mass consumption, and Guest certainly knew his demographic. Guest published almost all of his work in newspapers – the internet of the day. You needn’t be an MFA grad student, or an ivory tower English professor to understand his verse. He was a simple hard working poet, writing for a simple hard working audience, in what were, undoubtedly, simpler times.

Not to say that Edgar A. did not have his detractors. Dorothy Parker said of Edgar:  “I’d rather flunk my Wasserman test than read the poetry of Edgar Guest.” But we all have our naysayers don’t we. I will leave the link in place for those of you who might not know what the Wasserman test entails — enough said.

I mention Guest only because he authored the first poetry book that I remember reading from cover to cover. It was not the most sophisticated verse, but I believe exposure to poetry at an early age instilled a desire in me to play with words and put them together in an order that would make people want to read them – or maybe not…

Later in life I would go on to discover poets with a different voice, particularly the beat poets, Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg and my all time favorite (quasi-beat) poet, Charles Bukowski – a gentleman who is perhaps the anti-Edgar A. Guest of poetry (more on Bukowski in another post).

So why write about Edgar A. Guest and old folksy poetry? It is probably because I have been reading more poetry lately, thanks to the many new friends that I have made on Twitter and Facebook. Over the past few weeks, many of you have passed along links to your websites and I have been looking at as many as I can, with the limited time I have. What I am discovering is some really high quality work. Some people have sent me links to some masterfully produced websites, with truly professional content. Thanks to all!!

An acquaintance of mine, a gentleman who has been fortunate enough to have a couple of publishing credits under his belt, growled to me in an email the other day that the internet was filled “with rubbish”.

He went on to repeat a line in his email that I have read somewhere else, although I can’t remember where, that ‘when everyone becomes a writer, no one is a reader’. Now my acquaintance can be a bit condescending when it comes to writing, not because he has a graduate degree from a very well known East Coast Ivy League university hanging on the wall of his study, and not because he has a publicist that calls him to schedule signings at distant Barnes and Noble bookstores, no — he was quite like that before he’d published a line. I do not entirely agree with him.

I fired an email back saying: “reading a great poem online right now”. I sent along the link…so far no reply.

Frankly, I am seeing some really good work on the internet by some very talented writers. So, if you have anything you’d like me to link to from my little blog, please just ask and I will be more than happy to do so. Just don’t be surprised if I ask you to link back, and maybe in some small way we can all help each other.

So that’s it for this Tuesday. I think I will close with one of the greatest (undeniably corn ball, but nonetheless uplifting) motivational poems ever written:

You can do as much as you think you can,
But you’ll never accomplish more;
If you’re afraid of yourself, young man,
There’s little for you in store.
For failure comes from the inside first,
It’s there if we only knew it,
And you can win, though you face the worst,
If you feel that you’re going to do it.

— Edgar A. Guest (from Secret of the Ages; 1926)

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An icon falls…Tulip calls

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My phone rang early this morning. It was Tulip calling from Vegas. I hadn’t heard from her since before the holidays, so I knew that something big was up.

“Hey Trop,” she said, “have you heard the news?” She started out like that, like we talked every day. Her voice was raspy and her speech a little slurred. I figured she’d been up all night.

“Well hello to you too, Tulip,” I said, “I thought you’d dropped off the map. Where are you anyway?”

“I’m staying at Bally’s,” she said, “but that could be temporary, depending…I drove over for the Super Bowl.”

“You drove,” I said, somewhat shocked, knowing Tulip’s aversion to distance driving, as well as the condition of her classically restored 1978 Ford LTD. “All the way from L.A.?”

“Times are a little tough right now,” she said, “I’m trying to save on airfare.” A few seconds of silence followed, and then I heard the flick of a lighter, and I knew she’d lit a fresh American Spirit. “But if you want some fodder for that blog of yours,” she continued, “just turn on the TV.”

I did as Tulip suggested and turned on Channel 6 News out of Miami. The news of the day was just shocking. Dan Marino, or ‘Dan-the-Man’ as he is so often affectionately referred to here in South Florida had fallen, and fallen hard — within the space of only a few hours. He’d plummeted from iconic sports hero to dirt bag extraordinaire. I am sure that all of my loyal readers know by now, that Dan by his own admission had an extramarital affair — one that resulted in the birth of a child. Dan doesn’t deny the allegations and has in fact admitted that he has supported both mother and child, and apparently very well.

