Progress Notes

YouTube - Dropkick Murphys - Sunshine Highway

2007-03-03T06:30:00.000-08:00

Leave it to the Murphys to remind us of the road we take every year, the road that takes us through Richmond. On our way to the Sunshine State...Two weeks to St. Patty's Day. But who the fook's countin'?YouTube - Dropkick Murphys - Sunshine Highway

2007-03-03T06:13:00.000-08:00

Posting is still very much a hit or miss experience. Mostly miss. I'm batting about .021 and feel like I'm stepping up to the plate with Dice-K on the mound. Dice-K, for those of you who aren't Red Sox fans, is the Boston team's new starting pitcher.

Yes, it's baseball season again. The calender shouts, " It's nearly spring! " But the northwesterly breezes whisper, " Not yet. " Temperatures aren't supposed to get out of the 20s on Tuesday.

Donna have been living down here on the south coast of Rhode Island for about four years. Among the things we've learned is that spring's only a rumor here. It stays cold right through late May. The irony is that we always longed to live near the ocean. Endless summers were our dream. Endless winters is what we get, though.

Because of the wind that blows over the choppy waters of Block Island Sound.

Irony is everywhere.

The Sox play the Phillies this afternoon. I'll tape the game and watch it tonight, as I listen to the URI Rams basketball game. URI's playing Richmond, down there. Where it's warm.

YouTube - We Can't Make It Here Anymore - by James Mcmurtry

2007-03-02T14:03:00.000-08:00

I think it's time to hear this one one more time...YouTube - We Can't Make It Here Anymore - by James Mcmurtry

2007-03-02T13:34:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post is geting rave reviews for its stories about the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Hospital's Building #18. Instead of giving the paper credit, I'm wondering: What took them so long?

These conditions have been known about for three years. The miltary brass knew. Wounded troops' families knew. Walter Reed isn't located in some far away place with a strange sounding name. It has the same zip code as The Washington Post. Papers like the Post have bureaus and correspondents all over the world, yet this is a story that's been unfolding in a place within walking distance of the Post newsroom.

So I'm not jumping on the Praise the Post bandwagon just yet.

As I read the stories, and see how the cable guys are picking it up, I can't help but recall how Geraldo Rivera made a name for himself. It was back in the early 1970s. Geraldo Rivera in 1972 won an Emmy for his report of neglect and abuse at a Staten Island facility for the mentally retarded. More than thirty years later, you look up " Tabloid TV " in the dictionary, Geraldo's mug shot is right over there in the margin. How far he, and we, have come.

Still. Where was Geraldo, or his journalistic heir or heiresses apparent two or three years ago, when this story should have been broken?

Yes, I'm happy to see the morons responsible for this outrage exposed. I'm pleased that the Secretary of the Army was fired today. I'm hopeful that conditions at Building # 18 will improve faster than you can say, " Cover your ass. "

But beyond that nothing much is going to happen. It's just another case of a bureaucracy doing what it does best. Fucking up, then when it's caught doing that, doing as little as humanly possible to patch things up. Look what happened with Katrina. One minute Mike Brown's getting patted on the back ( " Heck of a job, Brownie. " ) The next minute he's canned and a new boss, same as the old boss, is sitting in that big corner office.

Does this story have legs? No, it does not. It has one leg, and is missing an arm, and nobody will care come next Tuesday.

2007-03-01T14:40:00.000-08:00

More important to me than coffee in the morning is Imus in the morning. I wake up around 6 am and reach for my Am/Fm/short wave radio, which is about the same size as a paperback book. Imus drives me crazy. Too many commercials. Too much talk about autism and lung disease. Too much coughing. Too much of Bernie's sophomoric rants. Too little knowledge of sports shown by Imus's latest sports hack. Too much. Too little. But it's the first thing I reach out for when I wake up in the morning, so there must be something there. It can't all be bad. Can it?

What is it with Imus? Why is he so popular? Why's he a king and queen maker extraordinaire? I know someone who's a regular guest on his show. What this guy likes most about the I Man is his " authenticity. "

In other words, he's real.

A cranky, 65 year old, recovering alcoholic and substance abuser, lung diseased, chronic coughing man whose hair spills out from under his 10 gallon hat like dirty water from a broken main...

That's Don Imus. As I said, he drives me crazy, but I buy whatever he's selling. And for me, at least, he's that first cup of coffee, the first thing you look forward to upon waking up from the fever dream sleep you've been sleeping.

2007-03-01T05:37:00.000-08:00

I seem to be back in the Progress Notes saddle. Computers have myriad faults and there are good reasons for steering clear of the things. But one very good thing about them is that they force you to think about things in different ways. They encourage you to brain storm, go the trial and error route. Take my latest problem for example.

I've been going days without being able to access the Blogger.com dashboard, which launches me onto the blank page upon which I scribble these words. Tried all kinds of things to correct the problem. Changed passwords. Attempted to create a whole new blog. Nothing worked.

Then I had a thought yesterday. I've been trying not to watch the cable guys during the day. It's all Anna Nicole all the time and I want nothing to do with it. Yet when I turned on my laptop the first page to come up on the screen is CNN. That's been my home page.

I got rid of that yesterday. Just randomly selected Google News as my new home page. And since then, I haven't had a problem accessing my dashboard.

2007-02-28T15:25:00.000-08:00

Some random thoughts on this last day of a short month...

The Dow lost more than 400 points in yesterday's trading. It was a big story, but not big enough to knock Anna Nicole from her perch. The cable guys yesterday had a real story on their hands, one that required their reporters to learn something, and fast, about the ins and outs of Wall Street trading. By closing bell time yesterday, it was big news. By dinner time it was back to all Anna all the time.

***

I'm watching the Red Sox first spring training game this evening. Tomorrow's March. Next week we turn the clocks ahead. It snowed a few inches the other night, but it's melting as fast as butter on a hot skillet. Spring, with all its broken promises,looms. I'm looking forward to it, like someone looks forward to reconnecting with an old friend who's stabbed him in the back more than once.

YouTube - I'm Shipping Up To Boston - Dropkick Murphys

2007-02-27T11:28:00.000-08:00

Are you sitting down? Ya won't be when ya start watching and listening to this kick out the jambs band...YouTube - I'm Shipping Up To Boston - Dropkick Murphys

2007-02-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

Finally!

It's taken me three days to get to this point. Haven't been able to post anything since Friday. In the meantime I've been all over some other folks' blogs, like a june bug on a screen door. I go to write in Progress Notes and can't. So I go to Colin's blog. Jake's and Terry #1's blog. And bug them. Leave messages like some crazy person who's just learned how to use a telephone.

It's good to be back, but I'm not optimistic. It'll probably be another three days before I get to post again. What's going on here? Maybe it has something to do with that UFO they spotted recently at O'Hare. You haven't heard about that? I hadn't either, until I read an op-ed piece in the Providence Journal about it. As I was reading it I was waiting for the column to take a turn. I was expecting the author to get to some kind of punch line, let us readers in on the joke. But it was all dead serious. Something strange and unexplainable was seen by a lot of people.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Does this have something to do with St. Patrick's Day looming on the horizon? Are the Windy City Micks starting to drink heavily already?

Notice this UFO'Brian was seen above an airport calling itself " O'Hare. " The craft probably tried to land at Boston's Logan first. Then the crew heard all that racket: The Dropkick Murphys celebrating The Departed's win at the Oscar show.

" Them natives are restless, boyos, " is what one of the little ( green ) men said to each other.

I think it was Jung who wrote extensively about UFOs and what the deal with them might be. I may be completely wrong about this, but I seem to recall Jung saying something about us all needing things like UFOs, little green men and leprechauns. They serve some kind of purpose. Quasi crazy things designed to keep us from going completely insane.

Especially the O'Brians, McCarthys, and O'Malleys among us.

Speaking of the Murphys. I'm going to try to add some of their music to the blog. Stay tuned...

The Number 23 - Movies - Review - New York Times

2007-02-23T15:15:00.000-08:00

Here's the Times review of " The Number 23. " The Number 23 - Movies - Review - New York Times

2007-02-23T06:35:00.000-08:00

The actor Jim Carrey was on the Letterman show the other night. He came out to thunderous applause, sat down and informed the host that his name and Letterman's contain a total of 23 letters:

J I M C A R R E Y D A V I D L E T T E R M A N

Carrey was on the show to promote his new movie: The Number 23. The flick's about a man who is obsessed with that number. Sees it everywhere. Finds it everywhere. Makes connections, connects the dots that add up to the number 23.

There was this patient on the psych unit where I worked. He was like that. It wasn't a number with which he was obsessed; it was street signs. Stop. Yield. Low Shoulder. Squeeze Left. Whatever the signs said, he thought they were speaking directly to him and that the words were a code. The thing I remember most clearly about this guy was how " normal " he seemed. He wasn't one of the frequent flyers, the chronically ill who kept coming to us. He held a good job. Had a wife and a family. A nice home. But he couldn't get those thoughts out of his head. He saw the signs, and they were driving him crazy.

I will not bore you with what was going on in his head, or what the signs may have represented ( Other kinds of signs? ) Suffice it to say, I thought about him when I heard Carrey talk about his latest project.

And I thought about this.

It was back in the early 1980s. I was senior writer for an ad agency in Hartford. There was this woman I'd befriended when we both had worked at another Hartford shop. K. was 11 years younger than me. Which would have made her 22 when we met. She was tall with long naturally blonde hair. She was athletic, having played for her college volleyball team. But she was no Tom Boy. Wore high heeled shoes and tight dresses.

K. and I did what friends do. We talked on the phone. I'd be sitting in my office and get the urge to call her.

" Hey McCarthy, what's up? "

" Wanna go out for a beer after work? "

" Sure. "

" Meet you at the Russian Lady? "

" 5:30? "

" 5:30. "

" See ya there. "

" See ya there. "

We'd meet, have a few drinks. Sometimes I'd go back to her place and we'd have one or two more.

I know what you're thinking. C'mon. You were more than just " friends. "

You'd be wrong. That's all we were. I had a wife, and she had a boyfriend. We had a heart to heart talk once about a guy with whom her boyfriend worked. He was cheating on his wife and she was appalled by his behavior.

I guess what I'm telling you is a When Terry Met Sally kind of story. Which raises the question: Can a man and a woman really be friends?

One day, as I was driving home from work, a thought occurred to me. K's father had a nickname: Bud. Her boyfriend's name was Billy.

Billy Bud.

That got me started. I began to follow E.M. Forster's advice: Only connect. I started connecting the dots. Came up with all kinds of " coincidences " related to the novelist Herman Melville.

Billy's " her man. "

Wow. That's what I thought.

K's parents had a cottage on a lake in New Hampshire. She invited Donna and me up for a weekend. On our way there I saw a sign: Entering Melvin Village.

MELvin VILLage. Melville.

K. had a hobby. She collected scrimshaw, which is, of course related to whaling, which is, of course, what Moby Dick is about. The name of the hockey team that played in the Hartford Civic Center in those days was The Hartford Whalers.

K. lived on a street called South Quaker Lane. Quakers play a major role in Melville's novel about a man's obsession. With a whale.

I could go on, but I won't.

But I will add this to this story. If you spell out my name and the name of the woman who was my friend, the letters add up to:

23.

I am not making that up.

2007-02-23T06:27:00.000-08:00

Might as well beat my editor, the right ( most of the time ) honorable Terrance Collins, to the punch. It's Geffen, not Geffin. Collins missed his calling; Max Perkins pales in comparison.

Obama’s Big Screen Test - New York Times

2007-02-22T17:16:00.000-08:00

The following is an op-ed piece by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Dowd recently interviewed Hollywood power broker David Geffin who had some interesting things to say about the former Beverly HillWillies. Read Dowd's piece and notice two things. Geffin's quote well into the piece about longing for the days when candidates were chosen " in smoke filled rooms. " Then go back to the beginning of the piece, where Dowd describes the room in which she is interviewing Geffin. " A crackling fire burns, " as they speak.

Where there is fire there is smoke. As David Byrne and those Talking Heads sang: Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

Obama’s Big Screen Test - New York Times

2007-02-22T15:27:00.000-08:00

The country is eating the Anna Nicole Smith coverage up, like rats supping on vomit projected onto a cellar floor.

MSNBC is the worst, and no wonder. Dan Abrams is calling the shots. Before getting this job, Abrams had his own show on MSNBC. I couldn't watch it. Not just because of the subject matter, which was typically a lesser version of the Anna Nicole saga. It was him, Dan Abrams, who I couldn't stand to lay eyes on.

Abrams had been a legal correspondent for NBC Nightly News in the 90s. And a damn good one at that. Whenever there was a pithy Supreme Court story to cover, Dan Abrams got the nod, and did a hell of a job translating legalese into a language viewers like me could understand.

Then he got his own show. And started to make Geraldo look like Edward R. Murrow.

Yes, MSNBC is the worst. But CNN and Fox haven't been much better during this latest legal three ring circus. Abrams influence seems to be spreading, like blood and vomit on a cellar floor.

