Mike Macartney's Blog

Free Is Dead

It is time. The sharing economy ain’t what they tell you it is.

Take a page from Rupert Murdoch’s playbook; you think he ever gave away anything for free? When is the last time you saw a free Stephen King book? How about Anne Rice? J. K. Rowling?

Back in 2011, 2012, or 2010 when eBooks were new we all did it, I did it, made some books free to boost exposure and get sales going. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now. It was delusion, desire, wishing on a horse to ride.

And back then it was all 99¢ eBooks too. It looks really cheap with the “¢” sign instead of $.99 doesn’t it? How’d that work out for you? People waited to get your book free and knew if you were only asking 99¢ you didn’t think much of your work either. “But, but, I did it to offer a sale price to get customers.” We all did, we are all guilty. The big publishers do offer their books at a discount to boost sales and introduce a new book – but they do it at $2.99-$3.99.

You know too that in the heady early days of self-publishing that there was a cavalcade or crap, a tsunami of shit being thrown at the new market. Free eBooks to promote websites and how to get rich and influence people, really bad books that were full of typos, bad grammar, and dumb stories, terrible romance and erotica hacked out, vampire/paranormal/dumb tripe, you name it – all free or 99¢ flooding the market and burying some really good stuff. And lets not forget 50 Shades of Grey, you know it was tripe, but it was free fan fiction and happened to catch with mainstream publishers desperate to latch on to something all those online readers would want.

And what was happening with all this free? Why people were throwing together garbage or having it written by offshore word mills and gaming the system to become best sellers and con people out of money.
http://thehustle.co/underground-world...

It’s 2015. EBooks are a much more mature market. Amazon only allows free books when you sign up for Amazon Prime and you give them exclusive publishing rights for your book. (You used to be able to make your book free on Apple iBooks and then Amazon would match it and it would then be free on Amazon. We all did that, but it is over now.) Even people with a modicum of fame are saying no to free.
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/28/wil_w...

No more giving your work away, no more free to build sales, no more 99¢ books unless it is a limited promotion and you go back to a reasonable price after. And make your book quality. If you have not had a tough editor go through it and make you do it right then don’t put it out there. You are the gatekeeper, the quality control. You don’t like reading bad books full of errors and typos, why would you expect others to pay you for the same? This is old, but still applies: http://www.syeopub.com/is-your-book-g...

I made sure that I no longer have any free eBooks out there, all my books are priced fairly, it is always a struggle to go through the editing process, but I do it. I pay artists for their work and fix errors even when I don’t want to and re-do things.

What would happen if you asked for your lunch to be free?
http://www.photographybay.com/2015/11...

So, why are you giving your work away or selling it for a pittance?

Coursing

When I was seven I got to take archery lessons at the YMCA. We stood in a long row of tiny children shooting at bright red, yellow, and blue targets with blue carpeting hung in back to catch the misses. I got my first Daisy pump action BB gun on the eighth Christmas, and a gas powered pellet gun the next. My father got me a Remington semi-automatic .22 with a telescopic sight from a pawn shop when I was ten that I still have. The first time I fired a shotgun at twelve was very exciting. It didn’t knock me over or anything.

During this time I read Field & Stream and Robert Ruark books. Like with Robert, bird hunting was it. I knew all about flu-flu arrows and what shot was used for ducks and geese and all the rest. As a teenager walking down the street with a gun at the edge of Sparks to shoot up by Joe Conforte’s walled compound caused no great commotion at all. Joe ran the famous Mustang Bridge Ranch cathouse and lived in a fortress up above Sparks on the road to Sun Valley with yellow lamps around the top of the 8-foot brick wall. About all that happened was one time we got stopped by a drunken Indian who had pulled his jeep over under some cottonwood trees with his friends because they were too drunk to drive and the sheriff might catch them. The soberest one asked us if we could drive and would we go get them some booze. A few years before my babysitter when my parents went to work at night was a 6’5” Washo named Tommy. He is dead now from alcohol and the hopelessness of being an Indian in America.

I never hunted with dogs though, like is done in the back woods of Mississippi my best friends and I visited one Christmas break. Dogs are used there to run the deer out of the woods and across the dirt roads where the hunters wait to shoot them. You can’t hunt on Sunday of course.

