The Service Gap; One Clerk Too Many; The Most Important Job You'll Ever Have

Everything I know about service, I learned as a teenager, from my father and grandfather, working in our family store. I mean that literally. I can't think of a single thing I've learned since. I've been reminded of one thing or another over the years, but always with the reaction, "Oh yeah, I knew that."

Greet the customer when they walk through the door. Smile and say hello. Always ask if you can help them find something--even the folks you know probably know the store better than you. If you don't know the answer, tell them you'll find out--and do. If you're busy with something at the moment that you can't stop, acknowledge their presence and tell them you'll be right with them--people will wait patiently longer than you would think possible so long as they know you're aware of their existence. There is always something to do--stock shelves, pull items to the front, dust, sweep, put away carts, clean windows--in most service industries, you are paid for your time, not the tasks you accomplish; the sooner you learn this, the more valuable you will be. Employers, whether you know it or not, are constantly keeping tabs on what your time is worth versus your co-workers. And finally, the customer is always right.

The nuances of that last one are hard for many to grasp. Someone gives you a five, and as you count their change, they protest that they gave you a ten. Maybe you're dead certain it was a five. Maybe you're certain they're merely confused, or maybe you're certain they're scamming you. You have only one question to answer: Do you want them to continue to be a customer? If yes, then they're right--no questions asked. If no, then the rule that ended the last paragraph doesn't apply anyway does it? The awareness is key. You need to be aware that contradicting them, sticking to your guns on that five spot, may very well mean they're no longer a customer. Is it worth five bucks? Not likely. That applies to almost any situation where you and your customer may disagree. Giving in may cost a little in the short run from time to time, but it will almost always pay dividends in the long haul. This rule was the beginning, I think, of my awareness that truth will often fight its own battles, and that allowing it do so, after you've stated it quietly and clearly (see the previous post on Prof Kirkpatrick), will almost always raise your estimation in the other person's eyes far above what your skills at debate might. The next time you disagree, they will remember the outcome, and they will give your words more weight. If they don't, then they are simply slow learners and their opinion of you should have no bearing on your opinion of yourself.

The Service Gap

What, you may be wondering, got me started before I'd even finished my second cup of coffee this morning? An article on the front page of today's Gazette put a name to a frustration I and others have been experiencing more and more lately: "the Service Gap."

If you’re older than 50, you’ve probably had this experience:

You’re standing at a checkout counter, ready to pay, and the twentysomething behind the register is talking on her cell phone. So you wait, and wait, and wait, and when the clerk finally finishes her conversation, she offers not an apology, but a grimace that suggests you’ve interrupted.

Sound familiar? It has a name: the Service Gap. It’s business-speak to describe a phenomenon fueling plenty of holiday-shopping frustration: the difference in the way baby boomers and members of the “millennial generation” define the concept of customer service.

I disagree with just one thing. I think this has little to do with differences in definition. I think the clerks we're talking about here, the frustrating ones, have simply never been introduced to the concept at all.

This disagreement extends to the article itself. There are older persons quoted, both consumers and managers alike, who seem to blame it on the younger generation as a whole. Then there are hard working younger folk who disagree:

“They’re clueless,” said Franni Segal, 55, a travel agent with a degree in retailing. “They’re more interested in talking to their friends.”

When she was in her 20s, working on commission as an assistant manager at Bonwit Teller, she recalled, she and her colleagues eagerly courted customers. “Today when you go into a store, they’re not interested in your needs . . . With the kind of service you get now, you might as well be on the Internet.”

But Sarah Collier, a 20-yearold Arcadia University junior who has worked in retail sales, said she thought her peers’ customer-service skills depended on their background and training, not their age.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily the entire generation. I think it’s just the individual,” said Collier, a hard worker who now sells time-share vacations for a Poconos resort. “I know how to give good customer service.”

Folks, Franni should just retire now. Sarah is going places. Sarah is going places for at least two reasons. First, if she's right and she does give good customer service, then she has a leg up on many of her peers. Second, her attitude recognizes that the Service Gap is fixable--Franni's fatalism is damning. I'll hire Sarah to supervise Franni in a heartbeat. Sarah will train her peers. Franni will just whine in the break room about how "untrainable" Sarah's peers are.

Franni has lots of company though. The world is full of whiners and fixers. The whiners drag us all down; the fixers help make it a better place.

My world is no different. I work at an institution of higher learning that likes to bill itself as "The nation's premier institution for developing leaders of character." Every program, every class, every activity gets examined for, must justify its existence through, its contribution to that goal. The problem with placing such intense focus on programs, classes, and activities through this "lens" of character development is that we lose sight of the most important factor of all: the people holding the lens. Leadership suffers from a belief that if we just keep raising the lens itself to the status of holy touchstone, and keep tweaking the programs under finer and finer focus, then eventually we'll get the output we desire: "leaders of character." Sorry. It will never work that way.

Leaders of character are molded through example and correction. All those classes and programs and activities matter, but they mean nothing without daily exposure to the right examples and daily correction and explanation of why what matters, matters. It takes me twice as long to walk across our campus as anyone else I know. Why? Because I am busy, as I walk, teaching. A salute is not a thing to be rendered silently. Proper courtesy demands that it be rendered with "an appropriate greeting." Being absorbed in your own thoughts or in a conversation to the point that you don't notice an approaching or passing officer is not okay. Lack of situational awareness in battle or flight will get you killed. The same lack, crossing my path, will simply get you an opportunity to have a conversation with someone much your senior.

Does that make me an ass? William Withers, "a communications professor at Wartburg College in Iowa who, with his colleague Patrick Langan, has spent years studying customer service," would argue that it does:

What’s the answer for peeved holiday shoppers?

Adjust your expectations — down, Withers said. Or be willing to pay more to shop and dine at establishments that have the time, interest and money to train their employees.

Nobody should waste their breath berating a young clerk or waiter, he said.

“Calling over the manager isn’t going to matter,” Withers said. “The server may still not look you in face. And they’ll be texting their friends about what an ass you are.”

Well, yes, if my conversation with these future leaders or current clerks took the form of "berating" then I would have to agree, even I would look in the mirror and see an ass. But as the candles on my birthday cakes more and more resemble a small bonfire and as the testosterone levels in my blood taper off, I find myself finally able to have conversations with clerks and cadets alike where my vocal cords don't tighten, my blood pressure doesn't change, and in consequence, my young charges defenses don't immediately swing to red alert. A significant factor in that capability rests in recognizing that the problem doesn't lie in the person, as fatalists like Franni would have us believe, or in the culture, as Withers would have us believe. We are the culture. We make it.

Culture is shaped by our own expectations and what we are willing to accept. If we follow Withers' advice and adjust our expectations down, then culture will head the same way, down. Is there anyone who believes that minimized human contact and interaction is an improvement? That interfacing with Overstock.com is preferable to the smiling face and twinkling eyes of the young clerk who made my eggnog latte the other morning and asked how my day was going? Maybe she really cared; maybe she didn't. Maybe she watches Rules of Engagement and took a lesson from the waitress at the corner diner who rebuffed Adam's hilarious rejection by telling him, "I'm a waitress. I work for tips. I flirt with all my customers." I tipped my barista well. If you tip servers who give you gruff service (the rules are different in NYC, I know, which is why I hope I never live there), then for God's sake, stop it! You're in the same class with those other officers who walk across my campus or through the halls of my institution and plop into a chair in the break room and complain about how cadets never greet them properly any more. "What did you do about it?" I ask. "What do you mean?" is the response I get.

Do something! Don't be willing to accept poor service. Do talk to the clerk, nicely, if you're the kind of person who can. Talk to the manager if you're not the kind of person who can talk to the clerk without feeling like an ass. If you're not the kind of person who can do either, or if you talk to the manager and get a blank stare, then talk with your feet and shop elsewhere. But don't complain and do nothing. You have the power to change your world. Use it. Whining just drags mine down too.

Listening to people complain is actually my job these days. It's not just tolerable; I even like it. Why? Because it doesn't stop with listening. If the injustice is real (and it isn't always), I get to fix things or to help people through the steps of fixing things themselves. Give a man a fish vs teach a man to fish. Sometimes the fish is a whale, sometimes a shark. That's okay too. I have a rack of harpoons. But, as usual, I digress . . .