2007-02-21T13:57:00.000-08:00

I had eye surgery today. Laser surgery for glaucoma. For the past two years I've been using eye drops to reduce the pressure in my left eye. Dr. L. told me a few months ago that he was recommending this. That was back in November. Today snuck up on me, came my way quickly, like a mugger attacks a man walking without purpose, taking a shortcut down a dark alley.

I wasn't making a big deal of this. Even though the word " surgery " described what I'd be going through. Surgery's one of those words that hits a nerve, especially in nervous guys like yours truly.

But, typically, things that other people get nervous about, I tend not to. The things about which I get nervous are pedestrian things. Like riding in the passenger seat of a car, driving over a long bridge or through a tunnel.

I can work a shift on a locked psych unit populated by a loose ( Very loose ) affiliation of paranoid schizophrenics, sociopaths and wrist cutting borderlines - and not be the least bit nervous.

But invite me to a cocktail party where I'm expected to make small talk and I'm a wreck.

To each his own comfort zone. That mine have tended to be workplaces wound with deadline and psychiatric tension says something about me, I guess. Something bad? Something good?

Suffice it to say: Something.

Where the hell was I?

In the doc's office today I was a little bit nervous. My nervousness manifests itself in two distinct ways. Back when I was flying, I'd clam up in the terminal ( A word that made me VERY nervous ). Once I got on the plane I said almost nothing, other than the occasional, " I'll have another scotch on the rocks. "

And there are times like today. When I'm kind of anxious. Sort of. But it's not like driving over a bridge or into a tunnel. It's fear, but at least it's not flying.

Donna and I walked into the office. Walked through the waiting room, which looked, at least to me ( Consider the source; my eyesight's not what it was ) like the departure lounge of a small airport in a country where people are willing to pay a small fortune to get out of. It was like Rick's American Cafe. Without the smoke. Without the characters.

The thought occurred to me: They look amazingly lifelike. Most of these folks in the waiting room were watching TV. Which was tuned into CNN. Which was covering the Anna Nicole Smith hearing. Which no one in his right mind would be paying any attention to. If these people were waiting to see a psychiatrist, this might just make sense.

But I gave them a break. These poor bastards all had one thing in common: They couldn't see all that well. They probably had no idea what they were watching. They probably thought it was something with some cultural merit.

They probably think they're watching Judge Judy, I thought.

I wasn't just thinking all this. I was giving a kind of running commentary to Donna. I was talking. A regular chatty Cathy.

Give me a break. I was nervous.

When I was called from the waiting room into the inner sanctum I asked if Donna could come with me.

" She's my seeing eye dog, " I said.

I didn't know if the tech heard what I said. No reaction. Tough room.

The tech gave me a large pill. She called it a " Horse pill. " Its purpose: to lower the pressure in my left eye. For the past two years I've been taking eye drops designed to do this. There's a pill?

I didn't ask the impertinent question. It's probably some kind of experimental drug. Known to work for horses, not yet proven to work when swallowed by morons like me.

After swallowing the horse pill, I was asked to wait again, out there where The Others were waiting. After about 45 minutes, I walked up to the receptionist and asked her how much longer I would have to wait. What I meant was how much longer would I have to watch these people watch this three ring circus on CNN?

" Ten or 15 more minutes, " she said.

When I finally got in to see the good doctor, I was still talking up a blue streak. At least for me. He hadn't been in the office ten second when I said to him, " Ya know, guys of a certain age can't help but think, when they're facing surgery like this, of that scene in ' Goldfinger ' where Bond is about to be sliced in half by a laser beam..."

That was more than I'd said in my entire junior year of high school, a year in which I felt like I was on a plane going down.

Dr. L.'s eyes got big. I'd hit a responsive chord. This was obviously a man who liked movies.

I said something about how easy it was for me to face this surgery when I thought of what James Bond went through in that movie.

" Man's gotta do what he has to do to get through stuff like this, " I said. " Talk about movies. Seen any good ones lately? "

Then I added, " That's probably a question you don't ask much of your patients. They can't see hit. "

The doctor laughed. And we got on with the show.

YouTube - Mark Knopfler - Going Home (Live)

2007-02-20T16:49:00.000-08:00

EnjoyYouTube - Mark Knopfler - Going Home (Live)

NPR : Jane Smiley's 'Ten Days in the Hills'

2007-02-20T10:55:00.000-08:00

This one sounds like a good read. Listen up.NPR : Jane Smiley's 'Ten Days in the Hills'

The History Boys - The Fountain - Bobby -- New York Magazine Movie Review

2007-02-19T21:10:00.000-08:00

My all time favorite flick is Anderson's " If. " Starring a mop topped Malcolm McDowell. I saw it when I was living in England. There's this new film, based on the play

The History Boys - The Fountain - Bobby -- New York Magazine Movie Review

Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die | by Chip and Dan Heath

2007-02-19T19:30:00.000-08:00

Peanut butter for thought...Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die | by Chip and Dan Heath

2007-02-19T17:39:00.000-08:00

I told the residents I was leaving. Knocked on their doors after the dinner I'd cooked for them ( Pork chops, oven roasted potatoes, peas with mushrooms and onions ) We gathered in the living room.

" A week from today is my last day here, I said. " I wanted you all to know that. "

Seven residents were in the living room with me. Keith was in the dining room, eating a sandwich. Robby was in the shower.

One of the residents asked me, " Will you come back to visit us? "

Someone else asked: " Where will you be working after you leave? "

" I have no plans, " I said. " All I know right now is that I won't be here after next Monday. "

An honest answer if there ever was one.

I have no idea what I'll be doing, what we'll be doing. Donna and I. Here we go again. Here I go again. Donna and I have been married for almost thirty years. Our life, this sentence, has been punctuated very often by my taking leave. From the newspaper business. From the advertising business. From one damn thing to another. The moves have always worked out well. There were no master plans; we just winged it.

We've had one hell of a run. Lady luck's been in our corner.

Here I go again.

Bridgit came up to me after my little farewell address. She'd been sitting with Keith in the dining room.

" You should have heard what he said to me as you were telling them you were leaving. "

" What did he say? "

" Said ' I'm gonna miss that guy. We were close, ya know? Close. He was like a father to me. ' "

The residents who stared at me and said nearly nothing are the people with whom I've been working for nearly three years. Keith's the new kid on the block. I've been working with him for about three weeks.

When I was working at the nervous hospital up in Springfield, I trained with a clinical psychologist. Sat in the co-pilot's seat as he conducted psychotherapy group. I learned a lot from the guy.

One of the things I learned was that in a group, any group, one person sometimes acts out or speaks out for the whole group. Says what the other's cannot or will not say. Does what others won't do.

I guess I'd like to believe that. But as Monsieur Montaigne so aptly put it: What do I know? What do I know?

2007-02-18T17:53:00.000-08:00

A week from now I'll pull my last shift at the psychiatric group home where I've worked part-time for the past three years. Tomorrow's the day I plan to tell the residents I'm leaving.

I'm not looking forward to this.

I never had kids. Nobody's ever come up to me and said, " Hey, Dad, could you...

Do this, say that, offer advice, tie a shoelace, answer this question. That question. How much salt should I put on the pasta?

So much of what's happened in my life can be explained by this sentence:

I never had kids.

My part-time job at the group home is the closest I've come to being a father with children. Before I did this I worked as a counselor and human rights officer on a locked psychiatric unit in western Massachusetts. People asked me back then: What's it like to work there? And isn't it depressing?

My short answer to that was " No, it is not. "

What's it been like to work part-time in a psychiatric group home? Let me think...

It's like this: Like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets The Waltons.

I'm father Walton. And tomorrow the script calls for me to tell John Boy and the rest of the family I'm leaving.

As I said, it ain't gonna be easy. But it's time to move on. Tennessee Williams said once, " There is a time for departure, even when there is no certain place to go. "

Where do I go from here? I said to my wife Donna this morning, " I'm ready to make a major change. " Donna tends to read the lines, not between them. And I can be as indirect as a freight train on the wrong goddam track. What I meant to say, but couldn't, and she wouldn't hear if I did was this.

I'm terrified of that one last dance we do alone.

Next month, which is a week or so away, is the month in which I will turn 60 years old. I see that in print and I just can't believe it. I just turned 21 a few years ago. Hit 30 last month. That's what it feels like.

Sixty? That's the age my father was when I got married. And he was dead nine years later. Me 60? No fucking way, man. No fucking way.

I will not accept this, I will...

Ah, yes. Of course. I will. I'm leaving. It's inevitable. I'll be gone. Goodnight John Boy. Goodnight all of you guys who I worked with. Ken, Ray, Jack, Keith, Colleen, Missy, Andria, George, Robbie, Jonathan, Dominga and Dawn.

I'm leaving the home. Leaving home. I'm going, as we all must some day. I'm leaving home, going home, departing.

Take care of yourselves. Promise me that.

Take care.

YouTube - David Bowie and Marianne Faithful I Got You Babe

2007-02-18T17:30:00.000-08:00

Somehow, this 27 year old clip speaks to me. Please don't ask me why?YouTube - David Bowie and Marianne Faithful I Got You Babe

2007-02-18T17:11:00.000-08:00

From the Progress Notes Department of Corrections:

I meant, of course, " Mummified, " not " Muffified. " I think it was Mark Twain who said there is a large difference between the words lightning and lightning bug. Same with this. One conjures Tony Perkins. The other some teenage sitcom vampire slayer. Scary. But no Norman Bates.

Thank you, TerrAnce. I stand, rather, at this late hour, sit...

Corrected.

YouTube - Marianne Faithfull - "Working Class Hero" (live)

2007-02-18T17:09:00.000-08:00

Her voice... Different from what it was. Her face is the same. But she's Faithfull. She's faithfull...YouTube - Marianne Faithfull - "Working Class Hero" (live)

lyrics

2007-02-18T17:02:00.000-08:00

lyrics

2007-02-18T14:39:00.000-08:00

We heard from a friend today. He'd been planning for months to move to the west coast of Mexico. Was in the final phases of that brave move. We read last week of the violence in that part of Mexico. Drug smugglers. Kidnappings. Tourists cancelling plans to vacation where our friend planned to live. Today we got an email from our amigo.

No deal. He decided to stay here, where it's safe, for the time being.

You Google " Violence in Acapulco " you'll get lots of information. But if you brought this up in conversation at, say, the agua cooler, it might not hit the responsive chords that Anna Nicole Smith might strike.

I know this is a glib observation, and our friend would be the first to call me on it. But I thought it was interesting, in a Dobbsian sort of way, that we know some one who chose not to cross the border that is defined by the Rio Grande.

We hear much ( Way too much from Dobbs ) about those who head up here. And so little about the expatriot community down there. Abd those who are planning, or had planned to join them.

Anna Nicole. Whether or not Peyton Manning has completely sold out. Britanny Spears, Brad and Tom Cruise. These dangling conversations we Americans have. We speak of things that do not matter. In, as Marianne Faithful might say, broken English.

2007-02-18T12:31:00.000-08:00

A Long Island man was found dead this week, his muffified body seated in front of a television set. Police report that the man had been dead for almost a year, and that the TV set was still on.

This guy might just be the only viewer in America with a good excuse for watching the egregious wall to wall Anna Nicole Smith coverage.

2007-02-17T18:49:00.000-08:00

When we got back from our Florida vacation last month we discovered that we had mice in the house. We bought some traps and put some peanut butter on them. Peter Pan peanut butter.

After a few days we checked the traps. The peanut butter was gone. But there were no mice on the traps. " Smart little bastards, " I said.

This has happened before. But in the past the mice kept coming back. They didn't come back this time and we were stumped as to why this was happening. Or to be more precise, why it wasn't.

Now we know. The peanut butter we were using as bait was contaminated with salmonella bacteria. Now some may quibble with my theory. Say mice are immune and all that. Maybe they'd be right, but I prefer to believe this:

The traps didn't kill the mice; the peanut butter did. The vermints weren't so smart afterall. We ( unwittingly ) outwitted the little bastards.

That's my story. And I'm sticking to it, like peanut butter to a slice of white bread.

2007-02-15T18:36:00.000-08:00

I was reminded recently of what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said back in the 1930s.

FDR said, " The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. "

These days, among the myriad things we have to fear, is...

Peanut butter.

Peter Pan peanut butter to be precise. There's been a recall. Certain jars of the thick gooey substance are toxic, can cause one to become sick with salmonella.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Of peanut butter. If you see someone at T.F. Green eating a peanut butter sandwich, make darn sure he finishes that sandwich before he boards your plane. You don't want any sticky situations developing on that three hour flight to Orlando.

And if you're driving south on I-95 through Baltimore, don't even think about trying to get through that tunnel with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a ziplock bag in your trunk. Homeland Security has ways to detect it.

And if they do, make no mistake. The alert level will go up. From yellow to brown.

Peanut butter. What could be more American than that? Yet today's news suggested it just might be the opposite. Peanut butter might just be another one of those evildoers folks have been warning us about.

Yesterday it was a dangerous world with much to fear, including fear itself. Today it got worse. Peanut butter and the evil it does, was the big story.