I never knew just how useful dogs are for hunting until now. The wirehair fox terrier loves to grab a pillow off the couch and drag it out the back door and around the lawn to get you to chase her. If you decline she will shred the pillow in front of you, just to be sure you really do want to play her fun little game. Last night I set the doberman after her in the dark. He loped with ease up beside her and threw off her timing completely. He kept right next to her and took all the fun out of it, damn his eyes. She got herded back to the door and I took the pillow. Wow! Hunting with dogs is the best.

Just Passin' Through

I had an old dream one night. Not the dream that is old and repeats again, but a dream about a place that was new and grew old. You know the kind. Walking alongside a building I once knew, the building not the person. I knew the person too, kind of, but not exactly them either.

The big log came rolling down the grassy slope towards us. My companion tried to hold me down in front of the log, like under water so he could hop out of the way at the last second. Pushing him out of the way, I easily stepped out of the path of the log. He pointed a pistol to shoot me then. I snatched it pulled the slide back, scraped the barrel into the dirt, and jammed a small rock into the end of it. It was a Glock pistol with a 4-inch barrel, 9mm.

The building security guards, or maybe they FBI agents took me as I prepared to tell the story of the man with the Glock to them. I woke me up at the story telling part. Only a fool tells a story to the police: truth, fiction, or otherwise. Your own truth hangs you as often as it shields you. Others hear what they want to hear most of the time. It is the WIFM radio station always tuned to what's in it for them. No matter the man who tried to kill me had shot somebody else inside the once new building. The building had classified government projects inside, and just why, tell us, had I been in there in the first place, humm? Things flip around like that, even when you are awake. Never trust your dreams.

My mind woke me up before I did something stupid and kept my big mouth shut. Rationality went around dangerous emotions and reeducated me yet again about how silence is the best part of valor. Going back to sleep, I returned to the dream and the waiting guards to inform them that I would require legal representation before I could answer any of their questions. Sometimes dreams are quite rational.

In the rational morning light the old building from other lives appeared like that old poster from the 1960s, the one about "just passin' through," the posters showing guys with the big feet. All the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers had big feet, and they always quickly lifted them up to get going through, like Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural with the big shoes and ZZ Top beard.

Who is Mr. Natural? Maybe he was a hippie, the ones who expanded their minds, a freak brother to help you navigate the road. It was a hippie poster after all.

It's always important to stay on the road. In the thick gray mist a misstep can send you tumbling down the embankment to splatter on the mud and rocks below. You might never make it back on the road again. There is no one in the muck and unforgiving boulders to help you.

Jesus directs travelers in one of those cool white chest straps that wraps down over his shoulder and around his waist. It has shiny silver clasps that match his big silver whistle on a white cord around his neck. Very spiffy he is. Just stay on the road. Keep right except to pass, stay in your lane, and don't wander. At the exit there is a big party for dad where you will sing happy birthday to him forever, and ever, and ever. All the cake you can eat.

It's okay if you fail. It is fine to fall down in self-piteous drunkenness taken to escape the boredom of it all, just stay on the road. Then you shall be raised up. The road will rise to meet your step leading to heaven an hour before the devil knows you are dead. Keep going. Follow the sound of the whistle if you get lost.

A white bandoleer goes especially with saffron, and old bald Buddha has it goin' on with his gleaming chrome WWII American Army helmet to boot. You are free to meander all over the road when he comes, and you can come back and go down the road over, and over, and over again, until you are so sick of it that you just stop to become no mas forever. It is the ultimate pass through.

Brother Mohammad prefers an electric cow prod with the chest strap, one with the long life extrapoke batteries. Zzzt - stay in your lane. Zzzt - keep going. Zzzt - no pork sandwiches. He procures 27 virgins so when you get to the end of the road - that's all there is at the end. Zzzt - bettern' Zzzt.

The scroll brothers with the beanies don't have anybody with a bandoleer they can agree on yet. When the road ends they say the toll taker does not even have a nametag. "Hello, my name is Nobody" is as good as any name for a motel clerk when you come up frazzled after a long road trip. Just a clean room for forever on the side away from the freeway, please.

The old Indian guy sings well. Whistles, drums, gongs, bells, chanting, songs, you name it he has it happening. It is enough to wake the dead. No worries, you are of the road and with the right guide and clear vision. Sing along while you walk.

More shysters, signs, advisors, rules, and seers purvey the road than Sunset Boulevard on Halloween with LSD and steroids. If you get off the road, well good luck with that. Always stay in your lane and to keep going. Ignore the ones who wander off and refuse to come back. Follow your guide, follow the rules, pay attention.