One Clerk Too Many

Two final thoughts, mostly for whatever young readers I might have, beginning their journey through the world of employment, whatever form it may take. First, one of the best lessons my grandfather ever taught me in that family store came one day when I was leaning against the soda box chatting it up with a classmate that Grandpa had hired (probably against his better judgment because he would have anticipated exactly the scene before him). He came over to us and said simply, "You know, when I was a young man working in a shop over in town, I was talking to another clerk one day when the owner came over, looked at us both, and said simply, 'You know, I was told long ago, if you've got two clerks talking to each other, you've got one clerk too many.'" Grandpa walked away. Keith and I found work to do. I never forgot that line and all that it conveyed.

The Most Important Job You'll Ever Have

Lastly, I lied, when I said everything I learned about service was learned in that store. At some point after I'd left to don the uniform I still wear, I did pick up one other line that has stuck and is worth repeating here. Either as a cadet or as a young butter bar, I must have complained about the futility of some Mickey Mouse "additional duty" I had been assigned--pubs monitor, unit historian, who knows. "Let me tell you something," the mentor had said, "the most important job you will ever have is the job you have right now." Clichéd? Maybe, but I think not. By definition, a cliché has "lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse." That particular little nugget of wisdom, it seems to me, isn't used enough. It may even be that it needs explanation here, but I think I'll just let it simmer. You either get it or you don't. And in a society where "authorities" like Withers would argue that our disappointment is a result of unrealistic expectations rather than lackadaisical performance, maybe it's not useful anymore in society as a whole.

I can only tell you this. It's been useful for me. It was useful for my grandfather and father before me. I hope it will be useful for my daughters. And it will damned sure be useful for anyone who ever works for me.

Homework

“I’m not seeing the Service Gap,” said Susan Magee, an adjunct professor at Chestnut Hill College who has studied the millennial generation. “I just think they’re kids.”

Remember, she said, it’s the holiday season, and store clerks of all ages are busy and stressed like everyone else. “I think at Christmas, if the person can manage to say, ‘Hi,’ get my item in the bag, and not forget my gift receipt, I’m satisfied.”

She's right and she's wrong. They are just kids. No one is born knowing what customer service is. But if we're willing to accept poor service and call ourselves "satisfied," nothing is likely to get better. The world and the people in it have a way of living up to or down to our expectations. I'm pretty sure that's what The Secret is all about, albeit centered on our expectations for ourselves. It works that way for others too. By expecting more of them, you can help them become better. What's difficult to master is the subtle difference between expecting things to be better from the outset and finding them so versus thinking they should be but not being surprised that they aren't. There's your homework. Good luck.

Update: Here's a link to the original article by Jeff Gammage, published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on 20 Dec. All block quotes above are from that article.

Robert Galloway Kirkpatrick Jr.

In the course of attempting to find the proper term for the phrase, "These aren't the droids you're looking for," Barry (over at Enrevanche) and I discovered a common friend in our past. Friend, teacher, and mentor. Robert Galloway Kirkpatrick Jr's name appears on the title page of my bound MA thesis in the library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill because if there is much value in it, he is largely responsible for it. And I have to say that he is largely responsible for more than that in whatever I may ever have contributed to any classroom in which I sat facing students.

Barry happened to witness our old teacher in what wouldn't even have been an atypical moment, as his quiet good sense reduced Bill O'Reilly to not much more than sputters. He was, in my recollection, one of the finest examples I've ever seen of the effectiveness of simply allowing the truth to do its own work against falsehood and wrong-headedness. The transcript of that exchange is available here, but I'll warn you that the hosting site is, rather sadly, on the side of O'Reilly, and posted the transcript by way of rebutting a Washington Post article (the link for which seems to have expired) that itself is written in admiration of Professor Kirkpatrick's exchange with the talk show host.

One of my own favorite memories of the man (and there are plenty to choose from) comes from a conversation we had one day, over lunch in the shaded courtyard of his Chapel Hill home, during a pause from the detailed attention he gave my thesis from start to finish. We were talking about the wonder of children's acquisition of language and he used a recent example from his own life to illustrate how idioms work, being constructions whose meaning is markedly different from what the literal meaning of the words might imply to a non-native or very young speaker.

The example centered around a recent train trip he had taken with his family, and while I'm sure I won't remember it perfectly, I think I can convey the gist. As the time to board the train approached, he had sensed the growing nervousness of his young son. He reported that when he finally pressed the young man as to the cause of his growing apprehension, the answer created one of those indelible memories that form the center of family stories to be told and retold, and also gave him an important insight into the nature of idioms. "If we're going to ride on the train," his son asked, "how will we get up there and what will keep us from falling off?"

I was deeply saddened to hear of his passing three years ago. 64 seems young to me now. If there is one thing abundantly clear in the recollections of him published in the faculty newsletter and the campus newspaper, it is that he touched every life he encountered with a depth that was rare and very nearly universal. I wouldn't even be surprised to find that, after a little time, the professor's words sank in through even Bill O'Reilly's professionally thick skull. Quiet truths, meticulously laid out and supported, have a way of doing that. And that, in itself, is probably one of the most important things I ever learned from Professor Kirkpatrick.

That, and how to make a really, really good tuna salad sandwich.

Firefox Browser

The reaction to this post from a number of my friends is going to be, "What took you so long?" I feel like one of those characters in a movie who resists and resists and resists assimilation, only to learn that life is actually a whole lot better once you yield and become part of the hive. The hive, in this case, is composed of folks who've already woken up and moved from Internet Explorer (IE) (any version) to Mozilla's Firefox browser. Last night, after it took me hours in IE6 to compose a simple post that should have been a half hour's work, I made the switch.

IE had this nasty habit of taking forever to load most pages. I'm running cable at about twice T1 speeds (you can check your speed here), so I wasn't buying that it was my internet connection. And every time I loaded a YouTube video, CPU usage would go to about 100% and stay there, even after I'd closed the video, even after I'd closed the video page. Only way to get my processor back? Shut down IE completely and re-open. That's a serious pain if you're putting together a blog post with links to any video. I typically work with a half dozen browser tabs open at once. Save the blog draft, close all open browser windows, log in again (which I also no longer have to do, since "remember me" finally functions).

I've been using Firefox for just under 24 hours now. I'm happier than a kid on Christmas morning. So to all of you holding out, come on in, the water's fine. All my favorites are still there. Learning to do the same things with Firefox that I was able to do with IE6 took all of about five minutes--about the same time as re-opening windows after one IE6 brain seizure.

My only regret: that it took me so long to switch.

Andy McKee, "The Friend I Never Met"

While we're on the topic of music . . .

There were a couple great discoveries in my life today. The first was that I work side by side, every day, with one very talented musician. For months we've toiled together at righting wrongs, answering queries from inside the beltline, making life better for some, ending careers for others, and now and then explaining to people that nowhere in our job description does it say anything about protecting them from the justifiable consequences of their own poor judgement. It's only half in jest that people say IG's have no friends. But I digress . . .

Just yesterday, for some reason or other, I ended up introducing my co-worker to this blog, explaining that, for the most part, what I do with my ever dwindling spare time is write, here and elsewhere. This morning, when I arrived at work, he'd brought something to share in return: a CD of tracks he'd laid down at home. Turns out he plays just about anything, and his oldest son and friends sing. I ripped all eight tracks to my computer and let them play most of the day. You can even hear some of them for yourself at his MySpace page. It never fails to amaze me the talent that can surround us without our ever knowing.

The finding out, and the discussion that ensued, led to today's second cool discovery for me. At some point, we were talking about musical experimentation, and he mentioned trying alternative tunings on his acoustic guitar. I asked if he were familiar with Michael Hedges. Of course he was, and he asked if I were familiar with Andy McKee's "Drifting." As he began to describe it, I recognized it as a video a friend had sent me a link to a few months ago. Turns out my co-worker is working on learning that piece himself. To quote Keanu: "Whoa!"

So tonight, I looked the piece up on YouTube again. For about the next hour or so, I ran through most of the Andy McKee offerings there. Candyrat Records understands viral marketing. Owner Rob Poland posts high quality videos, lots of them, of Andy doing his thing. I will own several Andy McKee CDs very soon. For more than a quarter of a century, I've been a Michael Hedges fan. The video at the bottom of this post, "The Friend I Never Met," is McKee's tribute to Hedges.

