tic tac tic tactile...

I miss the whirring hum and clackity report of the electric typewriter. There are few tactile experiences as satisfying as rattling off a run-on Selectric sentence. RAP-ATTA-RAP-ATTA-ATTA-PHLAP! Oh, man! That's the stuff!

The problem is that I also appreciate the convenience of the various word processing programs available on personal computers. Revision is a piece of cake with a computer. Right click, double click, find, replace. Can't do that stuff with a typewriter. What's a boy to do?

One day I will resolve to hit EBay and snatch up a serviceable and traditional machine, much to the dismay of my wife, and the next day I'll realize how my writing would suffer without a laptop to assist with spelling and grammar. I can't come to terms with this.

I have tried software that makes a typewriter-like clack upon a keystroke, but it's all crap. What I want....Nay!...what I need is for someone to create a hybrid keyboard that operates like an electric typewriter, but perhaps connects to my laptop through a USB port. Certainly, I can't be expected to do this myself. That would require hard work, dedication and attention to detail. But there must be someone out there in the interwebs that has taken some steps toward this end. I can't be the only one....or can I?

there are no atheists in the NICU: pt 2

In a previous post, I commented on my experience with the premature birth of my son. I explained that though I regarded myself as an atheist, the pressure of that day inspired me to pray. I posited that since I felt the need to pray, I must believe in God, at least in some manifestation. I've given it more thought...

What I experienced is not belief. Instead, I reached out to whomever could offer relief in a time where I felt utterly helpless. I could not control whether my son lived or died. Praying to a higher power absolved me of any responsibility and provided me great relief. I hadn't needed that kind of freedom before. So what does that say about me? What does it say about religion?

Obviously, it's nothing new. The idiom "There are no atheists in foxholes," goes back to at least World War II. I'd posit that in situations like mine, many atheists and agnostics have sought the comfort of God. Apologists would insist that this waffling is a sign of the hypocrisy of self-proclaimed nonbelievers. They would suggest that I was tested; shown just how much I need God. Christians would use this crisis as an example of how "God is in control." Even, perhaps, that the whole episode is proof of God's existence.

I think Colin McGinn really does a tidy job of explaining this phenomenon; that people seek God in these situations. He says:

"I think it's a sort of cosmic loneliness. I think that's what's behind it. It's hard for people to accept that we are alone, and that nobody cares."

It's really the whole basis for religion. Isn't it? People have the need for a cosmic big brother. We want to believe that in our most helpless situations, there is someone or something that will protect us; get us through these crises. In my case, I needed God to protect my son when I couldn't. But, if I'm to expect that God is powerful enough to protect my son, I have to ask a question. Who's responsible for endangering my son in the first place?

You see, therein lies the rub. Why was my son born four months early? That level of prematurity carries with it some fairly low odds of survival and equally high odds of short or long term suffering. If God is omnipotent, as we are told, then God is the author of everything. If it was a test of my faith, it seems awfully cruel to use an innocent newborn. If, on the other hand, God is kind of an absentee landlord who doesn't concern himself with the survival of one baby, we can assume that a prayer wouldn't affect the outcome one way or the other. There seems no solid logic to God's plan, at least if we propose that there is a plan.

I propose there is no plan. There is only we feeble humans. We who seek logic. When we can see no logic, we assign responsibility to God. When we see no logic in God, we attribute it to the idea that "It's all God's plan," and we couldn't possibly understand it. It's all very convenient. Too convenient to be true.

comfortably numb...

Newspaper readership has dropped steadily since the early 1990's. To some degree, it's a fiscal matter. With the current economy, the increasing costs of publishing and distribution have certainly hurt the industry. However, newspapers survived (even flourished) through the tough economy of the mid-1970's. Rather than money issues, the death knell for newspapers was the advent of the internet age.

Newspaper circulation has incrementally diminished each year as internet access has increased. The Newspaper Association of America has compiled circulation data dating back to 1940. The data shows that circulation peaked in the early 90s and has dropped each year since 1993. Why? The internet provides information in ways that appeal to the average citizen. With newspapers, readers must choose one source and wait until it lands on their doorsteps to be informed. Whereas the internet offers a variety of sources and news is made available within hours or even as it happens. Easy access to news as it happens surely accounts for the trend. It seems inevitable that the newspaper industry as we know it will cease to exist altogether.