If we are all really just passing through will we be lost and destroyed if we do not follow the beaten path, even if we can't see it?

Lots of other people have all kinds of rules. When you pass through their territory keep your mouth shut, and hire good lawyers when you need to. Sometimes dreams are like that.

Keep on truckin'.

PE

A dreadful nostalgia played in the 1980s about the 1950s. How the children of the 60s gritted their teeth over Ronny Raygun and pissed and moaned about remembering those people’s good old days of obedient wives and quiet children. This happened long before retro-tv came a-calling. That looping of endless repeats of The Cartwrights weeping for young guest actresses dying while Hop Sing scurried jabbering.

Ponderosa: No Women Allowed!

"Pa, she's dead!"

"But Hoss, you knew it would end that way when she showed up in a red shirt."

There too, Barbara Stanwick flowing down staircases to medieval Stockton, California with her snotty ass children sneering at the bottom.

Today, those 60s kiddies are thrilled by the whirlpool watching the memories go round and round with a sucking sound. Ads quietly drone to them likes flies in a summer kitchen about catheters delivered directly and Alex Trebeck peddling burial insurance. Does your Hurry Cane have batteries charged for its dual headlights? “Help! I have fallen off the stairlift and can’t get up!”

If you lived it you remember one of the joys of that carefree childhood, PE: PE. Physical Education, the thing Kennedy wanted every boy and every girl to have. Joy preached by Arnold on the road to the Governator of Call-e-fornia. Who does not want strong and healthy bodies to go with the bright and eager minds in schools across the land. Ronnie won the Cold War handily with bright young minds and strong healthy bodies from those six years of PE in junior high and high school.

In 7th grade you got the list of things to buy: white gym shorts, white gym socks, white tee shirt, tennis shoes without black soles (so as to not desecrate the holy gymnasium floors), and a jock strap. You brought your own towel to roll everything up in on Monday and take home on Friday. A Master combination lock held your wire basket in the wall of baskets that kept your uniform during the week. God forbid you did not take it home on Friday, or forget it on Monday. Later in high school came gray steel portals in stacks and rows.

The local sporting goods stores filled with children every September looking for jock straps in little colored cardboard bricks with arcane sizing printed on them. They lay scattered in large baskets in the isles next to the baskets of baseball mitts. If you are a woman, a jock strap is like a thong with two elastic bands instead of the center cord in back to connect to the elastic waistband at an angle to clear the butt cheeks. There are two reasons that a 12 year old boy might be forced to wear one: His large penis flops around in his shorts if he only wore regular underwear, or he is being groomed for a career as a stripper. Today it would be called a “Sundusky.”

Odd, when my sons took PE that they not only did not have to buy a Sandusky, and did not even have to take showers in large, gray concrete holding pens with drains in the floor and spigots in the walls.

PE in school resembled a Serbian Marine boot camp in every way. The first 15-minutes were calisthenics with jumping jacks first. They were a sucker's illusion to get past the nausea most felt waiting for the commencement of the death march. Then came mountain climbers, sit-ups, squat thrusts, running in place, push-ups, leg raises, bent torso push-throughs. Don’t forget deep knee-bends with hands on the hips. Sometimes duck-walks with hands on the head, and crab-walks with hands and feet behind you. Think WWII Japanese prison camp on the Bataan peninsula. Just warming-up.

Running came after calisthenics. Laps around the track or laps around the school on the sidewalk in the case of junior high. As a fat kid who was slow and very passive aggressive my internal motto was, “Yes sir! Right away Sir! Fuck You sir!” So sad they had to wait for me and a few others to walk in.

Track in the spring, baseball, soccer, and slaughter ball other times. Slaughter ball had two teams, shirts and skins, and a huge canvas ball to encourage commission of generalized mayhem by forcing the ball over the other’s goal line. When I was a senior they got some weights. One spring we actually did something I liked outside with them. No, we were not instructed to beat each other with them.

Many times Friday was a special treat: wind sprints up and down the gym for the entire period in rotating relay groups until kids threw up. Forwards, backwards, duck walk, crab walk, skipping, sideways, any way the sadistic bastards who “coached” the PE class thought up. Mondays are so bad? Really?

