Good morning Boys and Girls.

Checked the official surrogate “mood gage”, this morning and there it was, plain as day on the dial, just as I feared.

It’s a simple set-up I fabricated from an old water meter a few years ago. It’s powered by a connection from a nine-volt battery, through a mood ring I bought at a flea market for this very purpose, then to the mechanism from an old Uncle Fester light bulb from Spencer’s Gifts I got in High School. Now, however, rather than lighting up when I stick it in my ear, this doo-hickey acts as the primary receptor for my feelings, which are then transferred and displayed by the needle on the water meter’s face by means of a hair from my own head - taken back when I had hair - that winds and unwinds based on all the information provided from the ring, the light bulb and the vibrations and biorhythms from my all-too Fester-like body.

The middle of the dial’s face reads “happy”. It’s a good sized chunk of the 360 degree face of the meter; maybe a whole 90 degrees. It’s funny to see my handwriting there, shaky and cramped - I was trying to fit the words I had to write into very small spaces, and I remember being worried I’d misspell something and have to start over.

To the left of “happy”, in their own pie pieces that grow smaller and smaller toward the bottom, are the words, sad, angry, frustrated, and at the very bottom of the left side, is the word “enraged”; a tiny sliver where the needle seldom points. In fact, it seems to me I’ve only seen the needle in that section a couple of times over the years. Once was the day the Supreme Court decided to make that horrible “one time” ruling that stuck us with George Bush for eight years, the results of which we’re still dealing with and will continue to deal with for the next decade or more. Then there was that time I found out my favorite Chinese Restaurant was closing simply because the lazy-assed owners thought they had the right to retire after thirty-five years of running the place seven days a week. That was a baaaaaaad day, let me tell ya.

To the right of “happy” on the dial, in the same format as the left side, are the words, “open-minded, contemplative, skeptical, crestfallen”, and finally, in a tiny wedge the same size as “enraged”, on the left side, are the words, “deeply disappointed”. The needle zipped around to that spot so quickly this morning, I almost reset the thing to see if it was broken. Maybe the battery was dead, I thought, or the mood ring had lost it’s juice; or maybe I had too much wax in my ear for the connection between my brain and the gizmo to engage properly. But no. I knew the reading was correct. Hell, I’d have been utterly shocked if it hadn’t done exactly what it did.

See, I don’t have a lot of heroes. Never have. Just the way I am, I guess; perhaps because nothing is more disappointing than finding out someone isn’t who you think they are. It can be such a big letdown; who needs it? But once in a while someone comes along who seems so solid and hardworking and who gets such spectacular results in their chosen field, that, in your mind (or at least in mine), they end up getting elevated to hero status anyway.

-Foolish. You almost always end up shaking your head, feeling betrayed and gullible, and alas, I find I’ve been shaking my head an awful lot the last few days.

Damn…

Tiger, Tiger, Tiger.


Be good to everyone.

Good morning Boys and Girls.

Across the street this morning, a couple of houses down, a woman is setting up for a garage sale. Most garage sales around here seem to run Friday and Saturday, not Saturday and Sunday, but this morning, Sunday, there she is, getting things ready.

Yesterday, both she and her next-door neighbor had one, but so far today, I haven’t seen her neighbor setting up. Maybe she will, though.

Yesterday, SweetLady was out at the store while I waited for a guy and his wife to come back here to pick up the rest of SweetLady’s old bedroom set which we’d just sold on Craig’s list. The buyers hadn’t been able to fit it all into their mini-van in a single trip - not surprising as the stuff was big, bulky and heavy - so they took about half of it, and had just called to say they were on their way back to pick up the rest. I decided I had a few minutes, so I went across to peruse the two sales. I felt sort of funny about visiting the one; the one at the house closest to us; since I knew the “why” behind that particular garage sale.

I was immediately struck by the sorts of books for sale there. Usually, at at such affairs, I see old paperbacks; maybe a few best sellers and - almost always - heaps of self-help books that either did or did not do what they promised to do for the reader, but regardless had now been relegated to the “please get this crap out of my presence” boxes people put out at such sales, and with prices that tend to hover at around a quarter a pop.

Not here though. The books for sale at this garage sale spoke loudly about the man who’d owned them. Most were scholarly tomes on a variety of subjects; books on history, philosophy, science, as well as novels written in a few different languages. A beautiful collection of the works of Homer caught my eye and and I set them aside.