I never actually met Hedges, but I did see him in concert. It was sometime between 1989 and 1991, and it was in the auditorium at UNC Chapel Hill. It was every bit as awesome as you would expect it to be. And though it was at least 16 years ago, Hedges gave our family a phrase that we've been using ever since. Mid-show he took a quick break to down a carrot juice on stage, following it immediately with a can of Coca Cola. His explanation, grinning, "It takes the purity edge off." And that's been our excuse ever since whenever the person having the tofu for lunch reaches over and snags a fry; or when standing on a Colorado hilltop, watching the sun set from well above any hovering smog I pull a cigar from my jacket pocket. You get the idea. "Helps take the purity edge off." Once you get the hang of it, you'll find it's a phrase that comes in handy to explain a lot. You can thank Michael Hedges. But, I digress again . . .

McKee is, quite simply, a rather incredible guitarist. And although Hedges had died in a car crash a few years prior to McKee's coming into his own, I think McKee is quite right to think of Hedges as "The Friend I Never Met."

In keeping with the theme of yesterday's post, and the post elsewhere that inspired it, I think the following exchange from an interview with McKee, conducted by InstruMentalCase.com (it's not a link, and I don't suggest trying to enter it as a direct URL because it's crashed my browser three times now), and published on the bio page from McKee's own website, does a pretty good job of capturing, from the musician's point of view, that mnemonic quality we've been talking about here and over at Enrevanche.

IC: Do you have any advice for aspiring young guitarists who want to make a living as a musician? (Other than, “upload some songs to YouTube!”)

McKee: Well, I actually just posted a blog on my Myspace page yesterday about this topic. The main point of that blog was to remind guitar players to not get caught up in the technical aspects of music. It's a good idea to try and become fairly skilled with your instrument of choice, but don't let it be your focus. If you are going to begin writing music, don't focus on the accuracy of your sweep picking, the speed of your alternate picking, or the skill involved in your tapping. Unless you want to write music that only appeals to other guitarists, then that's fine. But if you want to really touch people with your writing, your focus should be on expressing something to your listener. Something they will feel. That's what music is about.

So, without further ado, I give you a video, only one of many available over on YouTube, of Andy McKee, playing "The Friend I Never Met."

Of Authors, Readers, Music, & Memory

I've noticed something of late: it's the more personal entries on this blog that seem to spike the readership. I find that fascinating and about 180 degrees out from what I expected. I had thought that it would be the posts on more current events or movies or some such, but no; it's when some single current event inspires a more original meditation that suddenly the number of hits tracked by Google Analytics spikes. And I'm beginning to understand why.

Over at Enrevanche, Barry's posted a riff on "Music as a trigger for memory." Though the list of blogs I read on a daily basis has slowly grown, it's still pretty small. But reading daily and being really moved by what you read are two different things. I was reminded by Barry's post on music and memory that it was my cousin's ability to sometimes strike a genuine chord in my own soul that attracted me to his blog in the first place, and it was his blog that eventually inspired me to crank this one up.

So, I'm going to guess that this is really how those spikes occur. We can get news of current events anywhere. But it's the human connection we feel when someone who writes on a daily basis manages to put into words, sometimes better than we could find on our own, something that we feel about those events. I've said all along, as an English professor, that the authors we're attracted to are those who can describe what we've felt or thought all along, but better than we ever hoped to. That's why I love Cormac McCarthy and someone else loves Rod McKuen. Same for blogs, I'm learning. It takes a while for a blog to find its own audience. What I'm becoming aware of though is that my audience, however small or large it may be, mostly isn't here for links to news or even other cool things on the web. Guys like Glenn Reynolds pretty much have that covered. More power to them. It's not what I created this space to do anyway. The point is, recent trends in hit tracking seem to indicate that what I did create this space to do has more validity than I'd realized. I'll try to blog with more consciousness of that in the future.

Meanwhile, pay that blog entry of Barry's a visit. It's worth the read. And be sure to take in the comments too. Here, for what it's worth, is an excerpt from mine:

Chap & Barry: I have to say, "the fullness of deep and involuntary memory" and "memory, like vinyl, has grooves that wear out" actually make pretty good bookends, though I have to say that I think the mechanism functions in reverse--the grooves of memory, unlike vinyl, are kept fresh by use. It's more like their sides melt into one another if the needle of remembrance doesn't pass through them from time to time. Best entry in a while, Barry. Thanks.

As for music, I've no doubt Barry has been my most faithful reader from day one, so I'm sure you'll remember "Adagio for Strings" back in September, about a pretty much similar topic. More apropos though is the passing of Dan Fogelberg last Sunday. Two nights ago I went to sleep with pretty much all my Fogelberg in the playlist, piping in through earbuds. What I remembered was why I don't listen to him that much any more. I remember too much when I do, and too much of what I remember is too laden with regret to be good for me. Again, beautiful post, Barry. Thanks.

And I don't say this very often, but if you are reading this blog, then thanks. And if you're getting anything out of it, feel free to leave a comment now and then. Blogging is largely an exercise in Narcissism anyway, but it's still done with an awareness of an audience, and it's nice to hear from that audience from time to time. In some ways, a blog and its comments is the ultimate expression of reader-response theory, so, jump on in there.

Cayenne Pepper

I couldn't resist.

Your Score: Cayenne Pepper

You scored 75% intoxication, 75% hotness, 75% complexity, and 50% craziness!

You are Cayenne! You're known for your dry wit, saucy remarks, and ability to stimulate (take that however you want). People in hot climates like you for your ability to make them sweat, but you're also quite good for people all over the world. Just don't mention your cousin, deadly nightshade.

Link: The Which Spice Are You Test written by jodiesattva on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Of course, I'm not sure about that whole cousin comment at the end. I could have sworn Barry was Saffron.

What spice are you?

The Golden Compass

Just came from seeing this movie with my daughter, home from college for the holidays.

The local paper wasn't that kind to it, but this is the hometown of the Magisterium. On the reviewer's behalf though, I have to say that they were pretty well-balanced and accurate in what they had to say. The main objections had to do with depth of character and coherence of storyline. I think, though, that maybe the author of that review may have actually been hampered by having read Philip Pulman's book, The Northern Lights, and therefore knowing more than was good for him. That review did not raise the sorts of objections that the Vatican did, as summarized in an E! Online article today:

"Hope simply does not exist" in the world created by British author Philip Pullman, read part of a long editorial printed Wednesday in the Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano, in which the Roman-Catholic body takes the big-screen adaptation of Pullman's fantasy novel The Northern Lights to task.

Quite the contrary, the local review, over a week ago now, pointed out that much of the book's anti-religious rhetoric had been toned down for the movie. I can only say that if what I saw was toned down, I can hardly imagine what a full frontal assault would have looked like.

Issues of dogma and anti-dogma aside, it's not a bad movie if you need an escape. A little overly melodramatic in places. At least once, I did wish Sam Elliott would just go ahead and French kiss the bear and get it over with (if you see it, you'll know the moment), but all in all, it was a good escape for a couple of hours. The willing suspension of disbelief didn't require enough effort to be distracting. I guess I'd give it a B/B-.

Oh, but whatever you do, hang around for five minutes or so of credits. At least enough so that you get to hear the song at the end. A good mile from the theater we were still laughing at the song. And it wasn't meant to be funny. Britney Spears probably wrote better lyrics in kindergarten. So, if you need a good laugh, don't be the first ones out of the theater, whatever you may have thought of the show.

The Future is Now

With digital billboards, police can now display a suspect's face to thousands of people, sometimes almost immediately after a crime is reported.

"We can be up in 15 minutes" of getting a suspect's photo, said Troy Tatum, general manager of Lamar Advertising, the Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based company that provided free use of the billboards in Mobile as a public service.

Back in August, I commented on the how rapidly science fiction becomes reality these days. In that post, I cited the movie Minority Report as being particularly prescient with regard to some aspects of our future.

This recent article from on the successful use of digital billboards as wanted posters is just one more illustration of how rapidly such "futuristic" concepts from recent films have become reality.

Dan Fogelberg, Dead at 56

And just like that, the world becomes a poorer place.

Photo from DanFogelberg.com

If James Taylor was one half of the soundtrack of my young life, then Dan Fogelberg may well have been the other half. One thing Fogelberg had in common with JT was that he sounded much the same in a solo acoustic setting as in a studio production. There are few artists of whom that can be said. He was very definitely one.

I recently put together a compilation that I thought pretty much summed up my life this fall. Two Fogelberg tunes made the list: "Souvenirs" and "There's a Place in the World a Gambler." (I left off "Dancing Shoes." That song has more meaning to me than I can bear.)