The Washington Post reported last month that it's the nation's largest newspapers that are suffering the most significant losses of readership. The smaller daily publications still control the market for local news and offer the best venue for local advertisers. The sword of Damocles.com is dangling over their heads, too. As hometown businesses begin to realize the benefits of online advertising, local newspapers will become less attractive. In response, newspapers have no choice but to offer their services online.

Most major news outlets, including newspapers, now offer services online. Many include "premium" service for a fee, but the majority provide news for free. They have to rely entirely on advertising instead of subscription dollars. For the consumer, there is a simple question: Why would I pay for a newspaper when it's available online at no cost? Newspapers have yet to answer that question and circulation will only continue to decline until they do. What does it all mean to the American public? Why should we care?

This is an era when people stare into an LED screen to access news. Bookshelves are empty as people load their libraries onto a Kindle. Instead of the hassle of a playground, kids turn to the Wii in the comfort of their family rooms. The clackity impact of the typewriter? Forget about it. We have abandoned the tactile experiences. There is something to be said for ink blackened fingers; for the 6:00 AM thump of the Sunday Times on your porch. Can one really enjoy a cup of coffee in front of a laptop? The imminent death of printed news is not progress. Newspapers, like books and baseball bats, should be held in your hands. It's another symptom of our increasingly numb culture. We don't "feel" anymore.

it stands to reason...

It is clear to me, after nearly forty years, that sometimes you just don't like somebody. There may be no tangible reasons, sometimes you just don't like somebody.

Ipso facto, sometimes people just won't like me.

I'm cool with that.

here's a starter for you...