Al Qaeda? Bin Laden? Iran and North Korea? No need to fear them. Not today. Today you need to worry about Peter Pan, and the terror that dangerous character's spreading.

2007-02-15T17:50:00.000-08:00

Joel Surnow, the co-creator and executive producer of the Fox counterterrorism hit show " 24 " is quoted in this week's New Yorker:

" After deposing Saddam Hussein, America should have just handed it to the Baathists and put in some other monster who's going to keep those people in line but who's not going to be aggressive to us. "

Idiots Rush and Laura Ingram are forever braying about Hollywood types and their naive takes on the war. Listen to this guy Rush and Laura. He makes more sense in one sentence than both of you've made in a year.

Salmonella outbreak linked to 2 peanut butter brands - CNN.com

2007-02-15T16:03:00.000-08:00

My wife and I were on vacation in Fort Myers Beach Florida last month. Our plan one day was to go out on a casino ship. On our way down to the place where this ship of fools was docked, I started to experience some pretty intense stomach pain. It came in waves.

We almost missed the boat, having depended on the Fort Myers Beach trolley to get us there on time. The Fort Myers Beach trolley isn't very dependable. At the bus stop, you have to step over the decomposing bodies of those who waited too long for their ride.

We were the last two people to board the casino boat. The guy who sold us our tickets was a pain in the ass, and the pain in my stomach was getting worse. The waves were coming more frequently, and as I boarded the tub I looked around to see where the heads were located. I knew I'd be needed them. My stomach was telling me that.

This ship of fools headed for international waters, the only place where gambling is allowed in this corner of the Sunshine State. As we headed west out into the still waters of the Gulf of Mexico...

The seas started to get heavy. The waves got big and the boat rocked back and forth, up and down. Just what my stomach needed. I headed for the head for the first time. It would not be my last.

Long story short, we lost lots of money. And I wasn't feeling very well at all, not at all. What the hell was going on? I wondered.

The answer to that question is in the following news story. Just before Donna and I took off for the dock, I had eaten an English muffin. I'd spread some Peter Pan peanut butter on the bread. As it happened, it was contaminated.

I wonder now: What are the odds that that jar of peanut butter we plucked from the shelf would be one of the ones that made people sick? What are the odds?

Salmonella outbreak linked to 2 peanut butter brands - CNN.com

Ploughshares, the literary journal

2007-02-14T19:08:00.000-08:00

Winter storm warnings and advisories were posted today. All of which reminded me of a poem penned by my old friend Tom Lux... href="http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmArticleID=2118">Ploughshares, the literary journal

2007-02-14T17:45:00.000-08:00

An article in the journal Social Work, written by Brian Bride, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, reports that social workers face a high risk of developing post traumatic stress disorder.

7.8 percent of the general population experiences PTSD. Fifteen percent of social workers Bride interviewed had PTSD. Forty percent of the social workers Bride interviewed reported thinking repeatedly about their traumatized clients. Twenty eight percent reported difficulty concentrating and twenty six percent felt emotionally numb.

Bride thinks a lot of social workers mistake their symptoms for burnout. When in fact it is trauma.

Social workers are paid to listen to sad stories. They are not alone in the battle. Nurses, counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists are also on the front lines.

In a week I will end a sixteen year tour of duty on the front line of mental health care. Burned out?

I don't think so. Traumatized?

Maybe.

2007-02-14T13:57:00.000-08:00

" In Vietnam, the battle crazy Lurps who lived across the landing strip from Browne's Tactical Air Control base had made a legend of beetles who entered the brain and contaminated the mind. Some of the Lurps had believed so intensely in the beetles that they had succumbed to the infection. That evening Browne entered the infestation in his log to bring the experience under control... Beyond that he could think of nothing to write. Later, he thought he might sit down to his journal and make a literary event out of it all. "

From the novel " Outerbridge Reach " by Robert Stone.

I was listening to NPR the other day. The topic was blogs. The question was asked: What's the point? Why write in a blog. Leave it to Robert Stone to answer that question.

Colin McEnroe | To Wit: Petroski Properly Pilloried. Now Please Pause

2007-02-13T14:10:00.000-08:00

A blog entry by Mr.McEnroe, and a comment by me...Colin McEnroe | To Wit: Petroski Properly Pilloried. Now Please Pause

2007-02-13T13:53:00.000-08:00

As I write this, I have three shifts left to work at the group home in North Kingstown, where I've been spending twenty hours a week since the middle of April, 2004. The reasons why I am leaving this job are complicated, and would bore you to tears should I attempt to fill you in on the details.

The tears you would shed would be ( Kind of ) like the tears I shed recently at the group home to which I am about to say goodbye. An emotional farewell? Not really. I'm used to bidding farewell to those with whom, and for whom I have worked. I'm a three career man. My first career was journalism. The job I held ( Like a drowning man clings to a log ) was newspaper reporter. I did that for three years, then added advertising copywriter to the medley of tasks for which I was paid.

When I graduated from college with a degree in English and Journalism my goal was to become a writer of fiction. I reached, with breath left to spare, that finish line as a copywriter in Hartford, Connecticut. Many of the clever headlines I came up with were lies; they were fictional accounts of what the products and services I had in my bag of tricks would do for John and Joan Q. Consumer.

Case in point.

It was my task one day in 1986 to supervise a photo shoot at the railroad station in Greenwich, Connecticut. Tim Teufel, an infielder for the New York Mets, was a local boy made good. A Greenwich bank, which was on the roster of clients my agency had garnered, had convinced Teufel to appear in a newspaper ad.

I arrived at the Greenwich station in my uniform. Blue blazer, striped tie, blue jeans and sneakers. I was the creative director for an ad agency in Hartford, and I dressed the part. I was a vice president, but you wouldn't catch me wearing wing tip shoes and a suit.

Tim Teufel arrived at the Greenwich station dressed in his pin striped New York Mets uniform. He was better dressed than I was. And paid a hell of a lot more than I was. But what the hell I thought then, and I think of it now. To each his own game.

The shoot went well. Teufel was cooperative. Took my directions and suggestions with an easy smile. Like someone used to being coached by an idiot.

Teufel, at that time, was in his late twenties. Handsome and recently married, his wife accompanied him to the shoot. She was quiet. She was pretty. She was nice.

The Teufels. Not exactly the kind of couple John Cheever wrote about. That's what you may be thinking, and of course you'd be wrong. The Teufels were not unlike the swimmers and the gin drinkers in the stories John Cheever liked to tell.

A few days after the shoot I got some mail. It was from the bank's marketing director. I opened the envelope. Pulled out a note and a tearsheet. I read the note.

" Enclosed is a tearsheet, the page on which both the ad and the story of Tim Teufel's arrest recently appeared. "

I unfolded the newspaper page. There was the ad, with Tim Teufel smiling that smile. And below it was a news story above which ran the headline:

" Mets Teufel Arrested Following Bar Brawl in Houston. "

Soon after Tim Teufel left the railroad station, he headed for the airport. The Mets had a road trip. First stop: Houston.

The Teufel story, the Houston story, hung like drool from the mouth of an unreliable source. Just below the ad I'd played a major role in creating.

As I look back on all this, I frame it in this way. It's the ultimate good news, bad news story. The good news being the ad. The bad news being the story.

I had nothing to do with the story reported from Houston. I had everything to do with the ad shot in Greenwich. Tim Teufel was one thing in Greenwich, another thing entirely in Houston. He was what he was, but in Greenwich he lied. And I was his sorry accomplice.

The ad I helped create was the fiction. The story of what happened in Houston?

That was the truth.

Where the hell was I?

Three shifts left at the group home in North Kingstown. I was talking about tears, the tears I recently shed as I worked my last days in the home. The tears welled as I peeled the layers off some onions. I was making a salad, the sine qua non of which is the onion. Salads are just one of the things I make at the group home. When one of the residents asks me: " Whatcha putting into it? " my answer's always the same.
'
"Everything but the kitchen sink. "

The line gets a laugh. The residents are a good room for a frustrated standup comic like me. But truth be told, the salads would be nothing without onions, the one ingredient guaranteed to make us all cry.

I never did much cooking before I started working at the group home. I'd worked ten years on a locked unit up north; I had a " knack " for working with the mentally ill. But I never cooked.

Until I started cooking at the home.

The following is from something Norman Mailer wrote in 1951. The words describe his feelings about a job he believed was his duty: Soldier in what some have called " The Good War. "

" So he took an opening in the kitchen. It promised him nothing except a day of work, and a day of leisure which would be completely at his disposal. He found that he like it... He had the rare and therefore intensely satifisying emotion of seeing at the end of an army chore the product of his labor. "

You work in a psychiatic group home, don't expect to see a whole lot of progress. Lower the bar of your expectations. Don't look for beginnings, middles and ends. Don't expect those kinds of stories.

Spend your time making salads. Roll the ground beef and ground turkey in your hands. Make meatballs, Make meatloaf. Prepare the meal. Shove what you've created into the oven. Wait. Read a book. Do some writing. Then take what you've imagined out of the stove.

There it is. The end, the final chapter, before which was the beginning, and the middle...

Every meal you cook tells a story.

2007-02-12T21:38:00.000-08:00

Pistol Pete Maravich would have turned 60 years old this year, had he not so impolitely died in 1987.

Maravich dropped dead of a heart attack shortly after playing a casual game with some friends. Did I say casual? Maravich played the game so hard it killed him. This was a game that meant nothing in the large scheme of things. Didn't amount to Bogart's hill of beans in the crazy world. Casual? There was nothing casual about Pistol Pete Maravich.

Maravich didn't just play basketball. He had a life. Did things with friends, who weren't always guys who were tall and athletic. He went to the movies. But he always sat in the seat on the aisle.

Because he always brought a basketball with him. As he watched the flicks, he bounce, bounce, bounced the leather orb in the aisle, practicing his ball handling skills.

Pistol Pete Maravich. That's the kind of guy I want on my team.

2007-02-11T16:35:00.000-08:00

They called it The Pod. The Buena Vista Social Club is what I called the five bed section of the locked psych unit I worked on.

At some point in the eleven years I worked there, the words " Behavioral Health " slithered, like poisonous snakes, under the locked doors and into the halls, the rooms and the offices of the Adult Psychiatric Treatment Unit of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The patients assigned to the Buena Vista Social Club, their behavior was the worst. Everybody on the unit was at risk, but these people were the most at risk. They were more likely to hurt themselves. They were more likely to hurt others. So we kept them apart from the rest of the population.

The Pod was the official name for their place on the unit. I thought that was a joke. One of the jokes I told to the other counselors and the nurses with whom I worked was this one:

What do you call the shrink who specializes in working with this kind of patient?

A Podiatrist.

Why did I call it the Buena Vista Social Club?

The big window on the west end of the Pod afforded anyone who stood next to it a spectacular view. Off in the distance, beyond the hospital parking lots and tenement buildings, stood the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains. Lenox was out there. Stockbridge. Places like Tanglewood and Jacobs Pillow. They were out there.

Getting out to those places would require you to hop in your car and go over the Memorial Bridge, the bridge that crosses the Connecticut River. Drive a few miles north until you see the signs for the Massachusetts Turnpike, that turnpike James Taylor wrote about. Sweet Baby James.

Of course, the patients assigned to the Buena Vista Social Club could not do that. They were stuck on a locked psych unit, APTU. They could look out that window and imagine themselves in places like Lenox and Stockbridge. They could imagine themselves listening to the music in the big shed, watching the dancers strut their stuff on the boards of Jacobs Pillow.

Me? I worked the day shift. I had the key that unlocked the doors to the unit. I could leave whenever I wanted to. I got to go home at 3:30. The patients and I shared the same view. But I got to leave. I had the key.

2007-02-10T13:53:00.000-08:00

A front page story in the Times today reported that, after 28 years of operation, a Princeton laboratory that has conducted studies of extrasensory perception ( ESP ), is closing.

But you already knew that, didn't you?

2007-02-10T11:39:00.000-08:00

There are times when I think Don Imus has me under his thumb. He gets on a rant about a new book and I buy it. He starts pushing a song and I have a strong urge to drive to the store and buy the CD. Yesterday Imus had his engineer Lou play a cut from Lucinda Williams new CD. Like a dog told by Pavlov to roll over, I went to the store. Asked if they had the new Lucinda Williams CD. Was told it won't be in stores until Tuesday. This is Saturday. I drove home, got my sleeping bag and tent, drove back to the store and set up camp...

I made that part up.

I did end up buying another Lucinda Williams CD: " Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. " It is, as Imus would say, " A great record. " They don't call them records anymore, but we all know what the I Man is saying.

This IS a great record. Produced by the E Street Band's Roy Bittan, and featuring Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle, Car Wheels... has some classic Lucinda tracks on it. Drunken Angel. Concrete and Barbed Wire. Right in Time.

I love this record. And I can't wait until Tuesday.