If you don’t live in South Florida, then you might not realize how Dan Marino is idolized here. Oh, the guy has his detractors for sure. A contractor friend of mine who worked on Dan’s house told me that he was cold and distant (translated to arrogant asshole who wouldn’t sign an autograph), but for the most part Dan-the-Man has achieved hero status here. He is after all, the immortal number ‘13’ – the star quarterback for the Miami Dolphins who, back during their heyday led the team to greatness, including the yet to be challenged ‘undefeated season’, of 1972.

As many of we Dolphins fans watch grainy footage of Dan’s gridiron exploits on the stadium jumbo-tron during pre-game hoopla, we find ourselves hoping that someday our team might find another Marino, and in fact every quarterback fielded by the Dolphins is compared against the Marino yardstick…sigh…

So Dan Marino has fallen, or maybe not. So far, lovers by the score are not stepping forward (see Woods, Tiger), and for the moment it seems to be a private matter between Dan-the-Man and his family…so far…

So I think Tulip was wrong. There’s nothing to see here beyond another fallen athlete. I don’t think this story will grow legs. I told Tulip that when I called her later in the day.

“You’re wrong Trop,” she said. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Wanna bet,” I said. There was silence on the phone and  I thought better of it. “Forget I said that, what’s your pick for the Super Bowl?”

“Ravens by 3.”

“By 3?”

“Yeah, in overtime,” she said.

That’s Tulip.

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Sunsets and the human spirit

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Note:  I wrote this for my wife on a special anniversary. She liked this piece and asked me to please put it on my blog:

* * *

We are standing on the dock at Mallory Square in Key West, Florida. It’s late afternoon, and we’ve come to watch Key West’s premier free attraction – the sunset. Over the years, we’ve visited Key West many times, but this time we are in town to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. It’s late January, and a rare cold front has descended upon the Florida Keys. With temperatures dipping into the high 30s (almost an emergency situation in that locale), we are forced to leave the shorts and flip flops in our suitcase and don long pants, sweatshirts, and even gloves for our trek up to Mallory Square.

“This isn’t the Key West trip I was planning on,” I growl as we trudge past the phalanx of gift shops, bars and restaurants that flank Duval Street. “We should have stayed home and come down another time.”

My wife ignores me, more concerned with the business at hand. “I don’t think it’s going to be a good sunset,” she says, “I’m really disappointed.” I look west, up the street, and see that the sky is overcast.

“Maybe we should just bag it then,” I say.  I notice a café across the street where the patrons are sitting at outdoor tables under heat lamps. They’re eating, drinking, and having fun, and they are obviously much warmer than we are.

“No,” she says, “it may clear off. We still have half an hour until sunset.”

The wind kicks up as we pass the old Customs House, and by the time we make our way through the throng of tourists and street performers to the seawall, my face is frozen and I feel more like we’re on a hike in the Maine woods than on a short vacation in the United States’ southernmost city.

In spite of the cold, the dock is crowded, and people of all ages are milling about trying to stay warm, some with drinks in one hand and digital cameras in the other.  Two teenagers sit on the dock making out, oblivious to the crowd gathering behind them. A middle aged couple to our right speaks in French, and although I have little understanding of the language, their conversation appears to have something to do with the sunset, or lack thereof. We talk to another couple who are down for the week from New Jersey, and the conversation alternates between dismay over the cold snap, and whether or not the sun will break through the cloud bank long enough to allow us all a picture.

“We saw the green flash once,” a lady says to me. She refers to the almost mythical flash of green light that supposedly occurs at the point in time just before the sun dips below the horizon. “But that was up in Naples,” she says, “I’ve never seen it down here.”

My wife seems concerned as sunset approaches, but determined to get a picture if the clouds cooperate. “I think it may be breaking away,” she finally says. I focus on the western sky and notice that a hole appears to be forming in the clouds.

“Yes, you’re right,” says the lady who saw the green flash in Naples. “I think it’s going to break through after all.”