Most of the news coverage I've read today has consistently mentioned "Leader of the Band" and "Same Old Lang Syne" as two of his best known works. I'm sure though, that for at least a while in the mid-80's, "Longer" would easily have made a list of top ten wedding songs.

It's sad to think that he's gone. I would be remiss, if I failed to include here a link to his personal message to the rest of us men about getting checked regularly for the disease that killed him.

Here, for anyone not familiar with his music, are two selections from YouTube. Just Dan, a guitar, a microphone, and an audience. Enjoy.

"Leader of the Band"

"Believe in Me"

Which Way Does Your Head Spin?

A more important question than, "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" may be "Which way would they spin while they danced?"

The image below, like so many other optical challenges, can be seen as spinning either way. Which way you see it, according to the source I lifted it from, says something discernible about how your brain works (see below).

The following text is lifted from The D-Ring:

The Right Brain vs Left Brain test … do you see the dancer turning clockwise or counter-clockwise?

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Most of people see the dancer turning counter-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS uses logic detail oriented facts rule words and language present and past math and science can comprehend knowing acknowledges order/pattern perception knows object name reality based forms strategies practical safe

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS uses feeling “big picture” oriented imagination rules symbols and images present and future philosophy & religion can “get it” (i.e. meaning) believes appreciates spatial perception knows object function fantasy based presents possibilities impetuous risk taking

Update: Here is a hint if you want to try and make her switch, but can’t. Look at her lower foot and/or the shadow of her lower foot and see if the woman switches direction.

If you are anything like me, you stared at it for quite a while in an unsuccessful attempt to visualize it turning the opposite direction. I was about 100% certain that it could only be seen turning one way until I looked away at the text. Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell it had switched. WTF. I began to wonder if retina tracking had been installed on my computer when I wasn't looking and used to reverse the dancer's direction the moment I looked away.

Hat tip: Lex, who got it from Mike, who got it from The D-Ring.

Convergence: Houses

I'm telling you, you can't make this stuff up.

That house that began the whole meditation on convergence? My friend will close on that later this month. I never really had much doubt about that one.

I'm not sure what to do with this though.

I'll need to move soon, I hope. The sign went up in my front yard yesterday, holidays and all. So, I've done a little looking around lately. Made a few calls today--five to be exact. Spoke to one person, left messages for four others.

Tonight, I'm at a squadron Christmas party at a golf course clubhouse. Met the Executive Chef, whom good friends think the world of. After dinner, I did too. At one point during the evening, while the emcee was giving out door prizes, my phone rings. As I was sitting up front, I didn't answer it right away, but I did pull it out to see who was calling. The number was from an exchange that could only be a land line from somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the golf course where we were. Odd. I could think of no one who should be calling me from that area. I walked out of the room and returned the call, running over different scenarios in my mind for how someone in the rowdy crowd I was with could be playing a practical joke on me. I got the answering machine for the golf course . . . the golf course where I was at that moment. I became even more certain that someone was having me on. I looked back into the dining room and one of the wives smiled and waved. What the hell were they up to? Then the voice mail indicator beeped. Someone had been leaving a message while I was returning the call. I listened to the message. The message was no joke at all; it was from one of the four people I had left voice mails for earlier in the day about houses. But here comes the good part: the name matched the name embroidered on the white chef's jacket of the man I'd met only a couple of hours earlier. I was already standing outside the dining room where the festivities were, so I walked on back to the kitchen. As I was asking one of the staff where the nearest phone was, the chef walked out. "I think you just called me," I said.

We spent the next ten minutes talking about the house. I'll see it tomorrow morning at nine. Who knows if it's the house I'm supposed to live in for the next month to a year. I can tell you this though--you don't have to hit me over the head with a two by four for me to know I at least owe it a look.

You can't make this stuff up.

"These aren't the droids you're looking for."

Early last week, I was visiting the best writer I have the good fortune to know personally, and in the course of the conversation, I think he suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that the department in which he teaches might be getting just desperate enough to want even me back. (Desperate because I was merely the first in a wave of people who, for their own mental health, continue to dive over the gunnel and take their chances in the open sea rather than sail one league further on the Pequod.) My response was a slight wave of the hand as I said, "These aren't the droids you're looking for. He can go about his business."

To my amazement, I got a blank look and a quizzical, "What?"

"You're kidding right?" Still the blank look. "You don't know the Jedi mind trick line from the original Star Wars? You've never heard that?"

"Nope."

I was so shocked that I asked my family about it that night. Their response: "We didn't know where it came from; we just know you're fond of saying it." Fine. Maybe it's just me, I thought.

No. It's not. Try Googling "aren't the droids you're looking for." You'll find that the phrase is deeply embedded in American speech as a signal, when used properly, that someone is attempting a Jedi mind trick on someone else, or on an entire subset of the population, especially when the person being accused of it is a member of the government. Wikipedia uses it as the Ur example of the Jedi mind trick.

So, for those of you out there who have never heard it, or for those who've heard it, intuited its meaning, but weren't really sure where it came from, I am providing the short video below as a public service. Chalk it up to the English professor in me educating my friends on the roots of an allusion that has moved past allusion into some other form of figure of speech for which I can't find the exact word. It began as an allusion, certainly, but when the person using it understands its meaning, yet has no idea of its source, it seems to me that said person can't properly be said to be alluding to anything. Hmmm. If anyone knows the proper term for such a linguistic phenomenon, please, by all means, chime in with a comment!

Perspective Helps: 3400 Christmas Ornaments

I have a good friend who really doesn't look forward to this time of year. The problem? A spouse he thinks goes a little overboard with the whole decorating thing. Perspective is really all important here. This story on a local Colorado Springs resident should help.

John Kerr’s tidy house near Wasson High School is festooned with outdoor holiday lights, with handpainted angels and bears and wise men. But that’s just a hint of the Christmas riches inside.

Kerr has more than 40 Christmas trees that hold more than 3,400 ornaments, and he’s inviting the public to tour his house at 2516 Fairmount St. when his sign is out.

“If we’re home, we let people walk through,” Kerr said. “We put a sign up that says ‘come in and count trees.’"

What I always wonder is just how obsessions like this begin. The article tells us that too:

Now retired from his post as assistant superintendent of Colorado Springs School District 11, Kerr still has the one that started it all, a Santa ornament he bought when he was 10.

That’s the year his mom put up a metal Christmas tree because “she just didn’t want to be bothered by the fuss and mess,” and he didn’t like it.

So, he walked to the S.H. Kress & Co. five-and-dime store at 23 N. Tejon St. and bought himself an ornament. The man working at a nearby tree lot gave him a branch from a tree, he put his ornament on it and marched home.

He’s been collecting ornaments ever since.

I knew there was a good reason, other than the wonderful smell, that we always have a live tree.

Of course, those come with their challenges too, like the first Christmas after we married, when we brought a tree home from the tree farm only to find the next day, after we had finished decorating it, that somewhere in its depths had been a spider web, complete with egg sacs ready to hatch in the warmth of a human abode. Hundreds, hundreds of tiny spiders greeted us the next morning. I think we had to bomb the apartment to get rid of them. That was 3400 ornaments we could have lived without.

An A Cappella Christmas: Straight No Chaser

A couple of weeks ago, I had the good fortune to attend the winter concert of the a cappella group "Back Row" at Colorado College. I posted a short blog about it, with a link to a video from that very concert. That may well be why a good friend sent me a link to this a cappella group's awesome rendition of "The 12 Days of Christmas." If you give a listen, I promise you won't be disappointed.

Convergence: John Holiday

For those of you new to the blog, who may need an explanation of what I call "convergence," go here.

Only my closest friends (and a few new acquaintances on the way to becoming real friends) know that from late August until Thanksgiving I spent a little time looking for someone I'd completely lost track of. Those same friends also know that, like several other instances of deflating memories, I'd have been better off to leave that one undisturbed--and how.

But those are other stories. This story is about John Holiday. "Doc." Go figure.

I dine during happy hour at least once a week, sometimes several evenings a week, at Plate World Cuisine, about a mile from the house. Bar none, the best food on the north end of Colorado Springs. On an evening about six weeks ago, I stopped in there after a short errand I'd run on the way home from work. That errand was the first effort I'd made in weeks to discover what had become of that old acquaintance. The "search" was a good two and a half months old at that time, and I was, frankly, running out of ideas on how to find this person. So, I stop in at Plate, and Michael, the General Manager, escorts me to a seat at the bar and introduces me to a nice lady named Judy. Judy and I, both pretty naturally gregarious, are getting to know one another when in walks another guy Judy knows. She waves him over and he introduces himself to me as John Holiday, "But friends call me 'Doc.'"