The mother of the woman holding the sale, elderly but spry, there to help out, asked me if I wanted a sack to put my books in. I declined, knowing I didn’t have to go more than a couple of hundred feet. I thanked her and continued browsing.

Quite a few people milled around, and another couple of cars pulled up during those few minutes. I suppose it was because those of us who love garage sales begin to suffer withdrawal symptoms this time of year as their numbers dwindle down to nothing as winter approaches.

Then the woman who owns the house came out through the garage carrying an armload of other things she wanted to add to her tables, and I spoke to her for the first time in my life. “Hi”, I said, “Lots of work, huh?” She looked to be about my age, pretty, but her tired eyes showed what she’s endured over the last few months. “There’s lots more to come out”, she said. “I think I’ll be bringing more out all day long.” I smiled and nodded, and continued looking through a dead man’s leftovers, feeling very strange.

About three months ago, her husband of many years killed himself, and right in front of her. He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, spraying his brains across the room and onto the walls and windows of their enclosed back porch.

I didn’t hear the shot, but SweetLady and I were there that evening, out sitting on the glider in the back yard, and this poor woman’s screams as she ran out the front door of her house got the attention of the whole neighborhood.

Crime scene tape surrounded the house for the next several hours in the aftermath of the suicide as police did their investigation, the situation complicated by the fact that the lady who lives directly across the street from us; a nurse; is a friend of the woman. She rushed over to help at the sound of the screams, and evidently, took the gun from the dead man’s hand. It was a sensible act, since she wasn’t sure he was dead right away and she needed to feel safe enough to do what she could to stop the bleeding - a futile effort, she soon realized - but by then, she’d touched that gun.

The police certainly understood she’d not been involved in the shooting, but for a while, it did muck up the situation as they performed their due-diligence.

As it happened, SweetLady’s daughter, just seven years old, had been out with her Dad for a few hours that evening, and we called to ask him to keep her a while longer than had been scheduled. The scene was so chaotic, what with the coroner, ambulances and myriad police cars coming and going for a couple of hours, that if possible, we wanted to keep her from being exposed to the commotion. Frankly, we thought it would scare the hell out of her. Thankfully, in one of the only kind gestures I’ve seen from her ex since I’ve known SL, he agreed to keep their daughter an extra hour before dropping her off; something we truly appreciated.

So it was that, now, a couple of months after the man’s death, his widow tried to get rid of some of the things that she needed to have gone from the house. As such, this wasn’t a normal garage sale; the stuff wasn’t refuse. Everything for sale there was of high quality, and, as I mentioned earlier, spoke to the education and taste of her now-dead husband, if not to the man’s obvious depression, or whatever reason or reasons he used to justify taking his own life. This sale was about closure, I think; no, I’m sure. This was about this poor woman trying to get reminders of something terribly painful out of her house and, thus, out of her sight.

I wondered whether the people who drove up because of the signs at the end of the street advertising this late-fall sale would have picked up on the same thing. Probably not, I decided.

At some point, as I debated buying a perfectly good Coleman stove - unused, by the looks of it - half-kidding, I think, she asked me if I’d be interested in a piano. I said that indeed, I might be, and she took me into the house and showed me a beautiful Young-Chang baby grand. She hadn’t even decided how much to ask for it, she said. Then she told me she’d probably want to leave it in place while the house is for sale, but that at some point, she’d definitely want to sell the piano. “It was my husband’s, and he’s since he’s not on the planet any longer…” Her voice trailed off.

I realized she wasn’t aware I knew about what had happened. She probably didn’t even realize I was a neighbor; why should she? We’d never met, and the only time I’d really taken notice of her was that awful night as she stood on her lawn with her arms wrapped around herself, crying loudly. I introduced myself and asked her how she was doing with all this, feeling guilty that I hadn’t come over to express my condolences much sooner. “It’s been hard, I”ll bet,” I said, weakly stating the obvious.

“It sucks,” she said. “Some days are better than others, but,” and she shook her head, “it just sucks.” Tears came to her eyes, but she still smiled and I wanted to hug her. We talked a few more minutes and she told me that, really, she’s not even sure she wants to sell the place. Some days she’s absolutely sure she needs to move, and other days, the thought of leaving the home they built together sends her into panic attacks.

What a lousy, lousy deal.