Oh yes, the colored trunk system. High school had white, red, green, blue, and gold trunks to be earned in week-long testing a few times a year. Requirements for red included, 32 push-ups with somebody holding a fist under your chest and thighs to touch gong down, 60 sit-ups in two minutes with somebody holding down your feet and your legs straight, 10 pull-ups with palms facing away from you, run 1/2 mile in 3 minutes, a series of 10 back and forth 50-yard sprints, and climb a rope to the 30-foot ceiling of the gym. Once you passed those a fireman’s carry of someone your own weight for 1/2 a mile made you red, red trunks that is, like the fire truck. Green added climbing rope without feet, and more of the rest without the firehouse test. Blue went further like climbing peg boards up the side of the gym with your hands and other impossible things. Gold included actual flying around the permitter of the gymnasium 10 times. Only two students in the entire 60 year history of the school had made gold. One year a 5’4” blond boy built like an olympic gymnast tried for gold. He already had blue. The coach worked with him during the testing weeks and he came very close, I think he missed the 4 minute mile or something.

I never made color, and even though I was a senior could not stand at the front of the lines doing calisthenics. Only colored trunks could. At this point there was one coach, Mr. Flynn, who liked me and was sad to have to tell me no.

Yep, PE, Hell’s Boot-Camp with “coaches” enjoying torturing herds of young boys and teenagers with pitchforks, poking between the jock strap bands on the way to the showers.

Even after several decades of karate and aikido training, weight training, and amateur bicycle racing I refuse to run for anyone. “Yes sir! Fuck you sir!”

Benghazi All Over Again

Holy mother of god, Jesus and the seven dwarves, they are doing the Benghazi dance again. WTF, over; it's over boys. It's dead Jim. Go take an Obamacare pill already.

Obama lied and people died, right, a catchy new phrase for you. Free, no charge. True too, of course he lied. Duh! He's the President and it's Washington Jim. Beam me up Walter. Hillary knew, Hillary knew! Duh too, she was SECSTATE at the time. Did you know? The boyz in Benghazi from Foggy Bottom were in cahoots with the girlz from Langley and got their asses shot up by a bunch of Muslims with guns in the Middle East. Really? They did? How could that be? Isn't that is what they get paid for? If Hillary and Barrack did not know that then you would have a real story: "President And Secretary Of State Do Not Know What The CIA Is Doing At US Embassies In The Middle East" "Congress Knows And Is Holding Hearings To Find Out What Anybody At All Did Know" "Everybody Knows Nothing In Washington" "But Somebody Knew And We Are Getting To The Bottom Of It" "Again Right Now, For The 35,480th Time" "The IRS Knew But Was Too Busy Going After The Tea Party" Yay, real news.

This is government in action? This is what they are paid to do? It's Democracy dummy. And we are exporting this to Ukraine to stop Putin with. Right now, as we speak. Then North Korea and then New Jersey next after that. Big "D" Democracy. Damn his eyes Putin, he can't get away from his part in diverting traffic on the bridge! And if he doesn't shape up right now we are sending John Kerry, Joe Biden, and John McCain to talk to him until he does. Democracy, you bastard! Take that asshole! You thought Pussy Riot was a prostate exam with hemorrhoids, just wait until you get a very stern lecture from the international relations troika of Johnjohn & Joe. Boy are you in for it Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Now go vote against Obamacare again. Do your damn job right. Cause if you don't we will hold an election and the people will throw you all out and put Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger and George Clooney in charge. Democracy! Take that! We got Hollywood and we are not afraid to use it.

Oh mother, where is that rat bastard Gaddafi when you need him.

Cliven Bundy: Coyote Master

Ain't this all of it?

Slave master Cliven Bundy does not own that land out there in the back and beyond. His imaginary plantation on public lands is not his to oversee. The Federal government is not the owner either for that mater. The land belongs to all and is a trust for everybody. He pretends it is his because his family has been squatting there for a few years, while the BLM tries to lock it away from everybody so it can be a military preserve or nuclear waste dump - nonsense equals nonsense.

I have seen the BLM pay hunters to kill coyotes from helicopters for the fucking ranchers and seen ridiculous use restrictions on boaters in the Ruby Marshes near Elko. People came out with their guns there to confront the arrogant BLM. I have been on the bombing ranges, ammo dumps, radioactive waste dumps, and the federal government water projects that drain Indian lands for the benefit of a few farmers next door.