Me, I’m still not certain. The two teenagers stop what they’ve been doing and point digital cameras at arm’s length toward the western sky. The French couple speaks in a low but excited tone in the language I don’t understand. Everyone watches the sky for the big break. Then it comes.

The clouds part swiftly and the first unfiltered rays of the late day sun streak across the water. Muted gasps of delight erupt among the mixed crowd of sunset revelers on the Mallory Square dock. A few seconds after that, the sun breaks through and it hangs suspended for a moment, like a rich orange globe sizzling in the South Florida winter sky. Cameras click as everyone takes advantage of the moment. A young couple asks my wife to take a picture of them with the sunset in the background. When she’s through they ask if we want our picture taken too, and they take a picture of us there. After they take the shot and we’ve thanked them, and they have gone away, my wife reviews their work in the tiny camera view finder.

“Perfect,” she says to me. I squint at the tiny image and see the two of us, huddled together in our sweatshirts, trying to stay warm, with the setting sun hanging just above my left shoulder. I think of how the both of us are now preserved in perfect jpeg format for time eternal. For a moment I forget the cold and I think of the past 30 years that we’d spent together. I think of how many sunset pictures we have at home in our photo albums. I recall pictures she’d waited patiently to take on the Pacific Coast Highway, and in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. I remember of the incredible shot she’d taken on Florida’s Anna Maria Island when an old biplane passed in front of the setting sun and she’d captured it perfectly.

“Don’t you think we have enough sunset pictures,” I ask.

“No,” she says. “Not enough.”

“Then you’ll never get tired of taking them?”

She laughs at me, “of course not, they’re all different.”

Then she says, “come on, let’s go somewhere and warm up.”

We walk back toward the old Customs House and stop for a moment on the corner to listen to a street singer. He strums a guitar with frozen fingers and sings a Jimmy Buffett song off key.  He looks colder than I am, so I put two dollars in his tip jar and we head out for Captain Tony’s.

Later that night, on our way back downtown, I spot the French couple. They are drinking white wine at the café with the heat lamps. They don’t recognize me, but I know who they are. I think about Mallory Square and how we’d gathered to watch an event that has occurred every night for the past few billion years. I see us all there, the French couple, the New Jersey couple, the make out kids and the green flash lady. All of us pulled in for that moment. Together we’d experienced the end of a day that will never occur again. It’s unique.

She sits on the edge of the bed and asks me what I want to do tomorrow — our last day in Key West. I tell her I don’t care as long as we go to Mallory Square for sunset.

W E Patterson's avatar

Living in the age of deception

. Life, Politics . , , , , , , . Leave a comment

*hood-winked

To take in by deceptive means; deceive. See synonyms at deceive.

hood’wink’er n.

*  *  *

Many years ago, at New York’s famed Feast of San Gennaro, I was relieved of $20 by a fast talking street vendor in a shell game. I left the Feast a bit wiser, and years later when I confessed my ignorance of New York street games to a friend, he laughed and remarked that I had clearly been ‘hoodwinked’.

I liked that word. Much more playful sounding than its cousin ‘deceived’, and much less threatening than its drunken uncle counterpart, ‘ripped off’, hoodwinked seemed to fit nicely into the picture of what happened to me that day. Lately, I am starting to feel like we are living in an age of deception, where hoodwinkers of all types are ‘taking us all in’ just a little bit.

First came Lance Armstrong, the Tours de France super star. Since bicycle racing does not attract the huge following here in the U.S. as it does in Europe, it takes some doing for a cycler to gain national name recognition. Ask anyone here in the States to name a famous cycler, and nearly everyone will name Lance Armstrong. Ask them to name a second and your question will likely be met with a blank stare. Lance seemed to have it all. A stellar athlete, Lance was from the get-go, clearly on a path to celebrity, and if his athletic prowess were not enough to seal the deal, his inspirational triumph over cancer would be. Since most of us feel that we are probably just one diagnosis away from this dread disease, Lance’s high profile cancer beat-down left us all knowing that not only was there life after cancer, but athletic top-of-your-game, celebrity status life.

