Musings, Trivia, Peeves, and Searing Insights

My Dad, John Bartram Penson III (1919-1987)

2010-06-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

I grew up on a farm because of my father who, at the age of 40, decided that he’d always wanted to be a farmer. My folks were both Chicago kids who’d ridden their bikes to outlying towns just to see farmland. Mom was born in Lombard, and Dad on Western Avenue in Morgan Park. He was passionate about art, and knew from a very early age that he was going to be an artist, and somehow, during the heat of the depression, managed to attend the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago.

When World War II broke out, he was so passionate about enlisting and becoming a pilot that he threatened to move us all to Canada because the RAF would accept him – a doddering old man at the age of 27 – and the fledgling Army Air Corps here in the States would not (the men in his flight class called him “Pops”). Eventually, The USAAC resolved the issue by admitting him. He trained in Texas, where I now live, flying B-25s until the war ended, never seeing action. His uniform, his wings, his service was a source of extreme pride to him to his final days.

He worked as a commercial artist for most of his career, designing well known packages for Kleenex, AC spark plugs, logos for UpJohn, Wammo, and retired from this to teach commercial art at Northern Illinois University. He appeared in an ad in Time magazine when I was a child, something that inspired complete awe and wonder in me.

He’d played baseball as a young man, eventually working his way up to a small farm unit for the St Louis Cardinals, but “gave it up for women” (my mom.)

From my father, I inherited my creativity, my sensitivity, but also my addictiveness and depression. As is the way of all people, we inherit both the good and the bad from our folks. Despite this, I wouldn’t trade who my father was with anyone. When my mom met him, she thought he looked like Tyrone Power and was immediately smitten.

There is not a single day of my life that passes that I don’t think about my father. He was enormously prideful in equal amounts to his sensitivity, and at time very irascible, belligerent, at others as caring and compassionate as any living man.

Once, when he and my mother were courting, walking along Lake Michigan, they’d seen a crowd gather at the breakfront watching a dog that was struggling in the breakwater, unable to climb the rocks. It infuriated my father, and after belittling the crowd verbally (which I can easily image him doing), he stripped off his shirt and dove into the churning, icy water. The dog, near drowning, clawed at him, scratching him, but he clung on, and was helped out of the water with the dog (by the same people he’d belittled). My mom was won over.

Here’s to you, Dad. I’ll love you always.

Bob Curell's 1929 Gibson Style 5 original 5 string banjo

2010-06-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

Today, friend Bob Curell was in town from Arizona and, after two years of trying to hook up, we finally got together. An hour and a half later I am still goose bumps. He has a Pre War Gibson banjo. This prewar has an original 5 string neck. This banjo is a flathead. This banjo has been in his family since 1935. It is a Style 5. Perhaps the ONLY ONE IN EXISTENCE. It was in my lap…

(Note to non banjo-files out there: Before WW II, dating back to the 1920s, banjo production was very high. Banjo "orchestras" and clubs popped up everywhere. Lest you think this meant bluegrass, remember this was 25 years before the term was coined. Banjo meant jazz and blues, was played with a "plectrum" (pick), and was a 4 string affair. Most modern day banjos are of the 5 string variety, the fifth string providing that driving, chiming sound that makes for bluegrass and mountain banjo. Prior to WW II, only a very few country artists were in the market for a 5 string banjo (most made their own), and Gibson made very few. These are generally considered to be the finest examples of 5 string banjos ever made, and some fetch upwards of 100,000 dollars. Of these, most are owned by top bluegrass pros today. Earl Scruggs famously played a 1930s Granada by Gibson for most of his career. Of all the models made, there is perhaps only one Style 5, with it's garish art deco designs, in existence. This is it.)

I owned a 1927 TB-3 archtop conversion, so I was accustomed to the feel of a pre-wwII Gibson, but to say that I was in any way prepared for this would be a lie. Folks can go on all day about the differences between flatheads and archtops, 1 piece flanges and tube and plate, and these all absolutely contribute to different sounds, so I had a pretty open mind on what to expect. But to hold the real deal in my hand - the holy grail of banjos – well... I was a bit surprised to feel my hands shaking. I was nervous, if not from the anticipation, simply from the fact that I was holding a pretty good sized home mortgage in my lap. I hit a few notes. I have a habit when I play a new instrument of leaning my head over the pot to catch as much of the sound as I can. On most banjos made by mere human hands, the sound can be loud, but not overwhelming. I was OK until I happened to hit a good solid 1st and 5th pinch. My ear is still ringing. I’m not talking about volume, although there was tons of it, but clarity – precision, the sound of the most piercing bell ring you can imagine. No harsh overtones, no buzzy, ringy after tones or harmonics. Just unbridled, get the hell out of my way, pure, pulsing 5 string banjo.

One of the things I remember about my ’27 TB-3 was the petite nature of the finish. Once, I’d taken my tenor neck down to dust it using a damp paper towel and was horrified to see deep red finish come off on the paper. Curtis McPeake assured me this was OK, and that these finishes were typical of instruments from that period. Today, in the days of absolutely perfect deep gloss finishes, the thought of making a new instrument where you can actually feel the boundary between the binding and the wood is unthinkable. I remember also looking at the Mastertone block, obviously hand cut, with small scratches where the grave had overshot the mark. Heavens, a CNC machine would be returned to manufacturer if it put out such shoddy work.

This banjo, from its wear worn neck, friction 5th string peg, crackled finish on the resonator (where the finish is so thin, you can actually see the grain lines when held against the light just right), hand chalked serial number in the resonator, gaudy rhinestoned peg head overlay just screamed art deco from the ‘30s. And it could not have been more beautiful. I could “see” the luthier. I could see the work on his hands.