I ended up buying eight books yesterday, and I’ll probably go over again today too. I hope she sells everything she wants gone. This morning, I noticed she’d hung out a man’s trench coat; leather, from the looks of it. I love trench coats, but I don’t think I could buy that one even if it’s in excellent shape, fits me perfectly and is priced at a dollar. I’d feel too weird wearing it.

I hope whoever buys it remains completely unaware of why it’s available.


Be good to everyone.

Good morning Boys and Girls.

A memory from long ago…

I walk along a busy road in the dark as rain falls. I pass through an underpass, with water gathered in a wide puddle at its bottom. There is a sidewalk along there and its raised just enough to be above water, but it’s too close to the road for me to avoid being sprayed by every car that passes. I curse seven cars during the twenty seconds it takes me to pass by the temporary lake.

My car sits a mile back. I turn to check, and yes, I can still see the flashing lights sparking; tiny fireflies in the rain. I see the service station ahead. It seems to grow no closer, but its not more than a mile ahead. I know this because I know this area; the business route off the highway leading into Michigan’s Capitol. Had I run out of gas just three more miles ahead, there would have been a gas station every hundred yards for a couple of miles, but no. I didn’t quite make it.

This is no emergency situation. I am in no danger. I am angry at the world, but I’m not scared. I am, however, very wet and tired and at least part of me has murder in my heart.

This is Thursday evening in November about eight. I’ve been away from home since 5:00  Monday morning. I am on my way home from a job on the west side of the state about eighty miles north of Grand Rapids where I’ve worked sixteen hours a day to meet a deadline at four p.m. earlier today. I got the job done; a job that would normally have taken at least two weeks, and usually three. The owner of the company begged me to take on the project after having turned down my initial solicitation a couple of months earlier. Finally, last week. after “praying extensively” about his problem, he decided that he did need help, and he called me last Thursday evening - almost exactly one week ago now, to the minute.

I spent last weekend doing as much as I could on the preliminaries, canceling an evening out with my wife on Saturday so I could keep working. By Monday morning, I was confident that I could get the job done this week, in time for the owner to meet the State imposed deadline - the third deadline he’d been given. He’d completely ignored the first two warnings. Now, it had become very serious. He simply had to address some serious health and safety violalations that had resulted in three injuries to his workers within a ninety day period. Not that they were always terribly efficient, but the inspectors had taken notice of this - the pattern being so glaringly obvious.

I told the guy that I’d have to drop everything else I was working on in order to get his project completed on time. I told him what my hourly rate was, that I required a retainer and full payment upon completion, which was my standard policy. He assured me that he’d have my retainer check waiting for me when I arrived, and that, of course, he’d pay me in full upon completion.

When I’d arrived, during the hour long meeting with the owner in which I told him exactly what I’d be doing, the order in which I’d be completing the dozen-odd tasks, and what information I needed access to and why, he asked me if I’d mind foregoing the retainer since he was going to pay me so soon anyway; that getting checks cut was a pain in the neck for him unless they were done during the normal cycle. I said that was fine, though I didn’t like it - mostly because he’d said it would be ready and waiting.

During the four days I worked on-site, I heard many tales of management’s callous disregard for worker safety from employees, and I saw evidence of it everywhere I turned. Safety guards were completely removed from almost all machinery. Safety switches had been overidden; stops on presses specifically designed to keep the damn things from crushing hands and limbs had been rigged so as to be inoperative, putting anyone who used them at severe risk.

One of my tasks was creating lockout procedures to ensure that machines could not be turned on by one person while someone else was in the process of doing maintenance or repair on them - a set of procedures so basic and necessary that I’d never seen a place of this size - there were over a hundred employees - without them in twelve years. It was shocking.

Meanwhile, each morning I met with the owner to brief him on my previous day’s work, and to inform him one the things he needed to acquire to make the work I was doing worthwhile and meaningful. During these meetings, the man repeatedly worked his faith into the conversation - as well as his disdain for any sort of government intervention into his business. He felt strongly that, not only should he be free to run his business any way he saw fit - as guaranteed by the constitution, he claimed - but also that the real problem these days were the trial lawyers.

I bit my tongue each day.

It was too obvious. He didn’t give a crap about his workers, and if they didn’t like the way he did things, they were welcome to leave and find work elsewhere. They certainly shouldn’t have the right to sue him if the way he ran his business caused them injury, nor should he be subject to oversight by anyone. He and Jesus seemed to have an arrangement. If he had faith, anything he did was fine, and no mere human should have the right to intervene in any way whatsoever.