"No kidding. Well, you're not going to believe this, but a lot of my friends call me 'Doc' too." And thinking that the coincidence might stretch credulity just a little, I fished out one of my skydiving cards, complete with callsign, and passed it to him. He returned the favor.

Now keep in mind that I had just come from the first real effort at tracking someone down that I'd made in a couple of weeks, and that I was running out of ideas, that I was, in fact, about ready to concede defeat. Enter convergence. On John's business card, just below his name, was printed, "California Licensed Private Investigator." I wish now that someone had taken a photo of my face. I can't even imagine what my expression may have been. I swear to you, the things that happen in my life, if you put them in a book, an editor would say, "No one is going to believe this." I'm going to put them in the book anyway.

One thing led to another. John gave me a few brief pointers. Persistence and time eventually led to success. I almost wish it hadn't, but again, that's another story.

This story is John's. During our conversation that first night, he mentioned that there had been a story about him in The Gazette a few years back. It was when he mentioned that he was also a collector of rare books and had owned a book store that I remembered having read the article, and thinking even then, "Now this would be an interesting person to meet."

Nor was I wrong. I look forward to conversation with this other "Doc" as much as anything about the whole Plate experience. Last night, for instance, I expected to make a quick run to Plate for dinner, and ended up spending over three hours at the bar in conversation with John. I've been an English professor. I still hang with English professors. But it took an evening with John to make me look forward to picking up James Joyce again. I was not a fan of Ulysses my first time through it, but I think I may have a new appreciation for it this next time around. Go read that article. Like most of the instances of convergence in my life, if you were to write John Holiday into a book as a character, an editor would most likely say, "No one's going to believe this." Believe it.

"It Ain't Conceit If It's True"

Way back in high school, in the Old North State, where Driver's Ed was (and still is) a required course and paid for through your taxes, I had a teacher who said basically two things that have stuck through all these years. One was, "I'll let you know when I quit rockin'," always said in response to, "All clear," at an intersection following a stop in which too heavy a foot on the brake caused too sudden a stop. Sarcasm, you see, is a tool in almost every teacher's bag. It stuck. Thirty-two years later, I remember Mr. Stikeleather as I patiently wait for my own daughter to master the gentle lessening of pressure on the brake that produces a smooth stop.

The other thing he was fond of saying whenever we young bucks gave him a hard time for his surplus of self-confidence was, simply, "It's not conceit if it's true." That stuck too, and oddly enough, I've had occasion to use it once or twice in my life.

It comes to mind tonight though, in a corollary form.

This is going to be, without a doubt, the most profoundly sad Christmas of my life thus far. (I'll not say "ever," because I know better than to tempt fate in that way.) I've been a little worried about myself lately, and about one of my very closest and dearest friends. I think, though, that Stikeleather's Maxim should serve to put my mind somewhat at rest, and likewise, the minds of my friends. I think that my cigar-chewing, Old Spice-wearing driver's ed teacher would argue that it ain't clinical depression if there's an acute external cause for it. We are entitled to our sadness, that close friend and I, even more thoroughly than our normally abundant self-confidence. She even more than I, on both counts.

I have held this post for days, wondering about the propriety of revelations so personal, both to myself and to, quite probably, the best friend of the opposite gender I am ever likely to know in this lifetime. But I am a great believer in the power of (insert your own word for it here). For some, the word is prayer--they credit the intensity of one person's supplications or the overwhelming volume of many simultaneous pleas with somehow bending the will of the Almighty to give divine attention to a mortal purpose that He might otherwise not have deigned to notice. I choose not to believe His purpose so malleable nor Him so needful of our efforts to direct His attention where most required. I choose, instead, to believe that our own wills and attention have power we are unaware of, and that our lack of awareness lessens that power not one whit. I believe that when many of us are concentrating on a single outcome--as when many people pray (genuinely, with great focus and earnestness) for someone's deliverance from a thing, be it sickness, addiction, or grief--that very real energies are contributed to bringing that outcome about. Call me a flake if you wish, but I will point out that no good Christian, Muslim, or Jew doubts the power of prayer to bring these things about through such efforts. The primary difference between my view of how it works and theirs is that I give both God and Man more credit than those who believe He can be thus bargained with. The result is the same, only the conception of the mechanism differs. I explain all of this because I am going to share what I do for a reason I will explain at the end.

In my case, the sadness to which Stikeleather's Maxim entitles me is grief for the end of a 20-year marriage. Even more than the disintegration of romance that causes my own heart to ache, I grieve the disintegration of stability and concurrent uncertainty about the future that weighs on my children's hearts. Every single thing in this holiday season that should be a source of joy is become a heavy thing instead, bathed in a finality that partakes of every memory back through two decades and shrouds each event or task in a pall far more bitter than sweet. Only one thing lessens that effect: because I knew a year ago that my oldest daughter would be leaving for school this past summer, I was aware even then of a certain finality about most events a full season ago--last time choosing a tree together as a family; last Thanksgiving all at the same table, for years at least. But I did not expect last year's yule to be even the penultimate Christmas morning waking under one roof. That, I expected to fend off a few more years yet, until marriage or engagement drug one or both of my children to some other hearth hung with stockings. But, it was that penultimate thing nonetheless, and that makes this one . . . sad.

But my grief pales, even in my own mind, next to my friend's. In a span of mere months--a span far, far too short--her healthy, active mother was diagnosed with a disease that my friend, the real doctor, knew would end her life. But used to being exceptional in every way, in no small part by virtue of coming from exceptional stock, my friend expected her mother, I know, to enjoy the generous end of that range oncologists give in answer to the inevitable, "How long?" But this time, it wasn't to be.

And because it came suddenly and in stark contrast to what I know she had expected, my friend is lost now, stuck in a place between worlds like Neo at the beginning of the final installment of The Matrix. There is the world that was but is no more. That world included a mother's comforting touch and voice and assurances--things even we nearly-half-century-old folk still need to lean on from time to time. And there is the world that will be, eventually, where my friend embraces her own assumption of that role, and recognizes that in every kind word or deed however small, in every child's injury attended, in every young mother's doubts assuaged, in every fine thing that she does for her husband that makes him aware of and grateful for her love, in every quiet secret, unrecognized as such, passed to her daughter or her sons about what it is to be a woman or a man, in every moment of considerate counsel, gracefully given or received with friends--in all these actions and moments, her mother lives on through her, and will live on through every life she touches. That world and her embracing of it, will be, but it is not now, not yet.

Now is the dark time, the lost time, the time of grief and inward wandering where all the things that she will one day recognize as her mother's continued presence are now the sharp and painful reminders of her too sudden and too new absence. This dark time, this place between worlds is a boundary that must be crossed. Even those who seem to deal with the loss of a beloved parent without passing through this valley eventually come back to it. The danger is in stopping, in looking back with such intensity and regret that one ceases to move forward to that brighter place where the person we loved so much and miss so much becomes, finally, a quality of the light in our smile, an overtone or harmonic in our laughter, and the breeze that rejuvenates our soul in our silences. Sometimes, making it through that valley requires more strength than we think we possess. It's those times when the prayers of all our religious friends and the concentrated attention of all our spiritual ones sustains us.

And that is why I'm sharing all of this here. For my religious friends, this amounts to a prayer request. For my spiritual friends, this is an invitation to focus your meditations on a heart that needs them. For my friends who are neither, this is an invitation to practice a new skill you may not have known you had. And it is not for myself I ask. There are gullies in my path these days, but few that I can't see over the edge of. My friend, though, is journeying through a darker vale with tall, steep sides, and I'm not sure the light at the other end is visible yet. Pray for her. Think of her. Send energy her way.

There was an episode of the original Star Trek titled "Requiem for Methuselah," which ended with Spock easing Kirk's grief through a mind meld and a single word, "Forget." I would not wish forgetfulness on my friend. What I would pray for, visualize, will into existence is not forgetfulness, but a different character of remembrance--one in which joy is the dominant emotion, in which the bitter no longer overwhelms the sweet, but serves as foil to deepen it. One which recognizes that remembering with joy is the greatest honor we can do those we loved and the greatest lesson we can teach to those we love still, for in doing so we school them on how to remember us, because our time will come, and sooner than we think.