Chapter 2

From the moment I saw her sitting at the table in the break room greedily slurping the last bits of a Cup-o-Noodles, I was in love with Alexandra Gunderson. Eight months later, I watched her across the newsroom from my desk as she stood flustered in front of the office network printer. She’d tried everything listed in the ‘clearing procedure’ from the user’s manual to no avail and stood there with her toner blackened hands up as if prepared for cardiac surgery. A wisp of strawberry blond hair that broke free from her tightly pulled rat’s nest fell in front of her left eye and she curled her mouth to blow it away from her face, only to have it fall right back into view. She was dressed appropriately for early June in the Midwest with a silky off-white blouse, a mid-length skirt that ended just below her perfect knees and a pair of orange and white New Balance running shoes with ankle socks. I’d seen her in her ‘interview’ shoes, too. A pair of closed toe, conservative mid-height heels did wonders for her legs, but I preferred the casual aura of sneakers. Unlike many of the women at the Times who showed up for work looking like a cross between Courtney Love and Bozo the Clown, she rarely applied more than some subtle lip color.
Benjamin Punzel, my best friend and the Times’ news editor, would tell me that I should get up and go help her. It would have been a perfect opportunity for me to save the day, maybe make some small talk, impress her with my wit and in-depth knowledge of all sorts of Hewlett Packard hardware. She glanced my way with a double take and waved with a warm smile. My stomach clenched. “What the hell just happened?” I thought. I just stared at her for a second then looked around me. There was no one on my left. I couldn’t imagine that she would ever wave to me on purpose.
And she hadn’t. I peeked over my right shoulder and walking confidently down the aisle of desks like Moses through the Red Sea was Ben, waving back at Alex. He stopped next to my desk and grabbed a chair from the opposite cubicle.
“Dave, why don’t you just go talk to her?” Ben offered, still smiling toward Alex. “She obviously needs help with the printer. That’s a pretty good ‘in’.”
“Hmm…how ‘bout I don’t.”
“So, you’re just going to stare at her, all creepy like?”
“Something like that. Yes.”
“Are you at all worried about the inevitable harassment complaint that follows creepy staring?” Ben leaned back in the chair and massaged its foam rubber arms.
“Not as long as I have my sympathy magnet.” I pointed to the aluminum forearm crutch that was leaning against the navy, fabric covered pseudo-wall of my work space.
“You know, that thing doesn’t give you carte blanche to just go around ogling young women.”
“It does, actually,” I pointed out, “It’s in the Union of American Cripple’s constitution. Under paragraph 2a. Better parking spots, bigger public toilets and unlimited ogling.”
Ben chuckled, “Damnit. If I’d only stepped in front of that bus earlier this week, I could be undressing Alex with my eyes, right now.”
“Hey now!” I scolded, “Find your own girl.”
“My friend, you don’t get to call her ‘your’ girl,” and he made bunny ear quotes with his fingers, “until you grow a pair and go talk to her.”
“I have hope as long as I don’t talk to her,” I sighed. “Once I limp over there and she gives me the puppy dog pity eyes, hope dies.”
“You’re making a pretty harsh judgment on Alex. Has it occurred to you that she might not condescend? She might just see you as an intelligent, witty guy with a limp.”
“A limp? It’s rather more than that. Don’t you think? It’s not a cute little limp, Ben. Tiny Tim had a limp. That Dr. House guy has a limp. I hobble along like Quasi-fucking-Moto.” It wasn’t a new subject for Ben and me. We’d gone around like this a hundred times.
“You’re going to have to get over the self-pity, ‘I’m not good enough’ bit, man. Not all people think like that.”
“Well, a lifetime of experience tells me otherwise.”
Ben capitulated, “Alright, alright. But if you don’t get laid soon, I think I’ll probably have to shoot you. I can’t take much more of this.” He got up from the chair, slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans and ambled back up the aisle to his office.
I was born with pseudarthrosis of the tibia. In layman’s terms, my lower right leg was broken while still in my mother’s womb, at about six month’s gestation. It did not heal completely and the healing that did occur resulted in my tibia bowing from just below my knee down to my ankle. The bowing subsequently created a growth disparity between my healthy left leg and my gimpy right leg. Between the fact that my condition went unnoticed for a time and that my mother had very limited means, it went untreated until I was four years old.
Even after the “successful” corrective surgery, my right leg remains three quarters of an inch shorter and I will always be at a high risk for future fractures. In fact, I’ve broken my leg eleven times since the operation from such adventurous activities as crossing the street to perilous maneuvers like getting out of bed. I have to be sure not to put my entire body weight on my right side not only because my leg may break, but it’s also incredibly painful. I don’t need pain medicine every day but if I’ve had a particularly busy day, say a trip to the mall or grocery store; I get pretty grumpy and take a Percocet with dinner.
My experience was that women preferred dating men that could take walks on the beach or twirl them around the dance floor all night long or scale a flight of stairs in less than fifteen minutes. The only attention I ever managed to garner from women was pity, condescending courtesy or friendly encouragement.
“Oh David! You’re so funny,” they would giggle. “I don’t know where you get that stuff. You’re gonna make some girl really happy to have such a funny boyfriend.” Some girl. I supposed they meant some girl with an eye patch or cleft palate or another abnormal equivalent. Keep the gimps together, that’s what I say!
I imagined that Alex was the kind of girl that sought adventure. She ran 5K’s for any variety of charitable causes nearly every weekend in summer. She ski’d the Birkebeiner and Finlandia every winter. She was a bit of an action reporter, always flipping her cell closed and racing to the stairwell to fly down the six flights of stairs two at a time to get a scoop. Even when she was stuck in the newsroom working her stories she couldn’t seem to sit for very long.
She must have had an important print job. Most people would have given up but Alex, ever hopeful, opened more panels and turned more knobs trying to clear the printer.
Just as I was calculating the opportunity cost of grabbing my stick and hobbling over to the printer, Justin appeared from the elevator with an ironic ding. He wore his usual three-button, athletic cut suit. The suit was charcoal wool and he sported a black polo, black leather belt and black Edward Green split-toed Dovers. The hair was short, blond, perfect. When asked the time, he would somehow manage to bend his arm without tearing the suit with his sculpted biceps and read from his Tag Heuer Calibre.
I would never have been able to identify his shoes or watch, but Justin was always happy to point them out. “Yeah,” he’d offer unsolicited, “I couldn’t decide on the Joe Abboud herringbone or the Hickey Freeman, so I got them both.”
Justin Teff wasn’t a journalist. He managed the marketing department. He was a glad hander and concerned only with making money, regardless of the implications on the reporters’ craft. The board of directors of The St. Cloud Times was very fond of Justin, mostly because he was good at his job. He managed to keep the paper profitable when many others were buckling under the pressure of internet news access. Justin wasn’t going to bring any Pulitzer prizes to the Times, but he was savvy for a guy just two years separated from graduate school.
Ben was highly regarded by the board, too, but because he was a seasoned newspaper professional, not a businessman. Together, it was thought, Ben and Justin were the perfect pair to take the Times into a very bright future.
Unlike the board, Ben and I hated Justin. The problem, aside from the fact that he was a pinhead, was that he thought his responsibilities included editing stories and columns in an effort to increase circulation. Once, Justin intercepted some political copy before it got to Ben. He red penned several revision ideas and dropped the article on Ben’s desk with a Post-It attached that read:
Thought I’d help you guys out. –J
When Ben returned to his office and saw Justin’s gift, he picked up the phone and hit the intercom button, “Attention. May I have your attention, please? Effective immediately, all article revisions submitted by our crack marketing staff should be routed first through the fiery gates of Hell, then up your ass, and finally onto my desk. Thank you. That is all.” Click.
Justin was at first upset that Ben had embarrassed him in front of the entire staff, but after some discussion with the board, it was determined that Justin had no editorial jurisdiction and it was best if Justin stayed away from the news. However, just because he avoided Ben didn’t mean that he kept his ideas to himself. He instead would stop by our desks and ask us what we were writing about, and then offer changes he thought were appropriate and may be more popular with advertisers. A lot of the other reporters and columnists would smile and maybe even make the changes. I could not tolerate taking orders from a slick MBA, so if he even walked by my desk I would shout, “Ben! Justin would like to talk with you!” and Justin would shake his head as he picked up his pace past me.
He stopped at the printer and smiled as he talked with Alex. She smiled back, but I couldn’t tell if she was happy to see him or just being cordial. She didn’t perform any of the other rituals I’d seen other girls use with Justin. No hair flip. No goofy giggles. No leaning in with a gentle touch of the bicep. He said something that had both of them looking my way. He strutted his way over to my desk.
“Hey guy. That chick is having problems with the printer and I hear you’re like a guru with them,” he was trying to sell to me. “What do you say you give us a hand?”
“Ben!” I shouted. Justin’s eyes opened wide and he watched for Ben to stick his head out of his office door. I snickered, “Just kidding, guy.”
**********