2007-02-08T17:18:00.000-08:00

" Writing is spooky. There is no routine of an office to keep you going, only the blank page each morning, and you never know where your words are coming from, those divine words. "

Norman Mailer

2007-02-08T16:16:00.000-08:00

" They were a curious mixture of high competence and near imbecility, some assigned to Space for years seemed to know as much as NASA engineers; others, innocents in for the big play on the moon shot, still were not just certain where laxatives ended and physics began. "

Norman Mailer on the reporters at a press conference starring Armstong, Aldrin and Collins. From " A Fire on the Moon, " his non-fiction book about the NASA moon landing mission. The above is from a chapter titled, " The Psychology of Astronauts. "

That was 38 years ago. Yesterday, an ironic twist, a spiral shaped worm slithered through The Hole. The reporters who covered the Lisa Marie Nowak story knew exactly where laxitives ended and physics began.

The thin brown line was drawn, pretty damn easy to see, in the diaper this astronaut wore on her 900 mile journey from Houston.

2007-02-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

Memo

To: Cable news guys

From: Me

Re: Use of the word; BULLETIN

I was 16 years old when that word flashed onto the screen of my parents TV. It alerted us Americans that our president was dead. Wall to wall coverage ensued. No other news mattered; the king was dead. Long live the king.

That word flashed onto my screen again. This afternoon, around 2:30. What was the news?

Anna Nicole Smith is dead.

Anna Nicole Smith? For this I was shaken out of my chair? Anna Nicole Smith? Her death doesn't amount to a " hill of beans in this crazy world. " As Rick might put it. So what's with the wall to wall coverage? There was no other news on this afternoon. Iraq and Iran and places like Darfur weren't on the map. Scooter Libby wasn't on the docket.

The only news I was getting was:

Anna Nicole Smith is dead.

Maybe I'm just not getting it. Maybe Anna Nicole Smith is a metaphor; maybe she stands for something, something existential in nature. Maybe the dumb blonde is who WE are. Perhaps she represents the culture, this thick toxic muck in which our wheels are all stuck.

Maybe it does amount to a hill of beans, after all.

YouTube - James McMurtry "We can't make it here"

2007-02-08T13:49:00.000-08:00

Here it is. Again. Great song.YouTube - James McMurtry "We can't make it here"

2007-02-07T18:26:00.000-08:00

An astronaut named Lisa Marie drives 900 miles from Houston to Orlando to confront and maybe kidnap, maybe kill, the other woman...

A few months back I wrote in this blog about how different NASA folks are from Nascar folks. Another theory of mine shot down, like a Black Hawk helicopter in Iraq.

Cue the country western song...

Army Is Going Wrinkle-Free; Velcro Becomes Norm - New York Times

2007-02-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

I did some time at a military college and spent four years in the Air Force. A lot of that time was wasted. But much of it was spent productively. I got to travel. Met and lived with guys from all over the map.

I was one of the uninformed, uniformed men. I spent a lot of time ironing.

Ironing? Yes, Sir! Ironing.

The uniform I wore was supposed to be neat and clean at all times. Mostly I wore olive drab fatigues and combat boots. Black leather boots I spent a lot of time shining.

I spent no time sewing. Sewing was womens' work and I was busy trying to be manly. I was an amateur back in in those days in the art of persuasion. This was years before I developed the sociopathic charm that helped me wend my way through the thickly carpeted halls of the advertising business.

Insignia and nameplates, chevrons and the name I wore proudly on my chest, were sewed on back then. But not by me. I got other guys, guys who had no problem with sewing, to sew them on my shirts.

I thought about this as I read the following story in today's Times.Army Is Going Wrinkle-Free; Velcro Becomes Norm - New York Times

2007-02-06T18:39:00.000-08:00

There are so many interesting angles to this story ( At least three ). Take for example: Lisa Marie, upon her release, was ordered to wear a GPS ankle bracelet. The technology of which is based on:

Trianglization.

A love triangle, then a bracelet that fits. In more ways than one.

2007-02-06T17:05:00.000-08:00

Naval Captain Lisa Marie Nowak, like a satellite locked onto Chinese radar, is an easy target. This story is so bizarre, so un-Right Stuff. We're all in cultural shock, the first symptom of which is telling stupid jokes at the expense of people like this.

Call me Captain Rehab.

That's probably what Lisa Marie will be saying within the next few days. Given what Mel Gibson, Miss USA, the mayor of San Francisco, et al have been saying recently. You get caught acting out these days, you go straight to default mode.

Rehab.

It's not funny; it's pathetic. But the first few chapters of these stories always go for the laugh. It's what we do best. It's how we deny the reality, the sadness, the awful truth of the news we hear every day...

Which pretty much explains The Daily Show and Mr. Stewart's success.

2007-02-06T13:41:00.000-08:00

I just watched the arraignment of Lisa Marie Nowak. Her lawyer probably made history today, established legal precedent. The first attorney to ever argue that an astronaut isn't a flight risk.

The judge decided to release her on $10,000 bond. Lisa Marie said she'd catch the shuttle back to Houston. Last I heard she was last seen somewhere over Sri Lanka.

2007-02-05T19:41:00.000-08:00

February 5. My father's birthday. It's been more than twenty years since I sent my father a card. He was born in 1917. He would have turned 90 today.

90.

I see him, as I write this, through memory's fogged up car window. There I am, behind the wheel of that 1963 sky blue Ford Falcon. There he is, in the passenger's seat. Probably nervous as hell, but not showing his hand. Not giving the tell.

We're in an old car. I'm driving, and he's passing on the skills that drivers learn, on those long and winding, potholed roads we travel. He's 45. I'm 15.

He would be 90 today. I am 59. I have never taught a son to drive. Sure, I've done other things, things he never did. Got a college degree. Served four years in the Air Force. Lived overseas.

But he did something I've never done. He sat in that passenger seat, while his son learned to drive.

2007-02-05T18:36:00.000-08:00

In Chicago they call it The Hawk. The cruel wind that blows across the big lake and races through the skyscraper canyons on and just off State Street. The Hawk was in the air today, but it's not Chicago I'm writing about. It's here. The south coast of Rhode Island.

High temperature here struggled to reach 20 today. Winds gusted to 40 Miles per hour. It was cold, boyo. But ya won't hear me whining.

A woman I work with is looking forward to seeing her son again. He's been in Antarctica since October. Bridgit brought into work today a copy of the local paper, the paper that covers the area in which her son lives. Way up in Maine, which is like the Florida Keys, compared to where he's been since last fall.

Bridgit's son Andrew has been keeping a journal, parts of which have been published in the newspaper. The entry I read this evening included some pictures. It's been a nearly snowless winter down here in Rhode Island. And yeah, it's cold now, but it's been warm mostly, since October.

The pictures show where Andrew has been spending his time for the past four months. If you're one of the ones whining about how bloody cold it is here, how difficult it is to live in New England...

Think about what it must be like to live where Bridgit's son has been living since October.

Antarctica.

I have a friend, Tom, who just returned from two weeks in Kenya. Donna and I know a young woman who just left for Tanzania.

I will not belabor the point; you know where I'm going with this. Travel puts things in perspective.

The Hawk circles over the house in which we live. The air in which the bird spreads its wings is cold. We can see it up there, through the skylight, from our perch by the fire dancing in the wood burning stove.

It's cold up there. It's warm down here.

I'm not complaining.

2007-02-05T05:33:00.000-08:00

Colts won. So I guess as far as facetime for Peyton goes...

You ain't seen nothin' yet.

2007-02-04T17:12:00.000-08:00

Peyton Manning's probably not a bad guy. But you wouldn't know it by watching TV. Manning's all over the screen, like a Junebug stupidly attacking a door. Like some kind of insect, seeing the light in your living room, and wanting to get in at all costs. That's Peyton Manning, as I see him.

As I write this, the Colts lead the Bears 16-14 early in the third quarter of Superbowl 41. The half-time show's curtain just fell. Prince performed. The weather was terrible, as it has been in Florida lately.

Purple rain fell as Prince strut his stuff. Purple rain. Great song.

Spectacular effects. How do they do that?

2007-02-03T14:59:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking, this week, back to the days when I earned my daily bread in the advertising business. One of the stories that sparked my nostalgia was the one reported out of Boston.

The city was shut down. "Suspicious devices " were discovered near bridges and overpasses. Terrorist activity? Nope. Guerilla marketing. The suspicious devices were nothing more than small, 21st century billboards.

Billboards a threat to the American way of life? Yes. I have, in fact, been saying this for years. Decades. Since I first drove to Florida on I-95. Back in 1967. Saw those egregious, ubiquitous, moronic " South of the Border " billboards that lined, and still line the interstate highway, like trash thrown from the window of a speeding Honda Accord.

Advertising. Sell, sell, sell. Make the people long for that which they wouldn't want and do not need. Advertising.

When I was trying to break into that trade in the early 1980s, I started networking. Among the folks I connected with was a man by the name of Chet Stover. He was working for the Milton Bradley toy company in Springfield, Massachusetts at the time. In the company's marketing department.

Chet Stove was famous. He had come up with a line in his younger days in the ad bidness. The line was:

" Indescribably delicious. "

The line appeared, for decades, on the packaging of a candy bar: Mounds.

I've thought much about that line and the man who coined it. I've thought about what it must have been like to come up with the line. How he, Chet Stover, must have worked through the process of coming up with the line and getting it aproved by his boss and the client.

Chet: I have some ideas I'd like to bounce off you, OK?

Creative director: Let's hear 'em.

Chet: This is the first one I came up with.

CD: Shoot.

Chet: Words can't describe how tasty this is

CD: Too many words.

Chet: I have some more.

CD: Let's hear 'em

Chet: Unbelievably scrumptious

CD: What else ya got?

Chet: A presidential speechwriter couldn't come up with the words to..

CD: Way, way too long.

Chet: Hard to say how much you mouth will water.

CD: That's awful.

Chet: I know, I know. Not my favorite one either.

CD: Chet. It's Friday afternoon. Take the weekend and come up with some more ideas. Whaddya thing of that, huh?

Chet: That's, uh, that's a great idea. Indescribable. Delicious! Talk to ya Monday.

2007-02-01T17:30:00.000-08:00

I was a dismal failure when I was studying economics in college way back then. So forgive me if I get some facts wrong here.

Adam Smith wrote that if everyone pursues his own profit then we all will profit. By the so called " invisible hand. " Helping yourself to profits is, in effect, helping others.

So. According to Smith, it's moral to pursue your self- interest. As Gordon Gecko said in Oliver Stone's " Wall Street, " : " Greed is good. "

All that money you want to make, and maybe will make, will " trickle down, " be spread out. Your wealth will contribute to the commonwealth. And that's a good thing. That's the concept.

The corollary is this: People who do not pursue their self-interest, those who steer clear of the entreprenureal spirit. That's a bad thing.

What I'm talking about is people who help people, other people. Social workers, advocates for the homeless, nurses, counselors.

Do gooders. The kind of folks Rush puts down.

These people throw a monkey wrench into the system Adam Smith spent so much of his time trying to explain to dolts like yours truly.

When I was working on a psych unit in Massachusetts, I was amazed by how many of the people with whom I worked - nurses, social workers, counselors...

I was amazed that they listened to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly. And agreed with them.

Do gooders all, they sided with the side I would have thought they'd oppose.

What am I to make of this? I can't for the life of me figure it out. Sure, I have some half baked theories, especially about the men on the unit. Human services is a girly man career choice, according to some. You get into it, and your political views change. You listen to Rush and subscribe to his newsletter.

You act like a do gooder girl on the unit. And get paid for doing that. But you go to your parties. You talk to the wife at the dinner table. You listen to Rush.

Double agent-like, you do the back-stroke through those muddy ideological waters.

Aiming to do good. But wishing and hoping, above all, to do well.

Why We Mourn Barbaro - New York Times

2007-02-01T14:52:00.000-08:00

This one's a keeper...Why We Mourn Barbaro - New York Times

2007-02-01T14:24:00.000-08:00

Joe Biden's been in Don Imus's stable of callers in for some time now. The conventional wisdom is that regular appearances on Imus's MSNBC show are a great way to promote what you're selling - be it a book or, in Biden's ( And Christopher Dodd's ) case, himself. The down side of this is this: Biden and the other nags get spoiled. You can say damn near anything on Imus, and get away with it. What Biden said about Obama pales ( oops! ) in comparison to what's consistently said between 6 and 9 a.m. week days.

There's a lesson in this for guys like Dodd, and even that horse ('s ass ) Lieberman. Riffing on Imus is one thing. The real world's another track all together.

Colin McEnroe | To Wit: Smells Like Scientific and Political Consensus

2007-01-31T19:27:00.000-08:00

I get a kick out of people who scream Global Warming's a myth. Especially those who are living the good life. Getting rich and tan. Lounging in the back of the boats they can't decide which decision to make. Should I keep it? Should I not? At least Ahab had some focus. Crazy as hell, but he knew what he was after. As I write this I'm hearing the tune, " These are a few of my favorite things. " I have no idea where this is coming from.

Colin McEnroe | To Wit: Smells Like Scientific and Political Consensus

2007-01-31T18:13:00.000-08:00

I went back again, yesterday, to my hometown: Easthampton.