About that next stupid, 2016 election: a bleeding pox on them all. A pox on the very concept that only two parties made up of self appointed opportunists, morons, bigots, and assholes as the only source of leadership and change in America. Sickness to death on Republicans and Democrats with their pointless positions and self-served posturing, and likewise to the "Right" and the "Left" with their moralistic, bigoted, thoughtless drivel, leading nowhere, doing nothing, and producing emptiness. Fear and loathing on the acid of failure is waiting in the back alleys, lurking in the shadows for to come out and greet weary, disillusioned voters after 16 years of aborted Presidents and impaired leaders everywhere.

No, not a tired old political hack from another era like Hillary for President, or ignorant religious bigots like Huckabee either. A man who thinks that Sharia Law ain't so bad as long as you change "Mohammad" to Jesus" and make him the supreme judge. Don't even start on nasty opportunist assholes Cruz and Ryan. Lest we forget mean morons Perry and Palin or stiff elitist posers Kerry and Romney, one and all out of touch with any average person in the normal world. Biden the Brain Dead or Reid the Ridiculous, pulease. Jindal or Rubio or Cuomo or Dean again, horrifying! Four more years of the incompetence of the likes of Bush and Obama, could anyone really want that? Anyone for a nasty old sailor from Arizona, who just won't go out into the wilderness and die?

To call the current parties and politicians a bizarre clown show bearing no connection to reality in 2014 is to complement and praise them. They are much, much less than that.

Say goodnight, leave a light on for the next owners. Maybe they will be better.

God save the coyotes from the helicopters.