shhh....

I haven't told anyone that I'm back. I thought it might be fun to just show up and post.



Autumn is in full swing here. The last of the strong cling to the branches, yellowed with age but unwilling to cede their position even after having watched their comrades fall two by two and three by three to Earth. Still, their effort goes unnoticed. Above, a dense and swollen sky is too busy to notice the plight of the leaf. Its only purpose to deprive all of warmth and light, somehow impervious to the wind and Coreolis. It hovers and we suffer for it. There is something to the coldness of autumn that supersedes winter's more bitter but more tolerable temperatures. It's damp and soaks to your core. One doesn't "feel" that kind of cold, one becomes that kind of cold. This purgatory is too long lasting for me to maintain sanity. It seems never to end and each day it worsens.

Where is happiness?

good night and good luck...

I'm done. It was a good run. We all had some laughs. Didn't we? Remember that time I talked about Grocery Day? Ahhhh...good times, good times. I've decided to kill the blog, Facebook, MySpace (though I never really used it) and other social networks. I'll probably still drop in on your blogs (you know who you are) from time to time, but I'm just done. It's time.

Thanks for the readership.

Earl out.

i came, i saw, i wrote about it...

Some observations...

Think of the most handsome, beautiful, sexy, intelligent, intimidating person you know. That person poops.

My children don't care if I'm bald, fat, ugly or a dork. As long as I have ice cream, they love me.

Making fun of a fat, bald guy on a scooter is funny. Seeing a fat, bald guy on a scooter beat the crap out of a smart ass is funnier.