For those of you who have never left, this might not make much sense. Bear with me. You'll be among those who leave. Someday soon. If you're my age. You'll join this club someday. Guaranteed. You will have paid your dues and you will attend the meetings. Or, if you will, the practice sessions of the choir invisible.

As I drive through the town in which I grew up, I see, on every street corner, ghosts lurking in the shadows of the buildings on Main Street, Union Street. Cottage and Pleasant.

Kids I went to school with loiter there. I see them smoking and sneaking sips from the bottles poorly hidden in the small paper bags they carry.

I see Karen Damon and me. We're walking down Main Street, past the place in which my mother, father and I live. Karen's wearing a flower, a flower I gave her. We're on our way to a dance hall on Main Street.

She's 14 and so am I. It's my first date. The very first date of my life.

I go back to my hometown and these are the kinds of things I see on the screen. Every building. Every street corner. A memory. An image. Of me and someone I cared for. Back when we were young.

Karen Damon died. I got that news recently from my mother. Who's the real journalist in the family. We often end our conversations on the phone with..

" That's all the news I have... "

Karen Damon died.

That was the headline recently. Karen Damon. She was the first girl I ever went out with. We went to a dance. We danced. The party was held on the top floor of a block of stores and apartments just down the street from where mom, dad and I lived.

Shop Row. That's what the Edward Hopper like picture ( in my mind ) was called.

Shop Row.

That dance we went to, my very first date. It was held on the top floor. Karen and I climbed up those stairs, ran up them like kids run up stairs. Got there and danced. The two of us danced.

It was as close to heaven as it got back in those days.

Now? She's there and I'm down here. In Rhode Island. Who's she dancing with these days? Who knows? Who knows?

But I'm thinking of that Jackson Browne song: For a Dancer...

" In the end, there's one dance you'll do alone ... "

2007-01-31T17:39:00.000-08:00

This Joe Biden thing is absurd.

Imagine that everything you say, in the car as you're driving; at the breakfast table as you're chewing the bacon and sipping the juice; as you're singing in the shower, parodying the lyrics of Man of La Mancha. Imagine that it's all being recorded.

Now imagine:

You're in line for a new job. A teaching job. A gig as an advertising copywriter. A nursing position.

In the process of getting the job, the guy who gets to make the call - whether you get the nod or not - gets his hands on the tape of you spouting off like some idiot singing in the shower.

I know what you're thinking. Applying for a teaching job or any job, is different from running for president. When you're running for president, or if you are the president, you have to watch what you say. As a matter of fact, you don't say anything. You read what your handlers write.

That's what George W. does. And folks call him stupid.

Yeah. Right.

2007-01-31T14:17:00.000-08:00

This just in!

The Big Hoax is Boston today was a marketing campaign!

When I was a creative director for an ad agency in Hartford, a lot of my ideas were bombs that never went off. But not literally.

I'll bet the house on this. The guys who thought this thing up will benefit from it. Despite all the smoke being blown now about them getting punished for their stupid idea.

2007-01-31T13:34:00.000-08:00

I'm not about to hop on the " Damn the Main Stream Media " bandwagon, but...

The big story on the cable news channels this afternoon was the discovery of some " suspicious devices " in Boston, Massachusetts. Today's coverage of this story was a text book example of how not to cover a news story. But there it was on all three cable outlets, MSNBC, CNN and Fox ( hole ) News.

The first breaking news was that 4 suspicious devices had been found. A reporter was shown doing a stand-up near the Boston Common. Behind him were scores of police officers and a fleet of cruisers. Off duty cops were being called in, according to the reporter. " Visibility " was the key, he said.

Then, this just in: The Charles River was closed down. Then we learned that Boston Harbor was being shut down. Then we learned, if we were watching Fox ( hole ) News, that the whole thing was a big hoax.

When I learned that, I switched to MSNBC where I learned that the whole thing was not a hoax.

Then I switched over to CNN where I learned that only part of the river was shut down, and that Boston Harbor had never been shut down.

I switched back to Fox ( hole ) News. Now they were reporting that 10 devices had been found, four of which had been determined to be hoaxes. As of right now, 4:45 p.m., Wednesday, January 31, the bottom line is this:

The whole thing was a big hoax.

Yet it got wall to wall coverage on all three cable news channels. And what did we learn during the two hours this was on the screen? Next to nothing.

The coverage of these kinds of stories reminds me of my newspaper reporting days. What viewers are, in effect, seeing and hearing, is the process of news gathering.

I'll repeat that. What viewers are getting is the PROCESS. It is not, in fact, the news. It's like the newspaper I wrote for publishing not the news stories I covered, but the notes I scribbled as I gathered the news. My notes and the conversations I had with my editors, pre-deadline and pre-publication, were the raw materials from which the final story was constructed.

Much of what I wrote in my note pad was inaccurate and unconfirmed. It was, in other words, wrong. Or very possibly wrong. But that's exactly what viewers of cable news get on days like this.

It's not news we're watching. It's like what happened in Boston this afternoon.

It's all a big hoax, and it's not very funny.

2007-01-30T17:37:00.000-08:00

Correction: I know. I know. Plays don't have chapters; they have acts. Consider this a defense of possible comments from guys returning from Davos. ( Like guys spending time in Davos would waste their time with yours truly ) What do I have to say about this?

Fuck you morons. And the Arabian horses and private jets you rode and flew in on.

But you're right re: the language. I'll give you that one. You're right re: the language. Plays don't have chapters.

2007-01-30T17:07:00.000-08:00

I was checking out at Wal-Mart the other day. Waiting in line. I loathe many things, many chapters in this post modern passion play in which we all play our roles. Waiting in line to escape from places like Wal-Mart is on the top of my list of the things I loathe.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Waiting in line. There's not much you can do when you're locked into a holding pattern in a check out line at Wal-Mart. Sure, you can people watch. Watch the people in line in front of you. I like to read. One of the things I do when I'm waiting in line, is read the backs of T-Shirts guys are wearing.

Here's what I read the other day, on the back of a shirt some dude was wearing:

" Our goal is your hole. Acme excavating. "

Our goal is your hole?

I'm a first amendment purest. Think one should be able to say or write just about anything. But c'mon!

Our goal is your hole? On the back of a T-Shirt one wears while standing in line?

What should be done with assholes like this? Joe Heller would know. Joe Heller who wrote " Catch 22. "

Take them out in the hall. And shoot them.

And remember you heard this...

From a so called liberal.

2007-01-30T16:33:00.000-08:00

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”

Jack Kerouac

The above explains a lot about why I " had a knack " for working with the folks on the locked psych unit in Springfield. And the group home in North Kingstown, Rhode Island.

2007-01-30T16:25:00.000-08:00

When Ralph Nader was a child, his father asked him, " What did you learn in school today. Did you learn how to believe, or did you learn how to think? "

Believe what you will about Ralph Nader. His father's point is well taken.

2007-01-29T17:45:00.000-08:00

The following is a response I just gave to a CyberFriend with whom I have been communicating of late. He's an interesting guy, a persona non...

Nah. Not that kind of persona. He seems like a good guy, a guy with whom one could do business. And share a (n imported ) beer. My new friend doubted the importance, was skeptical of, the skills required of reporters.

Here it is:

Dear J.

I've been thinking about something you wrote to me a few days ago. It's taken a few days to process it. The discussion was about newspaper reporters. How their skills are limited to mere writing and interview skills. I'm of two minds about the comment, and the last word I'd write to describe my state is " schizophrenic. " One of the most misused words in the English language.

First off. In the early 90s, I was at a point where I was telling myself: You're the first one in your family to get a college degree, but big deal; it's in English and Journalism. In other words, you're no rocket scientist, slick. The rocket scientist was my best friend, Dick. About whom I asked you the other day. But that's another story...

By the 80s, I'd made somewhat of a name for myself in Connecticut. My byline was recognized. My ideas - marketing and advertising thoughts - had folks knocking on my door. I won some awards.

Then shit happened, as it does to all of us, and I was forced off life's train track. Thought then: What else can I do, can I do anything else? Or am I some kind of idiot savant, some kind of Rain Man whose comfort zones are rooms in which words, not numbers reign.

I got a job as a counselor on a locked psych unit. I was convinced of the sense of this life move by my friend Terry C. and his friend, at that time, Dick N.

Terry'd lived an interesting life. Ran a restaurant in southern California. Rubbed elbows and other body parts with the rich and famous. Claimed he was the model for the character Michael Douglas played in " Romancing the Stone. " Said the woman who wrote the screenplay worked for him as a waitress.

I believed Terry. Not to believe him would have erased a good story from the story of my life. Oh ye of little faith. Ye have too few or no stories to tell.

Terry was working with a man named Dick N. at the time when life's shit hit my fan.

Dick's story was even more compelling than Terry's. He'd been an English teacher. Had degrees from Duke and Harvard. His job was the job I was considering: Psychiatric counselor.

A question I asked myself but of no other was this:

Why did Dick make that change? From academic to counselor, working closely with the mentally ill?

I landed the job. The hospital work required of me no writing skills. My interviews were pretty much limited to asking disheveled people who gave zero eye contact:

" Do you have anything sharp on you? "

And,

" Can you promise you won't try to kill yourself? "

Left unsaid re: the latter was ( On my shift. )

As it happened, I was pretty good at the job. In my basic training phase on the ward a supervisor told me, " You have a knack for this. "

Dealing with crazy people that is. I said, " Thanks. "

What I didn't say was, " Sure I have a knack for this. I did time at a military college, spent four years in the Air Force, three years working in a newsroom and nine years dealing with ad bidness art directors, delusional bastards who thought they were the reincarnation of people like Picasso and Ed Hopper."

So I agreed with you, at one point in my life anyway.

But, as I said, I've been processing your remarks. Writing skills; they ain't worth shit. Interview skills? An oxymoron.

I think good writing reflects good thinking. You put yourself down, say a friend of yours is a good writer. He is. But so are you. And in the brief time we've " known " each other, you've asked good questions.

Your interview skills, in other words, aren't bad.

There's a concept I fell in love with when I worked with the shrinks.

Projective identification, Ro...

Oops. I mean J.

This is getting to be way too long. Like shooting a tres from six feet past the half court line. I'm watching Nova playing Pitt and rooting for Nova. ( Don't get me started on Calhoun's sorry crew ) I'll get back to the game.

Have a good evening, and thanks again for the advice re: marketing myself.

2007-01-27T20:21:00.000-08:00

" Real estate might seem to be all about moving and picking up stakes and disruption and three moves equals a death, but it's really about arriving and destinations, and all the prospects that await you or might await you in some place you never thought about. "

From " The Lay of the Land " a novel by Richard Ford

Donna and I spend a lot of our time talking about real estate. What if we sell this place we're in? What if we leave here? What if we go there? Will life be better, better than this life, which is the envy of damn near everyone we know? My guess is the answer is yes. I've made many a move. I don't know how to play chess, but...

The first college I went to, Norwich University. It was a military college. Freshmen like me were called rooks. Pawns in a game called chess.

What goes around comes around on this chessboard called life. Now where was I? Whose move? Yours? Or mine?

Whose move?

2007-01-27T20:04:00.000-08:00

All of which is meant to say:

Obama in 2008

2007-01-27T18:29:00.000-08:00

I don't have any scientific evidence for what I'm about to write, but bear with me.

No, that is not the preface to most of the Gospels, according to Whatstheirnames. And this is not a faith based initiative. That said...

I've been trying to figure out why some very bright people I know carry George W. Bush's and Dick Cheney's water. And would take a sword in the chest for Christopher Hitchens. If I may be so bold, I think it has nothing to do with their politics. I think it has to do with their style.

Take a step back and look at the company you keep. Who do you hang out with? I don't mean the morons with whom you are forced, by economic circumstances, to work. As the old saying goes, you can pick your nose, but not the people you work with. Or something like that.

I'm talking about your friends. What do they look like? What kind of clothes do they wear? What kind of music do they listen to. Are they movie fans? Or would they have trouble telling the difference between, say, Steve McQueen, Butterfly McQueen and Queen For A Day?

My point is this. We choose our friends not on the basis of what and how they think; we choose them based on style. If we like someone's style, we'll probably like him or her.

Lillian Hellman said " I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion. "

I have no idea how that quote fits into this essay. But I thought of it, and wrote it down. Because that's MY style. And this is MY blog, my party. So I'll do whatever the fuck I...

Sorry.

Time for my meds. Be right back.

( Ten minutes later )

Ah. That's better. Ooooh. Oops. Huh? Am I awake? I'll 'er up on ablowssghrr.

Huh?!

Where wud I?

Style. Versus substance. You match those two up, Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston like boxers they are. Put them head to head, eye to eye, glove to glove. Cassius Clay wins every time. Doesn't matter if he's knocked down or knocked out. Doesn't matter if he's down for the count. It's the style points that matter in this post modern arena.

The good looking guy ( A knock out! ) who looks like he's never been touched, never mind punched. He wins. Hands down. Every fucking time.