Of course, when I finished the job, with three hours to spare - than you very much - the girl who cut the checks was off for the day, and she was the ONLY person who knew the check-writing system. He’d mail me a check.

Now I walk to the the gas station. I had been so angry for the last few hours that I hadn’t paid attention to my fuel indicator.

I borrow a gas can from the station owner, buy a couple gallons of gas and start to walk back, dreading sloshing back through that underpass and sprays that would soon drench me.

Before I get out of the parking lot, a fellow who’d just purchased gas himself asks me if I’d like a ride back to my car. I thank him profusely and accept the ride.

One hundred and twenty days later, after sending off a certified letter threatening legal action, I receive a check for half my invoice along with a promise of payment of the other half next month. Sixty days later, I call about the other half of my fee.

The number is no longer in service.


Be good to everyone.

Good morning Boys and Girls.

In what’s been a strange confluence of computer purchases and sales over the past month, I added one Saturday simply because it was too great a bargain to ignore, and as a result, I learned - again -  how true it is that men and women just plain think differently.

Friday was SweetLady’s birthday. My job, being the loving, caring, gentle suitor I am, has been to continue telling her how great she looks - for a fifty-year-old. (She’s far, far younger than that, and in truth, looks even younger than she is.) Regardless, my teasing means, of course, that my upper right arm is now full of bruises - bruises I’m quite sure I could use as evidence against her should I decide to go to the police. I might, in fact, except I’m afraid I’d end up talking to a female officer, who, once hearing both sides, would probably render my left arm black and blue as well - just as a matter of principle.

So it was that Friday evening, SweetLady, the kids and I had a nice dinner at one of the ubiquitous Italian chain restaurants where, after the meal, she was serenaded by a huge baritone who sang Happy Birthday in Italian before the complimentary cake and ice cream. I’m not a big fan of all these chains, but I must say, it was nice.

We were under the gun a bit at the end of the meal because the kids’ father was to pick them up at eight-thirty at her house for his weekend with them. We made it back just a minute or so before he pulled up, and he wasn’t at all pleased that he had to wait an extra two minutes for the kids to grab their things. Nothing new there; the man is mad at all of humanity.

I’d been driving all day to get there in time for dinner, and was pretty pooped out afterward - so I wasn’t the greatest company in the world after the kids left and was in bed by about ten-thirty where I slept soundly through the night - a rarity.

Saturday morning, SweetLady slept in, having stayed up later than me by a couple of hours. I was up early, since, not only had I gone to bed so early, but, this was my first morning here and it always takes a day or two for my body to adjust to Central Time. I had coffee on the glider, then a walk. Eventually I decided to go to a garage sale I’d seen a sign for where a fellow was selling a nice little iMac G4 with plenty of memory, some very nice - and expensive - graphics software, and good speakers - all for 50 bucks. Because I’ve been watching the used mac market so closely the last few weeks, I knew this puter would easily bring $150 - 300 with a quick ad on Craig’s List, so I powered it up, checked it out, and bought it.

The rather elderly man who sold it to me, explained it had been his nephew’s computer, who bought it for another young relative to use for a while. The nephew had moved west, bought a newer and more powerful mac, and didn’t want this one back when the other relative was done with it.

I got it back home and decided to wipe as much stuff off the hard drive as I thought prudent before making a decisions about (a.) how much to ask for it, (b.) whether there were any programs I might want, or (c.) maybe keeping it for myself.

Alas, the Administrator password, was not, “administrator” or “12345” or ‘imac” or any of the obvious passwords people usually set when they’re selling a computer, plus, since there were far more documents left on the computer than is sensible, I realized that no one had done anything to erase any of what had been on the thing since it had been used as someone’s everyday machine. After trying a half-dozen passwords, the hint “nails” appeared, but “hammer”, “screws”, “staples” and any number of other words suggested by the hint failed to gain me access. Not, “tacks”, nor “spikes”, or “fasteners”, or “pound”. Nothing.

-Another half-hour of messing with it did no good.

SweetLady and I had to go downtown just before noon, and I stopped by the garage sale again to ask the man who’d sold me the computer if he’d call his nephew to try to get the password when he had time. He said he’d try, and I gave him my number.

Then, on the way downtown, I told SweetLady about the predicament, and then told her about the hint-word, “nails”.

She thought for about a half-second, and said “manicure”.

Duh.

She was right, of course.

Men and women do think differently.


Be good to everyone.