Don't hesitate in this holiday season to reach out and touch one another. And I mean that literally. Shake a hand, wrap a friend in a full-bodied bear hug, hold a face in your palm while you tell someone that you love them. Life is short, and the only immortality we can be certain of is woven from the lives we touch.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I have never been so grateful for my friends as I am just now. Thank you all.

Your biggest problem as a superhero

Your Superpower Should Be Mind Reading

You are brilliant, insightful, and intuitive. You understand people better than they would like to be understood. Highly sensitive, you are good at putting together seemingly irrelevant details. You figure out what's going on before anyone knows that anything is going on! Why you would be a good superhero: You don't care what people think, and you'd do whatever needed to be done. Your biggest problem as a superhero: Feeling even more isolated than you do now.

What Should Your Superpower Be?

Hat tip: Enrevanche

"Things can always get worse." -- Cormac McCarthy, in Suttree

I had drafted a post on a very personal sadness today, but I think I will defer to a more public and profound one that unfolded only two and a quarter miles from where I sit typing this in my home:

Sun Dec 9, 9:28 PM ET
DENVER (Reuters) - Three people were shot to death and six were wounded in Colorado on Sunday in two church-related shootings in the U.S. Christian heartland.

Hell and back: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

This really isn't going to be as dramatic a post as the title implies. Hell was a new film by Sidney Lumet: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. This film was reviewed by the Gazette and given a solid A. Nonetheless, I somehow knew from the brief synopsis printed with the review that it probably wasn't going to be sort of film I would enjoy. But, I was downtown last weekend, and it was only playing in the local art theater, and it did get the best review of anything in town, so . . .

Here's my take on it: Coming out of the theater, if I'd had a gun handy, I might have blown my own brains out then and there. It was that depressing. Don't get me wrong. Wonderfully acted, but OMG! I've seen depressing movies before, movies that just made me sad; but, this was the first movie I've ever seen that really made me just want to step out into the street in front of a bus. So, unless you like feeling that way, skip this one.

There was redemption before night's end though. Happily, Colorado College's Back Row, a men's a cappella group, was having their winter concert at 10 p.m. that night. I went straight from the theater to the concert hall. Redemption. Sitting in an audience filled with mostly college girls there to cheer on the guys, it wasn't possible not to smile pretty much steadily for a solid hour. The video from YouTube below is from that concert. The quality's not great, but it'll give you an idea of the atmosphere. The sound was great if you were there, but the concert was really more about showmanship than musical quality. Small hall, small crowd, and I'm guessing that better than 90% of the people there knew someone in the group. To get a better idea of how good they sounded, try going to their website and listen to the sampling there.

Memory Lane (Someone Else's)

I go away . . . . but I do come back. If there were a clinic or a 12-step program for what I had, I would have checked myself in. But some s*** you just have to live through. Collecting material for an autobiography titled, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, is never easy, and it had better be a hell of a lot more fun to read about than live through or it's gonna be a real short run.

Anyway, part of re-entering the real world is getting back in touch with the digital one. Hmmm. Actually, I've been distracted by a digital one, but this digital one was definitely on the other side of the looking glass. In catching up with those who live in this one, I found I was late noticing a pointer from one of the best friends I've never met to a story by another I can't even call friend, yet, but for whom "fellow traveler" doesn't seem a stretch.

Out here in the "blogosphere," you occasionally run into a post with value for what it says. You occasionally run into one with value for how it says what it says. Rarely, some kind soul points the way to one that has value on both levels. I owe Chap a debt of gratitude for pointing the way to this Nov 27th post over at Neptunus Lex. If you're from the South and over, say, 40, it's worth the read for what it has to say. If you're someone of any age moved by well-above-average skill with the language, it's worth the read for how it says it. If you're in both categories, pour yourself a cup of coffee, set aside five minutes, and read. Don't read the way you might normally skim one of several blogs you'll peruse during your day. Read slowly, the way you might savor a good single-malt scotch and a fine, easy-drawing, maduro cigar. Take your time. You won't regret it.

Black & Gold Invitational, 2007

I've been busy doing lots of different things lately, but this was some of the most fun. That same trip to NC that produced the great signage also produced this thrown together all AF 14-way. It's a little rough in the beginning, especially when one of the less experienced jumpers slams into base, but the base held and everyone eventually got in. That'll be me at the bottom end in the nine o'clock position waving my legs to signal break-off for the outer jumpers.
Our USAF 14-way, Laurinburg, Nov 2007

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Indescribable

I know that this blog has few readers who don't know me personally and who don't know where my life has been lately. So, let me share, just a little. I said on New Years this year, that I thought 2007 would be the most profound year of change I'd seen in as long as I could remember. It's shaping up that way.

I've been busy finding my way back to myself. I've been getting to know my daughters better than I ever have. More importantly, they've been getting to know me--not me filtered through anyone else's eyes, but through their own, seeing me, perhaps, in some ways, for the first time.

Anyone who knows me, knows I pretty much don't get nervous. I've crashed cars, experimental planes, come out of a coma that was supposed to be final, twice opened a reserve chute less than two seconds from impact (the last time, only a month ago). People asked if I was scared. The answer's always been honest--"Not really. I was busy."

Only twice in the last two years could I really confess to being no kidding nervous to the point of knowing it. The most fascinating thing about it is how much it's surprised me.

Once was orbiting a stadium packed with 50,000 people, waiting to jump in with my class flag. I'd planned that jump for more than five years. That the reality of it set my heart to pounding nearly out of my chest, with nearly 800 jumps behind me already then, was itself almost surprising enough to calm me down. I rarely even got excited about jumps any more, let alone nervous. Don't get me wrong, I love every jump. But mostly, they're calming now, centering more than exciting. I never did figure out what made that one so different. But I haven't forgotten the feeling.

Today, I've figured it out. That feeling's back. What it is, is the waiting. Having set events in motion that you've imagined again and again, the time almost here finally, yet nothing to do for the moment but orbit, door open, knowing you're about to step out into thin air again, but this time, into the irreconcilable flesh and blood of a reality you've imagined a thousand times. A thousand times a thousand. It's the waiting. Nothing to hear but the pounding of your heart in your own chest. A thing you've grown personally and professionally unaccustomed to. Ground rush is less frightening.

Today, I'm like the little boy, who having behaved badly in church, is being carried out by his dad, and passing the last pew, throws one last glance and plea to the parishioners, "Ya'll pray for me." I may not land on target this time. I may not land standing up. I might not, I'm afraid, even make the stadium. By I am, by God, going out the door the second that green light comes on.

"You know who you are."

Sleep Now

I'm not certain I would ever have preferred any method of putting my daughter to sleep other than slowly swaying/dancing around our living room with her head nestled under my chin and me singing "Never Die Young" with James. But . . . there were those nights when I had to sit outside her door in order to keep her mother from going in to answer her heartbreaking cries of "Mooooooommmmmmmmmyyyyyyyyyy." Hey, I don't know where that advice came from, and I'm not sure whether I was any more in favor of it than my wife. I think I was more like the crew that was tasked with lashing Odysseus to the mast and stuffing their own ears with wax. Only no wax for Dad, and don't think a father's heart is any less torn by those baby siren cries.

If only the Dream Team had existed then. With a mission of "Creating a World of Great Sleepers . . . One baby at a time," here's what they have to say:

We know how confusing it is to be a parent these days--especially when it comes to the "right" way to get your baby to sleep. When our children were born we read an exhaustive number of sleep books, tried almost every sleep method in existence and found ourselves with babies who were mediocre sleepers.

After we finally "figured it out" (and exited the fog of sleep-deprivation) we realized that helping your child be a good sleeper can be simple and anguish-free. So, we formed Dream Team and dedicated ourselves to helping other parents figure out their child's sleep. The result? Well rested, happy children and parents who feel confident, recharged, and connected.

If you have a baby between 4 months and 2 years of age, you should check out their web site. If your babies have aged out of that bracket like mine, you should check it out just to see the most brilliantly innovative consulting gig I've seen yet (and to lament how much easier your life might have been if only they'd been around then). Co-founder and very smart mom Conner Herman is a colleague from my blissful days in the graduate English program at U.Va., but something tells me reading The Canterbury Tales aloud in Middle English at bedtime isn't what this is all about. Check it out.

(And hopefully, John DeVille will appreciate the title's nod to his inferior-to-The-Matrix-but-still-interesting Dark City.)