And so it is, I think, with politicians. Guys like Cheney and Bush. Commentators like Hitchens and Sullivan, Olbermann and Maher. It's not what they say, or think. It's how they cut their conscience, to fit the fashion...

It's all about style. It's all about style.

2007-01-27T17:20:00.000-08:00

A linguistic food fight is being waged in the cafeteria of a private school in Warwick, Rhode Island.

Recently Jeannine Fuller, principal of the St. Rose of Lima School, sent a letter to parents informing them that their children would be required, during the first ten minutes of cafeteria lunches to remain in their seats and be " silent " during the first ten minutes of lunch time.

The new rules resulted from three recent near choking incidents at the school. The school administrators believed that choking students would be more easily heard and responded to if students were required to be silent when eating.

When parents got word of the new rule, many were anything but silent. It wasn't long before reporters showed up writing about the new rule. Camera people took pictures.

Try to keep young students silent when a herd of mainstream media types gallop like startled wild horses into a school cafeteria.

What's all this about forcing silence on young American citizens? these first amendment crusaders asked.

What does this teach kids about rights?

" Gag Rule Will Prevent Choking Principal Says " shouts the headline.

The debate gets loud, but not clear.

Some parents took the word " silent " literally the principal says. No way did she mean that, even thoigh that's what she said. What she meant to say was that students were expected to be quieter than usual. They could still talk, but not too loud.

So why didn't she say that? Maybe her mouth was full and was hard to understand when she dictated the letter. Or maybe she's full of shit, trying to weasel out of what she so stupidly did.

It's not the kids who are choking. It's the morons who are making the rules.

2007-01-27T11:16:00.000-08:00

" Wouldn't all of us love to have a journal, a memoir, a letter, from those who we loved and lost? Shouldn't all of us leave a bit of that behind? "

Columnist and novelist Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen's latest Newsweek essay " Write for Your Life " hit some responsive chords.

Quindlen uses the new film " Freedom Writers " to make her point. " Freedom Writers " is about a young teacher who encourages " at risk " students - Latinos, Asians and blacks - to write about their lives on the lined pages of the composition books she gives them.

Quindlen believes that passing written words down so that others can read them is something more of us should do. In the age of the cell phone, " communication became evanescent, gone into thin air no matter how important or heartfelt. " She uses 9/11 to spark our imagination.

" Think of all those people inside the World Trade Center saying goodbye by phone. If only, in the blizzard of paper that followed the collapse of the buildings, a letter had fallen from the sky for every family or friend, something to hold onto, something to read, and reread... words on paper confer a kind of immortality. "

I've been keeping journals since the early 1970s. File cabinets in our basement are filled with the pages. There are stacks of journals in the study. I've kept,as E.B. White wrote " the minutes of my own meeting. "

A former newspaper reporter and ad copywriter, I've been paid for writing. But it's the words in those journals I consider the most valuable. When my father died in 1986, I longed to have in my hands: something he wrote. But there were no letters. No journals. No words written down.

I write a lot down. The irony is: my wife and I never had kids. All these words. All those pages. Words to a sermon no kid will hear.

Still. I continue to write. And encourage others to do the same. For the past four years, I've facilitated a writing workshop here. The workshop is held on Wednesday mornings at the neighborhood guild in the Peace Dale section of Wakefield, Rhode Island. The writers, for the most part, are older than me.

Norman is in his 80s. Jane's nearly 80. R.J. is 74. Doris, Gale, Guida, Helen, Monica. They're all in their 70s. They're all part of what Tom Brokaw calls, " The Greatest Generation. " That's the same generation of which my mother is a part. And my father was.

Each week I give an assignment. The following week the workshop participants come back and read aloud what they have written. They write stories. They write poems. They write essays. They write about what they've done, what they've seen, whom they've loved and whom they've lost.

Wouldn't you love to have someone you love do that?

2007-01-25T18:43:00.000-08:00

LSD. Peyote. Mary Jane. The 60s. Remember them? Probably not, if you had a little help from those friends...

LSD. Peyote. And sweet Mary Jane.

I'm reading Robert Stone's ( Don't even try to make the joke. Too easy. ) " Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. " Stone's a novelist and a damn good one at that. Was a reporter and an advertising copywriter who got his start back in the early 60s. As I flip through these pages, I'm reminded of my old friend Steve Tobey.

Tobey is, at least for me, a metaphor for the 60s. The smartest guy in the room, the one blessed with true wit, he spent two years at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Majored in history. Then he tranferred to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Changed his major to psychology.

Tobey and I were close friends. We were the kind of significant others guys have before they hook up with significant others other than those of similar gender.

Tobey was my best friend, my significant other. I'd had other ones. I would venture to guess I've had more best friends than any man I know or have known. A word comes to mind when I think about how many best friends I've had.

Promiscuous.

Yet, look how life's gone since I married. Donna was the one, has been the one and will be the one. Forever.

Where was I?

Talking about the 60s and drugs and mind bending experiences.

I'll side with the Beatles on this one. Love is all you need. And the love you take is equal to the love you make.

A Life Lived in Fear, but Not Half Bad - New York Times

2007-01-25T16:21:00.000-08:00

And for years, I thought it was his brother who reminded me of me. This one hit a responsive chord, punched me hard in the guts I often don't have. Especially that last sentence. A Life Lived in Fear, but Not Half Bad - New York Times

2007-01-24T17:19:00.000-08:00

A few thoughts on the state of the union address last night. This was, according to reports I read, a speech written by a committee, and edited by a man whose grasp of the English language is, to put it mildly, lacking.

So what did you expect? Friends, Romans and countrymen, lend me your ears? Ask not what your country can do for you? Free at last?

We'd like to think speeches like this could be scribbled on table napkins
and on the backs of envelopes. By a leader who loves words, respects good writing and knows damn well that good writing is proof positive of clear thinking.

But, as Rummy might say, sometimes you have to go with the leader you have, not the one you wish you had. Bush is who he is. He's not Winston Churchill.

Still.

How many youngsters watching last night said to themselves: " Damn! " How many were inspired. To think. To act. To take a road not taken?

How many said to themselves: I want to write a speech like that one some day. Or better yet...

I want to give one like that.

Not many I'm afraid. Not many.

The New Yorker : fact : content

2007-01-24T15:13:00.000-08:00

I write humorous essays. Having just read this one by David Sedaris, I may just pack it in and crawl back into my cubicle. This guy's a genius..The New Yorker : fact : content

Contributors | Rhode Island news | projo.com | The Providence Journal

2007-01-23T18:28:00.000-08:00

This one was published in the Providence ( Rhode Island ) Journal Friday.Contributors | Rhode Island news | projo.com | The Providence Journal

Magical Thinking: Why Do People Cling to Odd Rituals? - Psychology - The New York Times - New York Times

2007-01-23T15:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, as I was sitting in the living room, working on my laptop, I thought about an old friend whom I hadn't seen since the early 1970s. My friend is a physicist. Worked at Three Mile Island when all hell broke loose at that Pennsylvania nuclear power plant. That was March 28, 1979. I remember the date. It was my birthday.

I googled my old friend last week. Had the urge all of a sudden to connect with him in some way, shape or form. Found an email address for someone with his name. It's like fishing I guess, though I'm no fisherman. Threw out the line. Waited to see what might happen next.

It was him. He got back to me. I asked him where he lived now. An island off the coast of South Carolina, he replied. The same island on which Donna and I were staying two weeks ago. A week before I got that urge to reconnect with my old friend. Two weeks ago, we might just have been like, three miles from each other. On an island...

Where was I? Oh yeah. In my living room. Thinking about Three Mile Island. Then I look up. Stare at the TV. There, on the screen, is an image. Of the three cooling towers of Three Mile Island.

MSNBC was promoting a new documentary on the nuclear power industry. The trinity is always with us. That's what my old journalism professor, Larry Pinkham, always told us.

I know. I know. It's just a coincidence. Three towers. Three Mile Island. An island on which my old friend now lives, and I chose to visit for the first time three weeks ago.

In Norman Mailer's novel " Tough Guys Don't Dance, " his character says, " I'm tangled up in coincidences. " The character, a character named Tim Madden, was worried. He thought coincidences were omens, signals of bad things to come.

I emailed my old friend today. Told him of the coincidence. Three Mile Island on the screen as I had been thinking about it. I was apologetic. Felt odd talking to a scientist about what amounts to magical thinking.

About an hour ago, I was sitting in that same chair, in the living room. I opened the New York Times. Turned to the Science Section. And read this: Magical Thinking: Why Do People Cling to Odd Rituals? - Psychology - The New York Times - New York Times

2007-01-23T07:37:00.000-08:00

" Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description. "

Columnist and novelist Anna Quindlin. Quindlin
began her writing career as a newspaper reporter.

I was diagnosed in the spring of 1977.

My first byline was over a story about an 18 year old Holyoke, Massachusetts girl who had just been named that city's St. Patrick's Day Parade Colleen. I'd just landed a job as a reporter for the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram. This was during a time of year my old friend Nancy Sullivan calls " The High Holy Days. "

High on Jamison's, Harp and Guinness that is.

Holyoke was called " The Paper City " for the paper mills lined up along the canals. But it could have been called " Mick City. " There was a time when you could have mistaken the town for Belfast or Dublin. It was thick with families with names like Collins, Griffin, Ryan, Hanratty, Devlin and McCarthy.

When I was cutting my teeth on the police beat, the Chief's name was Sullivan. Mahoney was the Fire Chief.

The mayor was an arrogant bastard named Proulx. He didn't have a drop of Irish blood in his veins. How he got elected I'll never know. But knowing politics as I do, having learned a little about how cities work and how they do not, I have my educated guesses.

I was hired as a newspaper reporter after completing a semester as an intern. The week I was scheduled to end my internship, and get my degree in journalism, the city hall reporter called in. Said, " I quit. "

This was during a time when the names Woodward and Bernstein carried as much cultural weight as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie do today. A lot of us twentysomethings wanted to be just like them.

So many wannabees. So few reporting jobs. But lo and behold! Jesus, Mary and Joseph! A job opened up just when I needed one. They offered it to me and I grabbed it fast, like it was a cold bottle of Harp on a hot summer day.

Ah, the luck of the Irish.

So what's this, ya ask, with Anna Quindlin spouting off about diagnoses and such? It's a good question, lad. You'd make a fine reporter, ya would.

Well, as the pol might put it: Let me take a stab at that one, boyo.

The writer Gay Talese has called journalists " restless voyeurs. " Maybe reporters are pathologically nosey. I've forever been curious about what's going on behind that closed door. What better job for someone like me than newspaper reporting?

I had my own stable of sources. People who sat at the tables, in those meetings, behind those closed doors. I charmed them, manipulated them, made " friends. " The quid pro quo of getting to know me was to share what they knew. And they did.

What's that? Ya say that sounds like I was some kind of sociopath? Oh, ya would, indeed, make a fine reporter, lad. A regular A.J. Leibling you are.

So maybe that's what Quindlin was yapping about with her " diagnosis " and such. Sociopathology? Maybe. Maybe.

Are reporters a different breed, a sicker breed than the rest? I dunno. Maybe they're like cops, the kind of cops I got to know on my beat. The cliche you've heard a million times is, " It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it. "

I learned some things as a reporter. Got " friendly " with unsavory characters. Picked up some street smarts on the mean streets of The Paper City. I got a lot out of it. But yeah, I may have picked up a bug, some kind of virus that's stuck with me over the years. I was a reporter. That's no job description, boyo.

That there's what they call The Diagnosis.

2007-01-22T08:32:00.000-08:00

New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote this week about how 2007 is starting to remind him of 2003. He was talking about the war in Iraq. The headline over his piece was: Lying Like It's 2003. But the column could have been headlined: Lying Like It's 1970. Remember the " Five O'Clock Follies? " Those were the briefings given by military PR hacks in Saigon. Among the reporters covering these things was Sean Flynn, a freelance journalist ( And son of the matinee idol, Errol Flynn ).

Flynn went missing in Cambodia in 1970. His death was reported in 1971.

There was a column above Rich's essay yesterday. The column had nothing to do with the war in Iraq or the war in Vietnam. But the byline gave me a creepy feeling and seeing it kicked my mind back to a time when I was cannon fodder.

The writer's name was Sean Flynn.

2007-01-22T06:49:00.000-08:00

I googled an old friend the other day. Was curious about what he's up to and where he lives. I found an email address I was pretty sure was his. Banged out a short note.

D. got back to me a few days later. Turns out he's living on the same small island where Donna and I spent two nights earlier this month. We were probably a six iron shot from where he was. D. said he was enjoying the good life down there in the Carolinas. Probably playing a lot of golf. D. was one of the best athletes I've ever known. Lettered in basketball, soccer and, if I'm not mistaken, baseball when we were in high school together. But golf was his passion then. His family was like that family in Norman McLain's short story, " A River Runs Through It. " For that family, fly fishing wasn't just a sport; it was a religion.

That's what the game of golf was for D, his brother, his mom and his dad. They all belonged to the same country club in Northampton, Massachusetts.