Flying Babies on the Internet

It is one of those stories you mean to write but never get around to, a love story, circa early 21st century. Maybe the story in Wired Magazine about hacking the OK cupid dating site is one also. Maybe it is Valentine's Day.
In 1957 The Scientific Marriage Foundation started the computer/personality dating matrix off with an IBM punch card sorting scheme. 80-columns of little punched rectangular holes to spell out your path to love and marriage...hanging chads be damned!
Match.com popped into existence at the end of the last century, shortly after AOL attacked the US mail with an endless stream of CDs in colorful envelopes, sleeves, and tin cans offering connection to the Information Superhighway. Back when plesiosaurs, newspapers, and love classifieds ruled the February day. "Attractive tyrannosaur seeks svelte velociraptor for fun and romance, 555-1212" OK cupid is the new kid in the crowded romance personals world catering to the lonely hearts section of the Internet, a place where love is information and you can pick the day's partner over Starbucks with your mobile app.
The Wired magazine story about OKC told of a math professor, Charlie Eppes possibly, writing equations and computer programs to find that good date on OK cupid. Hopefully even a date better than the usual: "Hi, how are you? Eww, I have to take this call..." The programs scraped user data from the profiles on the site while he developed statistics to analyze the responses to the love questions. The charm of the story is how he struggled to have his robot Cyrano mimic a real person typing. Or else, OKC would call out Cypher Agent Smith to hunt Cyrano down and terminate it with extreme prejudice.
The professor actually assumed that the dating site designed its questions to elicit the true love personality of its many members. Hasn't this math guy ever taken any of those online personality tests? I know, for example, that my Harry Potter character is Draco Malfoy. But, I must say that I prefer his father to him. Oh well, that's what the numbers said. If instead OKC hired Hollywood writers to sit around and create entertaining questions it might look sort of like the Ellen show writers table:
"Should we have herself ask Nicolas Cage if he really did come from Krypton in a tiny rocket ship?"
"No, Terry Gross asked him that yesterday."
"Shit!"
"..."
Nah, they probably have a psychologist help them write the questions. Otherwise, it would be like sorting little holes in IBM cards.
It may be a Silicon Valley thing, but I have used dating sites since plesiosaurs at AOL. I have had long relationships, met dear friends, and even business associates from it. I have discovered doctors, psychologists, writers, therapists, engineers, business owners, attorneys, and business executives over the years. About a year ago on Plenty of Fish, I went out for coffee in the sunshine with a woman who turned out to be a call girl. We sat and talked about our grown kids, and how she has to cut off her work nails to do gardening.
Some people haunt bars to meet people, or church, or political events. They seek face-to-face contact to judge compatibility. Some want to talk on the phone right away to find out about the other person. How people write tells much more for me. Having to put down complete thoughts, and not being able to color or correct them with body language or quick restatements disclose much.
That's how it works: the mind, the thoughts, the person. All the canned dating questions and statistical matching say nothing about the mind until the words come out. Getting to the words part is when you can make those love decisions. It is a random, nonlinear process akin to chaos, not a pseudo randomization math problem with some elasticity thrown in to account for nonlinearities, then overlaid on a group of responses to multiple choice questions made up by the psychologist who consults with Ellen. Isn't that what Kurt Vonnegut's story EPICAC is about after all, the electronic love ghost in the machine?
When you are young and new to the game of men and women and life all the human evolutionary adaptation is on your side. Youth+Hormones+Hard Wiring = Love. A psychotic state that lasts eighteen months to two years, or about the time it takes a human offspring to be viable in the cold, cruel world - all Beatles songs aside.
Life past 50 is different. Evolution doesn't select for much past 35 years for humans. At 50 in the modern world we are still functional, life's inertia has become a landslide, and our offspring are just about to jump ship into their own lifeboats. That first love is memory and the marriage that came from it is memory too, likely as not. What questions should the dating site should use to match people then? Want to write the math for it? There is surely a Nobel in that bit of mental prestidigitation.
If love is about dating sites, math, words, and questions, then what about love at first sight? Is that little flying demigod's arrow? The stuff of red candy boxes and mushy heart shaped things in February? Does love happen when the little monster's braodhead slices through your heart while it hovers smirking above you? Is the only true love random love from that metaphorical arrow? Perhaps that is why all those hormones and genes and proteins are setup they way they are, to put you in the right place at the right time for the kill shot from the naked baby with wings?
In early 2013 it seemed that everybody in Silicon Valley was using OKC at the time. My expectations joining it were low, with no thoughts of destiny at all. After selling my house and 34 years in the Valley, my sights were set on a place I always have been called to: Central Asia. Paris calls many, but Kabul has more romance in its little finger than the whole Rive Gauche. My genes must have fallen off a camel or a steppe horse that wandered too far west in some dark past. The sisters of fate can answer that one.
Nothing much happened. My effort was minimal, and I turned OKC off for a while. I tweaked the profile and answered a bucket of questions to broaden out the connections when I returned to it. Yes Virginia, I pick what questions to answer and not answer, and I decide how to answer each to get the right profile. I fell into the "Liberal" bucket as a result. My sex profile did not reside out there at the Palomino club in Las Vegas. My cyber me came out responsible, nonconformist, nontraditional, and not religious, all very true, BTW. Besides, they did not have very good questions for a 50+ engineer who liked shooting since he was 8, talks to call girls about gardening, worked on defense intelligence systems, wrote short contemporary romance and spoken word stories, published books by LGBT authors and retired CIA officers - and wanted to work in Afghanistan or Uzbekistan. They did not ask that, after all.
One night in May 2013 a quick blurb flashed across my homepage. Someone had answered something to the effect: "What is the most embarrassing thing you want to put on your profile?" with, "Do I sound stupid!" It cracked me up! I saw that she lived outside of the Bay Area at a place I had not heard of in Southern California. I wrote back something to the effect: "I just had to write back even if you are down South and say LOL. Thanks for the laugh, I needed it after a bad week." I did not expect a response and went about my life. It is unclear even why it showed up at all, since I never looked for someone outside the Bay Area or put that in any preference on the site.
She wrote back for some reason that the sisters with the thread and scissors alone decided. She never paid attention people outside her local area at all, except for me after that little note.
We never stopped writing, and then Skyping, and then visiting each other. I moved in with Cindy in October and plan to spend the rest of my life with her. It is very much the right thing to do for both of us.
She is a little guilty that she prevented me from moving to Mongolia though. Now, I will never be able to find that stray horseman.
So much for math and dating site questions. Or as Miracle Max said, "Sonny, true love is the greatest thing in the world - except for a mice MLT - mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe.

El Jefe

The crows raid the dumpsters behind the complex and scatter the garbage around in the mornings. The groundkeeper, Jose was picking up the bits in the bright sunshine and flipping them back into the bins when I walked by on the way to the garage.

The crows get into the garbage, I said pointing at it.

Yes, he said.

Jose waved his hand at a big crow sitting on a thick telephone wire near the dumpsters. El Jefe, he said.

I smiled looking up and said, yes, it is him. I laughed to myself going on to the car. Yes, El Jefe. Perfect.

I like crows. If ever I would have a bird as a pet my familiar would be a crow. Harry Potter can have his aloof owl, and the Shah of Arabie can pose with his royal falcon, but I will take a crow. Crows know things.