Of course doping charges followed Lance’s success and those who dared to cast a shadow of doubt upon his squeaky clean image were, by many accounts, castigated and intimidated into silence. So, for many years we turned a blind eye to the super-star cyclist, preferring to see him as he wanted us to see him. Not until his recent, and now famed coming out appearance on Oprah, were we forced to confront the fact, that Lance the man, was simply another athlete with sins long hidden from view. First he said he didn’t – now he says he did…I am majorly hoodwinked.

Next came Beyonce. Her now controversial appearance at last week’s Presidential inauguration is under fire, her performance marred by allegations of lip-syncing The Star Spangled Banner (in fairness to Beyonce, if there was ever a song to lip-sync it’s that one). For some reason this inaugural “mini-scandal” seems to linger, perhaps even eclipsing Michelle Obama’s eye-rolling at the luncheon incident.

To those who say Beyonce has hoodwinked us, I cry foul. Well, maybe a mini-teeny-weeny hoodwinking went on, but who could blame her. If she had been lip-syncing to say – Barbara Streisand, well then…MAJOR hoodwinking …but she didn’t do that.  Beyonce chose, apparently (or perhaps she was advised by her handlers), to sing what is arguably one of the most difficult (and often massacred) songs ever written, by lip syncing to her own voice. So what is really wrong with that? Let’s face it. That is a damn difficult venue that Inauguration. You’re on like never before with the world watching – the Prez himself is sitting right there, and baby it’s cold outside. Who would want to take a chance on failure…

…Apparently James Taylor, that’s who. Like J.T. or hate him, you have to give the guy credit, he’s got guts. Taylor went on bald, cold, and nervous, but he played the game straight up. After his performance he gave an interview in which he admitted that Inaugurals aren’t the best gigs in the world for singing guitar players:

“It’s always hard for a guitar player to play when it’s cold because your hands sort of stiffen up and you know nerves tend to do that to you anyway. So I was, you know, very relieved to have gotten to it without any major train wrecks.”

And so he did. J.T. made it through without any ‘trainwrecks’. But it leaves me wondering if an occasional trainwreck, or maybe just a slight derailing, would not have been better for the career of Lance Armstrong. Maybe the loss of a race or two would have simply humanized him…or maybe not, but it would have kept him off of Oprah’s show confessing to the masses that he was a liar and a cheat.

And as for Beyonce, while I don’t feel that she is in the same league of hoodwinkers as Lance, I am thinking that maybe an imperfection in her performance would not have sent her career down in flames either. After all – politicians certainly don’t concern themselves with embarrassment on the national stage, so why should we expect a performer to  be perfect?

That’s it for now…back to writing about ‘writing’  topics really soon…I mean it…

–Trop

*Definition courtesy of The Free Dictionary, by Farlex.

W E Patterson's avatar

I sell the gun…and have some misgivings…

. Gun control, Life, Politics, What I'm Writing . , , , , . 2 Comments

Note to my readers: This is part 4, the last part of a ‘serial-blog’.  A serial-blog is something I wanted to try, but might not attempt again. But you never know. Without reading the first three parts, it probably won’t make too much sense, so if you are new here (or just showing up late), please scroll down to Part 1 and read the blog posts in order. In a nutshell, this is a short story that is intended as a personal commentary on gun control. The experience is true, or as best I remember it. All names and some inconsequential details have been changed, so if a character sounds like you my friend, there is a good chance it is.

PART 4

…I continue…

Dean White had it made. Or so I thought back then. If there was ever a guy who was truly his own man it was Dean.

About fifty years old at the time, he looked older. He had a long salt and pepper beard almost to mid-chest, and long grey hair almost to mid-back. His hair was always pulled back in a pony tail, held in place with one of those turquoise Navaho hair clasps. He also wore a turquoise ring on his little finger and always wore a turquoise bedecked belt buckle on a hand tooled belt. Dean hadn’t an ounce of Native American blood in his veins but he apparently liked the jewelry.

Dean made his living with a small printing business that he ran out of the basement of his house. He printed labels for catalogs and fliers and usually worked all night. This left him free all day to hunt and fish. Dean was married to a girl named Suzie, who was at least twenty years his junior. Suzy had platinum blonde hair and had worked as a stripper at a club in Kansas City before she left that world behind to marry Dean (or so I heard).