D. and I just touched base briefly and will chat more. I don't know exactly where he lives on that island, but I'll bet you it's within walking distance of a golf course.

2007-01-20T14:08:00.000-08:00

" The world would be a lot better if no one had ever heard of the word ' disrespect. At least the sports world would be. ' "

Providence Journal sportswriter Bill Reynolds

In a recent column on the pages of the Providence Journal, Bill Reynolds wrote, " You can't go anywhere these days without some player yapping about how he was disrespected. "

" I was dissed! " It's the excuse du jour, the reason basketball, baseball, football, hockey, and tennis players give these days for their unreasonable behavior.

You don't have to be a couch potato sports on TV addict to know this is true:

The games being played aren't the only games being played.

Tight ends dirty dancing, post touchdown, in the end zone. Designated hitters standing still as statues, waiting for the ball to leave the park before they leave home and start running to first.

Showing disrespect.

Does that bait get taken? You bet it does. What happens next? All hell breaks loose. On the field. On the court. Wherever they're playing their silly games.

I read the sports pages. I watch ESPN and all the other sports guys reporting what happened last night. The highlight reels are just as likely these days to include a few post game interview sound bites. Losers explaining why they lost it.

Not the game. Their cool.

It all boils down to this: I was not shown the respect I've earned, the respect I deserve. I was dissed. That's their excuse.

Every time I see this kind of thing being played out, acted out, I think back to the mid 1990s, when I was a counselor on a locked psychiatric unit in western Massachusetts. I was also the unit's human rights officer, responsible for making sure staff was treating patients with, yes, respect.

I wasn't the most popular guy on the staff. The golden rule was just one of the rules that wasn't always followed. Nurses, doctors, counselors and social workers were often treated badly. And some of them administered bad treatment in return. And there I was. Watching their every move. On a unit where staff was supposed to be watching the patients' every move.

Call it role reversal. Call it reverse psychology. Call it whatever bad name you will. It won't compare to the names I must have been called.

I wore several hats on the unit. Counselor. Human rights officer. I was also an instructor, a teacher who taught staff how to handle potentially violent situations. I took a course that qualified me to perform this task. But the best lesson I learned, the one I could best pass on to those with whom I worked, was taught to me one morning by a patient who assaulted me. He punched me. He kicked me. I'm sure he would have killed me, had I not been rescued by, of all people, the unit's clinical psychologist.

I was being beaten up outside his office. As I was being punched and kicked, he opened his door. This all happened during a period when " talk therapy " was looked down upon by those whose names were not followed by the letters Ph.D. ( in psychology )

The so called medical model was in vogue then. Little pills, not a lot of talk, was thought to be the key to rescuing folks from the turbulent waters of psychiatry.

I've always thought that when I die, some degree of irony will play a role in my demise. Irony trumped irony that day on the unit. I was rescued by the one person on the staff who still believed that the talking cure worked. He opened the door to his office and I quickly dived in. He shut the door and I sat down in a chair next to his desk. I was bleeding. He took out a hankerchief and wiped the blood from my face.

He didn't say anything. I didn't say anything.

Talk therapy? Hardly. But he saved me.

I've thought of that morning often. What could I have done differently? What was it I said that sparked that violent response? Did I show disrespect, and get nearly beaten to death as a result of my dis?

A few months after this happened I was asked to be an instructor. They wanted me to attend classes, get certified as a a teacher, one who taught doctors, nurses, counselors and social workers how to deal with people who too easily and quickly flew from dead calm into violent rage.

This was in the mid 1990s. I can recall, as if it were yesterday, telling the staff that we were likely going to be seeing more and more patients who, on the surface, could present as charming. Likable. Workable.

" But be careful, " I said. " The patients we're likely to get won't be what they seem to be. "

There were times when I wished something like that were carved into the granite above the front doors of the hospital.

All you who enter - remember - nothing here is what it seems to be...

We were getting more patients who'd been released from the prisons in Massachusetts. We were getting more patients for whom there was no other place to go. The unit on which I worked was getting to be a dump, the trash of which was comprised of dangerous men whose tattoos, no matter what the artwork communicated, sent this message:

Born to do harm.

We were getting more patients like the guy who nearly killed me. When I first got into the business, in 1991, the patients the hospital served were mostly depressed. Sure, there were the bi-polars and the schizophrenics. They could be dangerous. They could hurt themselves and others. But there were meds that could help them live their lives. In peace.

Guys like the guy who hurt me, however. Personality disordered guys. There are no meds for that.

I agree with Bill Reynolds. It seems to be getting worse. But it's not just the sports world I'm worried about. That's just part of the world about which I'm worried.

Road rage. Air rage. Supermarket fewer than ten items line rage. The guy in front of you. The one behind you. The one sitting next to you.

Don't tick him off. Treat him, or her, with the utmost respect.

2007-01-19T18:55:00.000-08:00

Art Buchwald died Wednesday night in Washington D.C. He was 81 years old.

Buchwald was a satirist, a columnist, a humorist. I wrote to him once, and he wrote back. I'd just started writing humorous columns for newspapers in Connecticut. Sent some samples. Asked him what he thought.

He wrote back and said he was sitting there, reading the pieces I'd sent him.

" I'm shaking my head, " is what he wrote. Didn't say in which direction his head was shaking. Side to side? Up and down? He didn't say.

But I took it as encouragement.

Rest in peace, Art Buchwald. You made people think. You made people laugh. You did some good in this world gone bad. Good for you. Good for you.

2007-01-19T06:06:00.000-08:00

I'm working on another C&W tune. I don't know why I have this sudden compulsion to write these things, although our trip down south probably has something to do with it. Here's the first few lines of:

Since June

My pants don't fit
I look like shit
gained twenty seven pounds

Since June

Fell off the wagon
My ass is draggin'
Hungover every day
Been this way

Since June

That's as far as I got this morning. Have to go to work now. Y'all take care til later. Hear?

2007-01-18T14:14:00.000-08:00

" Ever at home are the mice in hiding, dust and trash, and the truth abiding. "

From an untitled poem by E.B. White

Donna and I were married on April 9, 1977. This was long before weddings were recorded on video tape. For years now, I've had no regrets about not recording our wedding. I'm no fan of video cameras. If they had them back then I would have said " Back off. " Cameras make me nervous. I'd rather have someone stick a .38 in my face than the business end of a videocam.

If you scream, " Don't shoot! " at a guy packing heat he might just think twice about pulling the trigger. Yell that at someone wielding a camera and it'll go in one ear and out the other.

These people always get their man, or woman, or kid - whatever target they're aiming at. And they usually succeed in making their targets look stupid.

Bob Saget would be just another mediocre comic begging for gigs at the Huke Lau in Chicopee, Massachusetts - were it not for " America's Funniest Home Videos. "

That said...

I have been wishing lately that I did opt to record my wedding vows. Had I done that I would be able, now, to review that tape and determine if the vows I made included a promise to rid ( Read: execute ) certain unwanted visitors from the homes my wife and I would one day own.

It's been awhile. But to the best of my recollection I made the usual vows. I vowed to stick with Donna through thick and thin, sickness and health, fair weather and freezing rain. What I do not recall is this:

Justice of the Peace: Do you, Terrence, take on full responsibility for ridding your future homes of all spiders and mice that may invade said residences? "

Me: I...... Say what?????

Nope. I do not recall that part of the ceremony. Sure, I was drunk. Donna's father had a .38 caliber pistol held to my head. I was under duress.

Just kidding.

Wet work with spiders and mice has been a problem for years. Donna doesn't like spiders ( See: " Understatement - Wikpedia ). Me? I'm quite fond of them, and have been since reading " Charlotte's Web " when I was in the 1st grade. For those of you who haven't read the book, Charlotte, a creation of my hero, E.B. White, was a spider. Charlotte was smart, funny, and a loyal friend.

That spider has been kind of the role model for the life I've led since reading White's book. In other words, I'd run over my grandmother with an armored personnel carrier before I'd condemn a spider to the choir invisible.

So whenever Donna points to one of my many legged friends and screams, " Kill! Kill!, I find myself in the throes of marital and cognitive dissonance.

Remember Frank Buck? He's the guy who " Brought 'em back alive. " All those wild creatures. He brought them back alive. Over the years I have been Frank Buckian in my approach to the wild creatures in our midst. I got the spiders out of the house. Alive. There are different ways to do this. The easiest being to get a paper bag and a broom. Sweep the spider into the bag. Open the door. Deposit the ( live ) spider on the lawn.

Donna's happy. Spider's happy. I'm happy.

Excuse me. The phone's ringing. Probably the State Department calling again. Offering me a job again.

Spiders are easy. Mice on the other hand. They've been a problem.

Mice, or as Donna and I call them, the little things that wouldn't leave, have been a recurrent nightmare, a folie a deux fever dream my wife and I grudgingly share.

I'll never forget the first time we had them. I'll never forget what Donna said:

" MICE!!!!! DO SOMETHING!!!! ARGHHHHHGGHH!!!!

Perhaps some one of you out there could explain what it is about mice and women. What's the deal with that? To me, these little creatures are as threatening as wrens.

But when they're in the house, who ya gonna call? Mousebuster. That's me.

I have to admit, I've been a miserable failure at ridding our houses of these tiny invaders. Oh sure, I've nailed a few. But over the years I'm sure the scores's in their favor. I lay the traps. I vowed to do that; it was a post nuptual agreement. But I'm not exactly the great white hunter, obsessed with bagging the game.

Relate this process to fishing and you might say I'm a catch and release kind of guy.

That makes me happy. Makes the mice happy. Donna?

Happy as a clam. A clam surrounded by linguini and smothered in red sauce.

The good news is that I haven't had to deal with the mouse problem since Donna and I moved to Rhode Island four years ago. The bad news?

There's a mouse in the house. Donna discovered some droppings recently in the kitchen drawer. Aw shit, I thought when I heard this. We've been getting along so well since semi-retiring. Now they they are:

" The mice in hiding... and the truth abiding. "

We'll go to Wal-Mart Saturday. Mouse traps will be on the shopping list. I'll opt for glue traps. Donna will probably want the old fashioned kind, the one's that snap and break their necks.

She'll get her way. The things we do for love.

2007-01-18T13:59:00.000-08:00

The following was sparked by Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd's request, on his website, for recommendations for songs to add to his IPod playlist...

Drunk and Heavy " has probably also been suggested, but what the heck. For those few Connecticut voters who haven't heard it, here's some lyrics...

" She was drunk and heavy
as a 55 Chevy
but I loved her just the same.
Said she hailed from Greenwich
but I knew she was lyin'
Her accent was all wrong
but I gave her credit for tryin'.

Drunk and heavy.
Drunk and heavy.
She was way too drunk
and a few pounds heavy
and a far piece from Greenwich
was where she was actually from.
But I kissed her down there,
in a place just south of Waco,
in the back of my Chevy

Drunk and heavy
Drunk and heavy... "

Actually that ain't, um, isn't a real C&W song. I just made those lyrics up. But if Dodd's serious about throwing his ten gallon Stetson into the ring, he's gonna have to add some songs like that 'un onto his playlist.

Imus is listening, Chris. Imus is listening...

the end - Google Video

2007-01-18T12:13:00.000-08:00

It's been 40 years since I first heard this song. It's haunted me and haunts me now. Forty years ago this year I was flown ( American Airlines. What else? ) to San Antonio. Lackland Air Force Base. That's where young airmen like me went for basic training. This was in late November, 1967. Two months before Tet Offensive crawled like a snake into the American vocabulary.

the end - Google Video

2007-01-16T18:32:00.000-08:00

Terry was due to arrive in five minutes or so. We were in St. Augustine and had seen him a week or so before that, on Amelia Island. Donna and Terry share something in common. They graduated from high school together.

Terry and I have something in common. We both worked in places that have been called by some the most dangerous places to work in America. Locked psychiatric units.

I'd been given this book as a gift from my niece. " A War Like No Other. " by Victor Davis Hanson. I knew Terry was coming. And it's not like we don't have things to talk about when he comes. We have much in common. Are, perhaps, descendents from the same Celtic tribe. Lovers of words, we take the joke early.

Politics? We don't always see eye to eye on that topic, boyo.

Terry was coming. I dragged the book out from the camper. Put it on the picnic table, where I knew we'd share a drink and a meal. I'd been reading it, along with a few others.

Terry came. Saw the book.

" You're reading that, " he said.

" No. I'm selling it. Barnes and Noble had to start somewhere. "

" You're an asshole, " Terry said.

The truth of the matter is that Terry has read much of what Victor Davis Hanson has written. But he didn't know that Hanson had written this book about the Peloponnesian War.

" Only connect. " E.M. Forster wrote.

I don't know much. But I seem to have a knack for doing just that.

With good men like Terry.

2007-01-16T16:59:00.000-08:00

I lost five pounds on my vacation.

I'm down to 159 pounds. I'm nearly six feet tall, so that's pretty thin. Donna's amazed by my vacation eating habits. When we're on the road, I don't eat until we arrive at our destination, which is usually around supper time. No breakfast. No lunch. And a dinner as light on calories as Bush is on I.Q. points...