Sometimes El Jefe and his crew flit down from the eves in the front to hop around scattered french fries at the edge of the street that runs along there. Their world is the perch on the building, the sidewalk with the strip of grass and the marching row of trees next to the gray street. The crows know that they will have plenty of time to get the french fries, and that the people walking down the sidewalk will not bother them. There will be breaks in the flow of the cars hissing by, and the birds know when to hop closer to the curb when one of them gets too close, or even flap over to the grass when the big trucks swoosh by. They seem to understand their world and appear happy with it.

Crows are not bright about what the real world is, though. They do not know that they are just part of the human world that we have created over the whole of the Earth. The crows have their place in our world, scattering the trash and patrolling the grassy border. They go about their simple lives without knowing what they really are in the order of things. Their tiny brains cannot even begin to comprehend all of it.

When I stop to look up from the sidewalk beside the grass beside the road, I know where the road is going and what the cars are and what things exist down the road in both directions. I can look across the road over the trees and hills in the distance and know that Nebraska is over that way.

I have only been to Nebraska one time, riding through in the backseat of a car on the way to Ohio when I was nine years old. They had wonderful steaks, some of the best I have ever had, where my father stopped in a restaurant beside the road after a long day of driving. That is why I know all about the world in Nebraska; that and the stories on the TV and the books and newspapers, when there were still newspapers.

I have never been to New York City at all, but the real world has New York City in it, even if I have never seen it. I know all about it too. There are so many stories about New York City that no one could not know about it and understand it. It is very real. New York City is right there, over past the road, past the hills, out past Ohio.

El Jefe, no matter that he understands to get out of the way of the cars or that the garbage bins will have food in them, or even that he can manage other cows around him in those places, in whatever ways that crows do that, does not understand New York City at all.

El Jefe will eat a bad french fry one day, or hop too slowly getting out of the way of a bus. He will be gone and his world with him. Other crows will come and go in the real world and things will be as they should be. If there are no crows then other things will be there to take their place, or we humans will replace the crows with something else that fits better.

When I drove down a road today, not the one beside the grass under the row of trees, a black police SUV traveled along in front of me. A few years ago the SUV would have been a black and white car with a shotgun standing beside the driver. The large SUV I followed had a sniper rifle with a scope next to the driver. Next to the sniper rifle was another rifle without a scope on it. There were several radio antennas on the SUV, and I am sure that the driver had body armor under his crisp blue uniform. Those are parts of the world today, in California, Nebraska, and New York City. Those are real things. We all understand where they fit in the world and how to manage them. El Jefe does not know anything about them at all. But, he does know to get out of the way of the big black SUV if he is snagging a bit of dead squirrel in the road and the SUV comes along.

We are the most remarkable beings this world has ever known. Only 100 of our grandparents ago the Egyptians were stacking rocks, inventing civilization. They were innovators, those Eqyptians. 1000 generations ago there were no humans in California at all, Neanderthals were walking around Europe. Only 2000 generations ago we invented language. We grasped that everything surrounding us made the world and each of us stood at the very center of it wherever we happened to be at the time. We gave names to things and put them in their proper places. We looked at things in front of us with new knowledge, heard sounds around us and imagined into existence what those sounds actually were with the language.

Then came belief about how it all worked. Our brains extended farther and farther out, making the real world larger and larger. We realized that even if we died we would never really die and would just go to another world and live there forever. It would be just the way we wanted it to be, this other place. El Jefe does not understand any of this this. He will not be going to the other world with us when he is hit by the bus.

In just a few short years, we will be able to travel away from this planet into the whole universe that we know is out there. We will meet other beings there and they will learn more about the real world from us and we will learn things from them. They will become parts of the real world, and we will fit them into their place - somewhere out past Nebraska.

El Jefe does not understand the real world, or that he is just a part of ours. But, I guess he is happy with the garbage cans and the french fries in the street under the trees, beside the grass, next to the sidewalk.

Nothing Is What It Seems

and everything is something it isn’t.

This is a favorite E. B. White quote from his essay The Door. It is old and not well known, certainly not like Charlotte’s Web. The essay, the one about the door, is about life.

The musing is collected in an interesting gray cloth book residing on the shelf of my library labeled: Time Machine. Present Tense, Vol. III, Portrait of a World, edited by Sharon Brown of Brown University was published for college students by Harcourt, Brice & Company in 1941.