Getting to Know Me

It occurred to me this morning, that when I give out this blog address as a good way to learn a little more about me, I may not necessarily be doing a good thing. Few blogs are more eclectic than this. A movie, book, wine, cigar, or restaurant review one day, personal narrative another, straight up ponderings on life, death, and politics on another. And then, some days, like yesterday, just something thrown in there because one of my readers gave me a hard time for being silent for over a week (connectivity was as short as time while shepherding a skydiving team to an invitational meet halfway across the country and spending every available evening with my off-to-a-nearby-college daughter). There's also the pseudo-anonymity of a pseudonym made necessary by my official position elsewhere. I strive to keep my posting appropriate enough that no lines are crossed, but even so . . .

All that said, I'm contemplating adding a box to the right margin that will collect the more introspective posts that I believe reveal something of the character of their author. Until I have time to do so, however, here's a short list of some I think belong there. If you're a regular reader and think there are obvious choices I've left off, please send me an e-mail or comment, and thanks for hanging in there. Doc

• See Off This Mountain (Part One) with links from there to Parts 2 & 3
• In Memory of Randall Combs
• A Thousand Splendid Suns
• Seasons of Love
• Natalie Portman
• In the Valley of Elah

That's a fair start.

You Don't Say

Back from five wonderful days in Laurinburg, North Carolina, with trips to Wilmington and Charlotte to break things up. Skydiving every day. Got to see my daughter on three of those five days. Witnessed a night pyrotechnic parachuting demonstration by the Golden Knights that impressed even me, and I'm hard to impress.

I have to share the funniest thing we saw. Growing up with an English professor, my girls have a keen appreciation for words. The oldest liked this sign so much, we had to go back and take a picture.

You think?

Schneier: "Upon Further Review

The ruling stands."

I'm grateful to two readers who took the time to make extensive comments, thus pointing out places in which my original post might need some elaboration. Having provided a link to the comments in that first sentence, I'll jump straight to a response, which because of its own length, I'm offering as another post, rather than a continuation of the comment string.

Gentlemen, and I mean that sincerely,

First, thank you for taking the time to respond. The dialog is why I'm here at all.

John first. You are an intelligent man. Now put that intelligence to work making a serious effort to separate cause from effect, real problem from other related and co-existent yet somewhat independent problem.

I'll explain. And keep in mind that how much I can say with regard to my own opinion of current leadership is limited by both prudence and law. That said, I think I can address the problems in logic & rhetoric here without necessarily tipping my hand.

The need for vigilance is an effect. But it is an effect, not of "the fulcrum . . . found in the Office of the Vice President, the Oval Office, and the former office of the SecDef." It's an effect of the reality imposed upon us, not even by 9/11, but by the continued existence and planning of the sorts of groups that planned and executed 9/11. 9/11 didn't cause anything. It was a wake up call. It was, itself, an effect of our complacency and hubris. The fulcrum you lament is not a cause of the need for vigilance. To some extent, it's an effect of that need. That fulcrum may exploit the need, politically. That fulcrum may choose to fan the need for vigilance into an unhealthy hypervigilance for political purposes. I'm not denying that--neither the fanning nor the unhealthy aspects of living in constant fear. But Mr. Schneier's ill-thought-out attempts to shift the blame for the inconvenience these new realities impose on us to the very people whose lives, jobs, and consciences are most affected by them, and to lull us back into a business-as-usual complacency by labeling even a genuinely necessary level of watchfulness, as you put it, "a terrorist victory by virtue of forfeit of reason" is every bit as reprehensible a journey to the other end of the spectrum.

Somewhere in between lie both sanity and safety, or at least as much of either as we are going to find in this new world. The responsibility then, of those of us who possess some skill at thought, argument, and persuasion--whose frontal lobes are still fully functional and engaged--is to steer our friends, neighbors, and countrymen toward that rational, realistic, middle ground at every opportunity. I am not a believer that the way to balance lies through competing extremes. The way to balance lies through moving both sides closer to the middle.

Your penultimate paragraph provides its own undoing in the word "potential." "To regard all strangers as potential 'Islamofascists' and every hefty bag as a potential bomb is to bring the real madness of the battlefield home which I thought was the overall objective of why the occupation is continuing." I'll make only a casual note of my disappointment in the rhetorical dishonesty that allows you to employ a line of administration spin in which I know you don't believe to do a bad job of trying to make a point, and move straight to dismantling the point itself: An ever-present awareness of such potential is not madness; it's prudence. I would hope that more than 99% of the time, we'll prudently engage our frontal lobes and conclude that the probability of the potential being reality is low enough to be summarily dismissed. But awareness of the potential is not madness. To be paralyzed by that awareness is, literally. In its most acute form, it becomes agoraphobia. If you really don't believe that prudent awareness is possible without paralyzing paranoia, then you have a much lower opinion of your fellow citizens than I. Again, the key is to constantly make the effort to rationally separate the new realities of our world from the irrational political extremes to which those realities are all too frequently put.

Like our mutual friend Barry, I have long eschewed political affiliation, largely because of my disappointment that neither side seems capable of refraining from whatever willful conflation of cause and effect best serves their own cause at the moment--common sense, mental health, and true national interests be damned.

Mr LandruBek,

I don't think I have missed the point at all. And, while you add some disingenuous extras designed to imply that my disdain for Mr. Schneier extends to everyone who reads his blog as well, which it clearly doesn't, I'm happy to say that you pretty much get mine.

I heartily disagree with your interpretation of Mr. Schneier's post as intending to allow for the subtleties of security in this new century. The very examples he uses seem to preclude that. Further, I am decidedly not a believer that security is a zero sum game. Personally, I find the very concept of zero-sum is a thing that tends to limit thinking. I find it most often employed by those whose powers of reasoning are sadly limited, or else I find it too frequently used to mislead others who depend on those in a position of trust (realizing that I refer to our ideal government rather than that lesser of evils which we usually provide ourselves as voters) to guide them. If you are committed to that concept of security, then, as you say, fine, we now know where we stand and we have little to talk about. But, if you aren't too irredeemably wed to that zero-sum construct, let me try to give you another way of thinking about things.

To think of security in that way would mean that while the bomb squad was dismantling imprudently placed Lite-Brites, they were therefore unable to respond to some other more urgent and real threat elsewhere. I'm not aware of such a threat going untended at that time. The real choice was, I think, to, in an abundance of caution, have the bomb squad respond to this and exercise the unique capabilities they possess, put their training and equipment to some use, or, at some risk of loss of life and infrastructure, let them keep twiddling their thumbs waiting for their pagers to go off. That sir, is not a zero-sum choice. Zero sum implies that to do one thing, I must not do another equally important and pressing thing. Yes, everyone, including those responsible for our security, must always choose between options for how to use their time, but until every option becomes equally urgent, we have not reached the state of affairs implied by your statement that "security is a zero sum game." Succinctly put, you are simply wrong to think that. At least part of my issue with Mr. Schneier, beyond his dismal choices of examples to make his points, is that it seems zero-sum is exactly the way he wishes you, and all the rest of his readers, to think of these things.

You accuse me of thinking of our citizenry as sheep. I don't think of our citizenry in any such broad and limiting way. Some are sheep, some are wolves, some are snakes, and some are eagles. I think our citizenry is, on the whole, quite capable of thinking for itself and for recognizing and reporting potential threats and deciding what merely "different" behavior may not merit further investigation. Mr. Schneier's disappointment that he can no longer don his fishing vest, fill the pockets with modeler's clay, run wiring from pocket to pocket and then walk unmolested through an airport or courthouse, I must sadly admit, exceeds my capacity for empathy.

Your assertion that a tilt toward over-reaction in favor of under-reaction "will hamstring secruity efforts" is not wholly without merit if one takes it as a reminder to security officials themselves to be vigilant against that state of affairs. But your choice to assume it will, in fact, be wholly unchecked, and therefore we must abandon that tilt immediately, is as fine an example of a slippery slope fallacy as a composition instructor might ever hope for. You seem to think that the world is populated by nothing but sheep, security professionals included.

Finally, you are quite right that I deliberately turned the common meaning of CYA for rhetorical effect. That's not quite the same as misconstruing. Had I thought you wouldn't notice, I could be accused of playing unfairly. Apparently though, I give you and all the other readers out there, more credit than you think.