Sorry. Easy Granada like target. Strike that...

But have you noticed that Bush does seem to be putting on weight? Maybe someone told him he needs more gravitas and he thought he said gravy and... or maybe he was driving down south, and saw all those billboards.

Sorry.

Where was I?

I lost five pounds. Which is what everyone wants to do, right? You ask people: What do you want to do now that it's a new year and all? Lose weight. That's what they say. How much? you ask. Five pounds is what they say. Everyone wants to lose five pounds.

Well, slick. I did it. I Dee-id!

And I did it on the road. On the road down south, where Hardees ( Why does everything end in EE down there? It ain't Murphy, it's Murfee, etc. ) shouts on its billboards:

" No skinny burgers here!! "

The smallest burger you can get at Hardees is as big as a hubcap. You walk into a Hardees, get in line and look around you. What you think is:

" No skinny people here!!! "

Hey Toto, I don't think we're in Darfur anymore.

Hardee's is just one of the fat food joints on the roads we traveled. Stuckeys, Shoneys, Wendy's, Burger King, McDonald's, Cracker Barrel. Not to mention the local places.

Wings N' Wigs. Ribs N' Femurs. Biscuits N' Shit.

Food, food, food. Sell, sell, sell. And I wasn't, we weren't, buying it.

I lost five pounds on my vacation. Yes, I dee-id.

Born to be Wild - Google Video

2007-01-16T16:03:00.000-08:00

Born to be Wild - Google Video

2007-01-16T15:18:00.000-08:00

We're home.

The house never looked better, or felt roomier. After living in a camper for two and a half weeks, it feels good not to be bumping into each other.

Not that the marriage needed testing, or needs an annual road test like the one we just took. But a trip like the one from which we just returned is, indeed a test. And I can't help but wonder how many couples would pass it. Donna and I were together, sharing a very small space with a dog named Gracie.

Ours is not one of those big as a Trailways bus kind of campers. It's what they call a Minnie Winnie, a small Winnebago. Twenty four feet long and about eight feet wide. Not once did we get on each others nerves. Not once did we criticize each other's driving.

I know. This is just riveting stuff I'm writing, and I'm sure you are, dear readers, thinking that this trip we just took rivals those cross country treks Jack Kerouac and his pal, Cassady took back in the 60s.

Dharma bums we ain't. We're dull as bread knives.

But we get along and after nearly thirty years of marriage that might not be the stuff that best selling books are made of. But it's something to write home about.

2007-01-14T13:55:00.000-08:00

Dateline: Fayetteville, North Carolina. Home of Fort Bragg and Pope AFB. Colonel Jack Jacobs, an MSNBC analyst, was stationed here a long time ago. What was it? The Peloponnesian War? The Civil War? One of those wars. Oh yeah, right. The Vietnam War. He was here when I was stationed just south of here in South Carolina. Jacobs was on Imus recently and he was talking about the time he spent here back in the 1960s.

" We called the locals the Fayette Cong, " Jacobs said.

Donna and I plan to stick close to the camper this evening.

We left St. Augustine this morning. Had a good time down there. Our friend Terry joined us for dinner last night. Grouper. A local favorite. Terry thought the camp ground looked like a typical south of the Mason-Dixon line trailer park. But we like it.

Our plan is to head north to Pennsylvania tomorrow. Then head home Tuesday. I think we must be following the same route as some Confederate outfit did back in the 60s. The 1860s.

War is on my mind. Wonder why?

2007-01-11T15:16:00.000-08:00

Forty years. It's been that since I was shipped, like produce, from New England to the southern plains of south Texas. It was an American Airlines plane that carried me there. I'd never flown before; this was the first time.

Should have been Virgin Airlines, huh?

This was November, 1967. Two months later, the Tet Offensive. The flight from New York to Dallas ran smooth. No turbulence. At least as far as I can recall.

But the world was spinning out of control.

2007-01-11T13:54:00.000-08:00

I might have shaken hands with a guy who's going to be president. So what's new? you ask. He wasn't running when he took my hand. He was walking slowly down Water Street.

Now, ten years later, he is. Running that is. Chris Dodd just threw his Bosox/Yankees cap into the ring. Donna and I met Dodd back in the mid 1990s. He was stranded on an island off the coast of Rhode Island, as were we. Dodd was there, an A List guest of the Kennedys. Ted's son, Teddy Jr. was getting married in a small chapel around the corner from where Donna and I were staying.

This was as close to wedding crashing I hope I will ever get.

It wasn't intentional. It wasn't like the wife and I said, " Let's book a room on an island where some Kennedy's getting hitched. "

It was a coincidence. We'd booked the room long before we knew Teddy Jr. would say " I do " on Block Island.

The afternoon before the wedding, we spotted a white haired, nice looking guy walking out of a Water Street bar.

" That's Chris Dodd, " Donna said.

" No, " I said. " It's Richard Gere. "

" I think he's in Tibet, " Donna said.

" You're probably right, " I said. " Haven't seen any ' Free Block Island ' bumper stickers on the Wranglers out here. "

Yes, it was Dodd. We crossed the street, shook hands. This all happened on an island off the coast of a small state from which Dodd isn't from. That was ten years ago.

We were probably the only ones who recognized the white haired gentleman from Connecticut. As Dylan scribbled when Dodd was a young man:

" The times they are a changin'. "

Donna and I, we're hoping, if he wins this race, they do just that.

2007-01-11T09:21:00.000-08:00

Donna had an experience this morning similar to one I had a few weeks ago. I was on the computer and got curious. Wondered what an old friend was up to. Googled the man. Learned he was dead, and had been for 12 years. I hadn't seen this old friend in 40 years. Hadn't communicated with him since the mid 1980s.

This morning Donna got an email from someone she knew in Connecticut. The first line of which was: " I write to tell you that A. died last night. " A. was once a very good friend of Donna's. She hadn't seen her in years, but she had talked with her on the phone a few weeks ago.

Elkin, my old friend was in his 60s when he was killed in a plane crash in Indiana. Donna's friend was 40 years old. A. had taken suddenly ill this week, called 911 and was rushed to the hospital. She died there last night.

We do not yet have the details concerning A's death.

Two old friends gone. One dead in a plane crash. The other felled by mysterious illness.

As we sat on the beach this morning, about an hour after learning of A's death, we spotted two dolphins frolicking in the warm, still waters of the Gulf of Mexico. I will attach no significance to this sighting. But I will say this: We had been hoping to see dolphins all week and, until this morning, had had no luck.

But this morning, on our last day here, we saw them. Two dolphins swimming side by side, leaping into the air every now and then, as if they were happy to just be alive. They were heading north.

2007-01-11T07:02:00.000-08:00

This is our last full day in Fort Myers Beach. Tomorrow we head north to St. Augustine. We'll spend a night or two there, then journey northward. We should be back on the coast of Rhode Island Tuesday or Wednesday.

As I write this, there is a map sitting on the table next to me. Donna has highlighted the route we're taking. A thin pink line stretches, like a vein on the back of a hand, up the east coast of these United States. An appropriate image that. I have come, over the years, to know this route like the back of my hand.

The first time I made the trip south to Florida was in March, 1967. It was spring break and I had a week off. My friend, Bruce Forbes, and I drove his gray VW Beetle down I-95. We left Hartford around 6 p.m. Thursday night and pulled into Fort Lauderdale about 30 hours later. The only stops we made were for gas and to use the head.

Donna and I did the same thing the day after we got married in April, 1977. Straight shot down the coast. No sleep stops. Took turns driving.

These days it takes 3 or 4 days to make the trip. And the veins on the back of our hands are starting to look less and less like lines drawn in the sands of time - and more and more like small mountain ranges on old topographical maps.

2007-01-11T05:53:00.000-08:00

Donna and I sailed out of Fort Myers Beach yesterday on a casino ship headed for international waters. " Ship of Fools " wasn't stenciled on its bow, but it should have been.

You guessed it. We didn't hit any jackpots out there; what we hit was an iceberg called bad luck. We lost money. We've done that before in casinos. But at least in those dives we had our land legs. The gulf was rough and everyone on this tub was stumbling around like drunken sailors. Donna's stomach was lurching. My stomach hurt and I was spending more time in the head than I was sitting in front of the slots.

All in all, not the best day of our Florida vacation.

2007-01-11T05:46:00.000-08:00

January 9, 2007

The guy next to us, his name is Lonnie. He’s a truck driver from Nashville. Most folks down here in southwest Florida were celebrating The Gaitors victory in the college football championship game last night. Lonnie and his wife couldn’t have cared less about that contest. It was, afterall, Elvis Presley’s birthday.

People you meet on a trip like this one remind you of people you knew once. You go on vacation and think: Thank God. Finally! I’m living in the present tense. Well, slick, you ain’t. Yesterday’s baggage is always up there, strapped to the top of your camper. Or whatever vehicle you and your wife are driving.

Lonnie and I started talking. I initiated the conversation on the day we pulled into this campground in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. I tend to do that. It’s like working on the unit. What I did when I learned that there was a patient who was scaring everyone shitless was walk up to said patient and introduce myself. Make no mistake, I am a shy man. No hail fellow well met man am I. But I was usually the first one to approach a dangerous patient, and say softly…

“ My name is Terry…

The response I got spoke volumes about what would happen next. A “ Fuck you “ wasn’t as bad as it sounds here, and now, as you read this. “ Fuck you “ said “ Steer clear. “ And I did.

I approached Lonnie on the first day we were here. Stuck out my hand.

“ My name’s Terry. “

Now you may be thinking, that’s nice. Neighborly. Another way of framing it is that I view all interactions with unfamiliar people as I would if I were still working on a locked psychiatric unit. Everyone I meet. Every new situation I encounter. They just might be crazy. This might just be dangerous.

All I’m doing is getting to know the territory. Call me paranoid. Then remind yourself. It’s the 21st century, post 9/11 world.

Lonnie and I are about the same age. When I first approach him, as he’s sitting there in his smiley face folding beach chair, I think: He’s an old man. Then I think: The sorry bastard’s probably the same age I am. Pushing 60.

I asked Lonnie, “ Where ya from? “ Lonnie says, “ Tennessee “ and I think back forty years, when I was a young airman in San Antonio. Basic training. The kid next to me, his name was John Parker. He was from Nashville.

John Parker. He’d be about Lonnie’s age now. If he made it through that Godawful war.

Who knows about that? What I do know is that I did. And here I am, on the gulf coast of the state of Florida. Watching the sun set.

I asked Lonnie, “ You still working? “ He said, “ Yeah, I’m a truck driver. “

“ Full time? “ I asked.

“ Full time, “ he said.

“ I’m semi-retired, “ I said. He didn’t ask. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s because I was a newspaper reporter. Maybe it’s because I’m nosy. I’m the one who asks questions. But there are times when I just want to let people know who I am. What I was.

“ Any plans for cutting back? “ I asked. “ Semi-retire? “

Then I added, “ Would give whole new meaning to being semi retired – you being a truck driver and all. “

He got the joke and we shared a laugh.

2007-01-08T12:25:00.000-08:00

" By the way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me to be an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968. "

From " The White Album " by Joan Didion

Joan Didion also wrote of the summer following that summer of 1968. " I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. " The late 1960s. I've been thinking of those two summers, the summers of " 68 " and " 69 " this week. Donna and I cross the Mason-Dixon line more than a week ago. Spent two nights in South Carolina, where I was stationed during the time of which Joan Didion writes.

How far we've come since then. Or have we? The word for the day is: Surge. One defintion is: An abrupt,strong increase. It's the word the administration is using to describe what's happening to troop levels in Iraq. As in, " There will be a surge of 20,000 troops. "

What that is, actually, is what was called an " escalation. " back in the days when I was cannon fodder. Those days, those summers during which so many of our heads spun and our stomachs heaved.

Meanwhile, there is more unsettling news crawling across the bottom of our TV screen. Explosives have been found near a cruise ship in the port of Miami. And, as if this day wasn't already making me think about Don DeLillo...

Breaking news out of Missouri: A chemical leak near Sugarland, Texas. A possibly toxic cloud is drifting toward Houston. A White Noise kind of day indeed.

2007-01-08T10:59:00.000-08:00

A story on CNN, as I write this, is the strange gassy odor that sparked some building evacuations and disrupted train service in Manhattan this morning. Another story is that of scores of birds found dead on the streets of Austin, Texas today. A ten block area, in the heart of Austin, was closed off for a while.

The Department of Homeland Security is denying any links to terrorism.

The lead story on CNN right now is the one reporting that Saddam wanted to eliminate the Kurds by using chemical weapons of mass destruction.
Are these three stories, in any way related? Be careful if you even think about connecting the dots, these blips on the post 9/11 radar screen. They'll brand you as some kind of lunatic conspiracy theorist.

So don't go running around outside and warning your neighbors that the sky is falling. It's just the birds dropping out of the clouds y'er seein' Bunky. Don't be afraid. Go shopping.

I hear gas masks are 30 percent off in Austin, Texas.