The book has wonderful chapters like, The American Heritage, Men at Work, Whither Science, Strains and Stresses, Headliners, Patterns In Politics, and War and the Future. The Door is filed under Strains and Stresses. Even in 1941 there were strains and stresses about the present world and what comes next it seems.

The little gray book also has American Landscape by Thomas Wolfe, Two For A Penny by John Steinbeck, and The Modernization of China and Japan by Hu Shih. It contains 63 essays, columns, poems, and plays from when they taught college students those things, back in the middle of the American Century.

I do wonder who Sharon Brown was and what became of her books. What did all those essays and stories and poems mean to her and the people who published them - and all those students who read them in that time of infamy? What were they thinking? And why were all those particular things filed under, “Portrait of a World?”

How do we find Sharon Brown today? You can find the book on Amazon in the UK. Seems Sharon Brown gets mixed up with Sharon Osborne. But, pick the one who was born in 1891. Then the Amazon search engine breaks down and reverts to Sharon Osborne. Well this is now, and that was then. Celebrities were different then.

What about now? These times are the real times, the ones that matter. There are wars raging. Economies are crashing. America is unsure of what its now and its future will be while the money leaks away and new, dark powers rise. The jobs and cities that were thriving 10 years ago are shaky, unsettled, and wide-eyed. Old national faiths built on old successes and triumphs tremble. They glow dully and seem thinner and staler, too naive. “For it is inevitable that they will keep changing the doors on you, he said, because that is what they are for; and the thing is to get used to it and not to let it unsettle the mind,” says Mr. White in his essay, the one in the gray textbook from 1941. The one about life.

Youth unemployment in America is about as high as it has ever been. It is tough to get a decent job coming out of college right now, and the loans are deep and endless. College students network, blog, text, meet, and have the great ideas that young people with new minds always have. There are many young people in Silicon Valley and New York and Los Angeles who are trying to make the next Facebook, or writing code for the iPhone, or trying to get a conference up with TechCrunch to make the rent for another month. They are smart and connected and working hard. A career? Sure, but have to land the next gig and maybe I will have to go work steady at Google or Yahoo or Oracle or Hp one of these days if my startup does not work out. Now, if I could get on at Apple.

Having a startup and even getting a couple of bucks from an angel investor so you can pitch it to a VC, once you get it running, is not Facebook. But, Facebook isn't quite Facebook anymore. The IPO never took off as it should have. Something changed.

The past is temporary. Wait awhile and It will be something it isn’t. All of it will be invented over again come the next generation and the one after that.

You can also use a door and a bit of string to pull out a loose tooth, so I am told.

Walking

Something different. Experimenting with spoken word stuff - and you don't have to make it rhyme!

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Always moving, waiting. Always pacing.

Sometimes slow shuffles with dirty plastic bags hanging.

Shuffling steps inching along. Agonizing. Slow.

Looking down, standing sideways. Staring at the curb not the endless paved path going somewhere.

Unsteady, littered carts full, rolling slowly.

Purpose and determination and speed crossing the street. Dragging the cart behind with freak flag flying.

Sprinting somewhere. "Have you got any spare change"

On to the next person pumping gas in front of the mini mart. "You got a dollar?

No cart at all.

Just walking. Slowly, quickly, around and around the mall. Don't get to the end too soon. Before you are ready.

Life's path in concrete. Marked. Hard and smooth.

What happens if you stop? Just to sit and stare straight out from the metal chair at Starbucks?

A need to get somewhere. To the next somewhere, and the next, and the next.

Ride the bus to our stop. Then get off and go about our business.

Ride all night, half turned to the glass in the white light. Staring. No business to get to.

Just sit on the cement. Everybody will look then, and pretend not to. Hurrying to their business.

Somewhere to go.

The next trash can and then the one after that, and then the one after that, and then the one after that, and then the one after that, steel and stone maids all in a row.

Keep moving, you have somewhere to go. Something to do.

Roll along on the bike. Up and down the ramps to the sidewalks. Going somewhere. People to meet, say "hi" to.

Moving.

The big pack takes up a whole chair. Nobody will bother it. Nobody will take your noisy radio.

This is the rich suburb. You can sit here every day and smoke. You don't have to go sit in the library.

You can go back and forth to the rest rooms at each store and move the pack to the concrete bench over there and go sit across the driveway behind the palm tree.

Walk to your job in the morning. Walk home at night. Carrying everything.

Don't stop. Keep going. Keep walking.

Pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth behind the bars.