Sarah Palin should be left alone until she's actually running for office.

Every American should root for the president to be the best president ever, whether they voted for him/her or not.

Starting smoking is infinitely easier than stopping.

The people that work at Starbucks are happier than the people waiting in line for their venti, half-caff, non-fat caramel machiatto.

The only advantage to being a man is peeing standing up, but it's a pretty big advantage.

In a home with 2 adults, 4 children and 2 dogs the most frightening three words in the English language are, "What's that smell?"

There should be a provision in federal law that allows once per month for one citizen to punch another citizen in the neck, consequence free.

I am reasonably sure that if police questioned me about being in my own house after reports that my house was being broken into that I would cooperate and thank them for responding so quickly to the report.

People who become frustrated and stressed-out while playing golf are missing the point.

I still refuse to accept "commentator" as a real word and when I finally lose my mind, you will find me naked in a Barnes & Noble with a black Sharpie crossing it out of all the dictionaries.

The idea of a mandatory gratuity for parties over 8 defeats the purpose.

The readership of this post will skyrocket when I enter the words "free" and "porn" in the keyword section.

As much as Americans love Mexican food, Mexican music and Mexican beer, you'd think they'd like Mexican people more than they do.

Books don't write themselves.

Peeing in the shower is OK, except after eating asparagus.

The Jonas brothers are musicians the same way Jon Bon Jovi is an actor.

Hot dogs taste better when referred to as "wieners."

Stewed tomatoes are the best way to screw up a perfectly good dinner.

It is impossible to listen to "Down Under" by Men at Work without smiling.

From "Stepbrothers": Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, Rosie O'Donnell - You have to marry one, screw one and kill one. GO!

Everything an 8 year old boy can hold in his hand can be imagined into a fire arm.

As it turns out, running around naked and eating fruit snacks while watching "Yo Gabba Gabba" is cute when you're 2 and creepy when you're 38.

Amanda Bynes is exponentially cuter than Miley Cyrus.

38% of readers will probably not make it to this observation.

malapropriate...

I am on the precipice of a great crossroads. While I am beginning to realize my educationalist exponential, I am yet unsure of my goal. Professionally, I am completely satisfactory. My familiar life has plummeted to the top, with a beautiful wife and four glorified children. I am 'living the dream', as they say, where before my life went up and down like a metronome. What will I do with my remaining days, though?

Is it important to me that I become a man of great statue? Frankly, I could care less about fame, but I wouldn't kick fortune out of bed for eating crackers, if you know what I mean. I'm not asking for an extortionate amount of money. Just enough to be comforting, to make a nice future for my hairs.

Perhaps my goal should be to depart my knowlege upon tomorrow's writers and humanitarianists. It would only amount to an extra sinister of college to abstain my teaching degree. Then I could teach literature at a high school or maybe just help middle schoolers with their grammarical errors and English cosmopolitan. Someone once said, "The real heroes of this world are those that decimate their lives to the enrichment of our youths." I could be that hero.

I'm still young. I still have severed more years to finger out my path in life. There's no rush. I'm really just a string chicken.

roundabout...

In maintaining brevity, there is little more that one can do, when attempting to speak or write, than to strive to keep your ideas, and by "ideas" I mean original ideas, solely your intellectual property et. al., as brief (a relative term) as is possible for the sake of your audience, whether live or after the fact, perhaps on audio or video tape or other electronic storage devices (I.e. digital file format) in a world of otherwise long winded and over-indulgent speakers and authors, rather than suffer your audience with themes which appear to continue long beyond their window of prescience into banal, self-serving, pretentious ramblings from which an ear or eye can hardly recover, leading to the audience's regret that he or she has merely lost his or her investment of time, which he or she will never recover, lamenting upon his or her death bed that the possibility exists that his or her life would have been far more rewarding had he or she never taken in your incoherent drivel, printed or spoken only as an effort to hear yourself speak or see your ideas, and again by "ideas" I mean original ideas, solely your intellectual property et. al., in print.

I want a scooter.

ps. Check out the new short story, "A Message from...", if you are so inclined.