In addition to his printing business, Dean also was an accomplished gunsmith. He was known to buy and sell guns too, so he wasn’t surprised when I showed up at his house one morning with the .22 High Standard, wrapped in cheese cloth, and stowed in a shoe box. Someone had told me that as long as a pistol was contained in a box, any box, that it wasn’t considered a concealed weapon and you could carry it on the car seat beside you (sounds like hooey to me now that I think about it).

Dean was coming off of an ‘all nighter’, having just finished a big print run for an Omaha department store, and he still had 250 bulletins for the First Presbyterian church to run off before services next day, so he was a little grumpy. Suzy was pleasant though and brought us both steaming mugs of hot coffee.

Dean unwrapped the pistol, and inspected it like he knew what he was doing. While he was looking at it I gave him the condensed version of how Lenny and I had tried the gun out on a firing range, conveniently leaving out the fact that the range was on Earl Hackelman’s farm, and not only had we trespassed, but we’d almost been run down (or gunned down) by Hackelman himself. I told Dean that the gun shot right and high.

Dean laughed at me. “This ain’t no target pistol, son,” he said. “Now if it’s targets you want to shoot…” He got up and went into another room. He came back with a long oak box with a fancy inscription carved into the lid above a carving of an eagle with outstretched wings. He sat the box in front of me.

I opened the box. Inside was a true .22 caliber target pistol. I handled it carefully. It was perfectly balanced and the difference between it and the gun I had purchased from Harry was as pronounced as the difference between my 1969 Plymouth and a racing Ferrari.

“How much?” I asked Dean, momentarily seeing myself entering professional shooting competitions.

“Three seventy five,” said Dean, “but I could allow you fifty for your gun, so make it three twenty five and it’s yours.”

“Kinda out of my price range,” I said, as I laid the target pistol back in its ornate cradle. “What can you give me outside of trade.”

“Thirty bucks,” he said without hesitation.

“Thirty bucks,” I said, “wow, I paid fifty.”

“You got screwed,” said Dean.

“How about forty then?”

Dean smiled and pulled a turquoise money clip from the front pocket of his jeans. He counted out thirty five dollars. “Take it or leave it,” he said.

I took it.

*

A few days after I sold the pistol to Dean, I ran into Lenny’s brother Rick at the County Line Tap. I hadn’t spoken to Lenny since the day he approached me with the offer to buy the gun. Lenny had left town for California without saying goodbye to anyone.

I walked over and asked Rick if there was any word from Lenny.

“Didn’t you hear,” he said.

“Hear what?”

“Lenny got robbed, that’s what.”

“Where…when?” I asked.

“Modesto, California,” he said. Then he told me that Lenny had stopped at a burger joint to get a bite to eat, and when he came out his car was gone.

“They stole everything he had,” said Rick.

“Everything?”

“Yeah, everything. All he had left were the clothes on his back. They found the car the next day stripped and burned.”

Careless Lenny…I thought of the gun that I almost sold to him.  Would I have put a weapon into the hands of a criminal, had I sold the gun to Lenny? Could the gun – my gun – have been used to rob, intimidate, or even kill?!?!. The answer was an unequivocal yes.

I was haunted by my ‘almost sale’ for some time afterward, and in my mind’s eye, I could  see the look on the face of  the happy car thief, after finding the loaded .22 pistol carelessly left in the glove compartment of Lenny’s unlocked vehicle. I could see the evil glee in the man’s eyes as he slid the piece into the waistband of his jeans. Later I could see the look of terror on the face of the liquor store clerk as the gun brandishing robber demanded the cash drawer. Maybe she would resist, or perhaps a feigned gesture would be misinterpreted as resistance. Maybe the thief would panic, pressing the trigger just a bit too hard…this target would be much closer than the one in Hackleman’s cow pasture. At two or three feet it wouldn’t matter if the gun shot right, or high. I would hear the sharp crack of the .22, and then I’d see blood on the face of the store clerk, and on the thief, and then on myself…after that I would awake covered in sweat.

THE END