So, for the time being, I'll stand by my original post, and my original opinion that Mr. Schneier's conduct, with his implications that security is a zero-sum game and that citizens are just too sheeplike to simultaneously be vigilant and discriminating and are therefore teetering on the edge of agoraphobia in danger of falling over with every warning to be watchful, is every bit as reprehensible as the alleged fear-mongering of which John DeVille accuses that fulcrum he so detests.

Flag on the Play: Schneier Gets It All Wrong

This started out as a comment on a post over at Enrevanche, but just got too long. So, if you're coming to this fresh, you can either dash over to Barry's place and read the post, which is actually an excerpt from a longer article, filled with so many fallacies, some factual and some logical, that I hardly know where to begin; or, you can trust me to convey the gist fairly. Personally, I'd rather you read the original to keep me honest. At any rate, here is how it opens:

We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

I'm sorry, but, "Uh-oh, flag on the play. It looks like Doc just tossed a Bullshit Flag. Here's the official call from the field: 'If you act different [sic], you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong.' GET USED TO IT."

Let me explain. I particularly liked the example of the girl wearing a circuit board and carrying a fistful of PlayDoh. Hello!! I looked at the photo. I might know it's not a bomb, but I wouldn't expect everyone to. Used to be you could do really off the wall stuff and be considered eccentric. Now you can do really off the wall stuff and be considered eccentric, or possibly, scary and dangerous. Why? Because it used to not be possible to conceive of any but the most insane among us killing innocent people indiscriminately using things we'd never thought of as weapons. Now, that's one of the world religions (I'm not picking on Islam, so don't start working yourself into a religious tizzy). I simply mean that wanting to blow yourself up and take a crowd of people with you whose main attraction is that they did nothing in particular to deserve it other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time is no longer merely an isolated psychotic condition.

So, how do we combat that? Well, the term is becoming overused, but it's still the right term: vigilance. Whether you say "Be Vigilant," "Be Watchful," or "Be Suspicious," matters, but only in terms of connotation and perception. In terms of denotation and actual action, not so much changes. So, expect a new campaign soon, one that will change all the terms with which we refer to the new role of the citizen in keeping us all in one piece (along with our dams, powerplants, landmarks, etc). Look for an effort to find some wording that makes us all feel a little less like Big Brother, while still urging us to do essentially the same things.

Is there something wrong with that? Absolutely. But it's not the fault of "the authorities" whose "CYA attitude" and "knee jerk" responses Mr. Schneier laments. Those reactions are hardly knee jerk. They're well thought out, carefully planned, and even rehearsed. Why? Because that Y in CYA stands for "your" Mr. Schneier. That's your ass their covering. Yours and everyone else's who has nothing in common with you except having done nothing at all to deserve being being blown out of their clothing as they go about their business.

You want them to protect you. You pay them for it. They have begun, as a group, to begin imagining the previously unimaginable on a daily basis. Why? Because that psuedo-religion out there has been at it for a while already. They have a head start. Our anti-hijacking training ten years ago taught us to cooperate. Always cooperate. What might have been different if the training had taken into account the potential use of a fuel-laden airliner as a weapon? Who can guess. Herein lies the problem with another of Mr. Schneier's "points," that, "People have always come forward to tell the police when they see something genuinely suspicious, and should continue to do so." How, pray tell, are we to know what looks suspicious anymore. The obviously suspicious is the least frightening.

I'm as saddened as you are at this new need to view everyone whose actions are out of the ordinary with extra scrutiny. It's sad that I have to teach my daughters that if they're ever stranded by the side of the road and someone stops to help them, that they should get in the car and lock the doors and talk to their possible good Samaritan through a closed window. But that's the reality we live in. You can adjust, or you can call my daughters ungrateful and rude.

Personally, I choose to adjust. When I've come upon a woman or youth in such a situation, I've tried to think what I would want them to do if they were my son or daughter or wife, and then not to be insulted when they act as if I might be an axe murderer. I try to modify all my actions in such a way as not to threaten, and I'm not at all insulted if they never get out of the car or unlock the door. I'd rather they not. Frankly, I might be a little wary of them. I can call for help and watch over them until the authorities arrive, or, if that makes them nervous, I can drive on.

By the same token, it may be sad, but if I choose to wear a circuit board on my sweater and carry a handful of something with the same consistency as C4 in my hand, I'm not going to be surprised when the cops surround me. I might kick myself for not stopping to think how I could look to others. I expect, if I keep my cool, I'll have a good laugh over it later.

Covering your ass Mr. Schneier is not an easy job. There was a day when such acts were inconcievable. Perhaps we'll see that day again. Until then, be watchful, be thoughtfully scrutinous of extraordinary behavior, be whatever euphemism makes you, in your new role as anti-terrorist, feel less threatening or less a puppet of the doom mongers you seem to think we are, because it is, Mr. Schneier, your role, whether you want it or not. To reject it, is to embrace the role of victim. And you are wrong, sir, to cast aspersions at those who ask for your help in this battle, or who have decided that it's better to assume the worst and then back down than to under-react then have the task of calling parents and loved ones. We study, study, damn you, events like the Virginia Tech massacre. If that unpleasant professional task tends to tilt us toward overreaction, then so be it. I'll accept that. I know parents who expect it. Demand it. I happen to be one of them.

We all wear many hats. Parent, soldier, journalist, anti-terrorist observer. It's not as if you're being asked to turn in your sister for being a Republican or voting for Bush, but you do try to make it sound that way. You make it sound as if the "relentless campaign to convince ordinary citizens that they're the front line of terrorism defense" is some effort of those who really hold the front line to shirk their jobs. I'll grant you one thing: I'd like to believe that those who share my profession are the front line. I'd like to believe that what we do, in intel, in ops, in forward locations, under fire, at great risk, is the real front line. I think that campaign, in as much as there is such a campaign, gets one thing wrong. Ordinary citizens aren't the front line. You're told that to make you feel more important and to avoid frightening you more than is absolutely necessary. Fact is, you're the last line, the inner perimeter, the nanny in the closet with the baby and the cell phone while the burglar ransacks downstairs.

And I'll close by violating a rule of mine and following a rule of mine. I detest name calling, especially when it serves as a stand-in for well thought out argument or debate (I hope I can safely avoid that accusation at this point). On the other hand, I also despise those forms of euphemism which rather than seeking to soften bad news, seek to conceal the moral cowardice that refuses to call things by their rightful name. Thus, when you say, "Causing a city-wide panic over blinking signs, a guy with a pellet gun, or stray backpacks, is not evidence of doing a good job: it's evidence of squandering police resources," then I can't help but recall that at least one of those "blinking signs" was placed on a support girder under an interstate and over a bus depot and when I remember that, I think I would be shirking my duty if I did not say, straight out, you sir, are an idiot.

Instead of bewailing the need for watchfulness that terrorists have foisted upon us all, and the necessity of exercising more caution than ever and risking the occasional overreaction, I suggest that you use whatever influence you have to move people toward more objective self-scrutiny. Don't you think, that if the advertising whiz kids had stopped and thought about it for a minute, they might have foreseen how that device might appear? That maybe an airport isn't the place to invent new forms of adornment that involve things that are, any way you look at it, similar to the components of some IEDs? They didn't think. She didn't think. Okay. I can forgive that. But for you to then lay blame on those charged with covering your ass for what you consider over-reacting? That, I have a problem with. For that, I have to throw the bullshit flag.

James Taylor

My cheeks hurt.

There's not really any way to convey, in mere words, the magic of James Taylor concert.

The first time I took my daughters to a JT concert, it was at Wolftrap in Virginia. One was just eight. The other, not quite five. From their earliest days, they knew James Taylor. More nights than not, if the oldest had trouble getting to sleep, I would dance around the living room with her in my arms, her head on my shoulder, singing along with James's newest album. "Sing the cowboy song, Daddy," was a frequent request at bedtime. Before she could speak in complete sentences, she could say, "James Taylor, Daddy, James Taylor." I honestly think, after "Mommy" and "Daddy," "James Taylor" may have been the third and fourth words she learned.

When tonight's concert wrapped up, finally, after about four encores, with a quiet, acoustic "You Can Close Your Eyes," I was sitting in the audience, with my arm around the shoulder of the my youngest daughter, whose cheeks also hurt from smiling, feeling like pretty much the luckiest father in the world.

Sometime, I'll chronicle the James Taylor soundtrack of my life, eras marked by albums, synaesthetic memories in which image and sound and emotion blur into a single remembered whole. Life in a gentle musical blender.