Bob told me the history, as best he knew it. It was owned by an L. K. Miller for a fairly short period of time before his father bought it in 1935. One owner, for the most part, for the entire life of the instrument. This is like finding a ’63 split window Corvette in someone’s garage with the price sticker still on it. Bob is a gracious, magnanimous owner. His goal is to get as many pickers to see this piece and play it. It’s not meant to be in a vault somewhere, he says. And I agree. And now I’m lucky to have been chosen to be one of these pickers.

I played a few tunes and marveled at the balanced tone from top to bottom. The neck intonates perfectly as high on the fret board as you choose to play. My hands were unaccustomed to the feel (I play a Doug Dillard type super high head tension, thin bridge, light string archtop) and stumbled to “get” the instrument for a while. Bob has it setup with a thicker bridge, medium strings, fairly high action and medium head tension to get a more primitive tone from it. The banjo was patient with me, though, and simply lay there as if it was saying “I’m ready to do more anytime you are.” One of the things that really struck me was that usually banjos setup like this don’t respond to soft playing. Not here. This responded with the lightest touch, but never “overrode” the sound when played hard. By the end, I was pretty sure the banjo was capable of doing far more than I was able to plug into it, but it tolerated me.

I want to thank Bob for this opportunity, and have posted a set of pages on my site to document the occasion photographically. Bob, thanks a million. I will remember this day on my last day.

How Many to Follow?

2010-06-10T07:34:00.000-07:00

One of the trends I’ve noticed over the last year is people whose following numbers are about as impressive as their followed by numbers. I’ve never messed around with auto-following, and in principle, I don’t think it’s wrong, but at some point I believe there is a maximum number of people one can legitimately say that they are “following”. I think my current number is about 800, and I’m beginning to feel I’m not doing most of them any favor by missing most of their tweets as my timeline rips past me.

I supposed we’re all on here to “market” something. Even if it’s just to meet new people, we’re kind of marketing ourselves. Some, on the other hand, are all about marketing some product or service (most of my new followers, lately), and their following/follower numbers reflect an effort to broadcast as widely as they can. I’m going to suggest that if you follow 16,879 people, you’re probably going to miss that tweet from your sister inviting you to her kid’s birthday party.

One of the side effects of this proliferation of following numbers is as follows: You wake up in the morning, send out a tweet saying that you’re doing pretty well, then, trickling in over the next couple of hours, you’ll receive tweets from followers saying “How are you today?” Well, I’ve already said how I was today, right? The underlying problem is that some people use this mini-blog system as a sort of souped up messaging service/chat program. But I suspect the real problem is that they are just following too many people to see your morning tweet.

Twitter was originally designed to network small groups of people, like a project team at a company, so that everybody could see updates on everyone else’s activity. I don’t think one thought was given to celebrities who garner millions of followers, or marketers who follow hundreds of thousands of people. At this point, there’s not much difference between this and email spam (and tweets from them are probably treated about the same).
There are no rules in Twitter. You can use it however you want to. And I suppose that’s the beauty of the thing, as it allows for constant evolution. But the next time your Aunt Minnie wonders why you’re snubbing her on Twitter, you might look at your following number.

Later.

Jim

Apology

2010-05-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

I tried really hard. I did.

Once upon a time I followed (on Twitter) a certain Hollywood actress who, for reasons I hope she doesn’t still regret, chose to follow me back. I blew this chance, demanding too much of what I perceived as a relationship. I thought I was special, I guess. No fool like an old fool.

Now, hat in hand, I’m asking back in from the cold. How to do this? How to not sound like the foolish sycophant I fear she sees me as? Or am I being grandiose to even think that she may still remember me? That was about 200,000 follows ago. If I’m really lucky I won’t get blocked. If I even get noticed.

I tried to stay away. I tried to put her out of my mind. This worked really well for about 2 and a half days. Then I just accidentally started peeking in on her tweets again now and then. Then I quit lying to myself and followed her again.

Was I the fool for following her in the first place? The fool for unfollowing her when I thought she wasn’t responding to me? Or the fool to think I may be (or should be) forgiven? Or (perhaps worst fear of all) the fool for not letting go.

Well, I can’t. I tried. I really did. I miss her.

Jim

Celibate! Celibate! Dance to the Music!

2010-05-03T10:18:00.000-07:00

To say my life worked out a little differently than what I had planned would be an understatement of cosmic proportions. A decent student in school, I come from a family of highly educated folks, and figured at some point the need to get a few degrees would take hold and propel me towards some sort of academic pursuit. I actually took Latin in high school with the vague notion that one needed it in med school. Hah.

It’s now 40 years later. Medical school became law, then just a bachelors degree in something and even that didn’t happen. What did happen was music. And alcohol. I spent the better part of 20 years lost to both. Then, through a circuitous chain of events, computers entered my life, and I was suddenly calling myself things like “Technical writer” and “web developer”. I’d married once, divorced some 11 years later, then again (newly sober).

Then the year 2001 happened. Annis terribilis. Remember what the headlines were before 9-11? I do. Very clearly. “Tech Bubble Bursts. Job Losses in the Thousands”. My dad, a commercial artist and later teacher, had exactly three jobs in his adult life. My mom had one. One. I’ve had three jobs in 6 months. My last “permanent” job lasted 4 months. Gaps in my resume led me back to music, and I wound up single again, broke and, for the first time in my adult life, alone. To say that I never saw myself being alone, self employed as a music performer/teacher at the age of 55 falls short. This is all just to say that I became pretty accustomed to radical, unforeseen change in my life. So much so that change sneaked up on me frequently.

I guess somewhere in through all of this mess I just assumed that sex was necessary. I had, as mentioned before, been in a relationship with a woman for most of my adult life. Suddenly, (after a couple of nightmarish Match.com experiences), I found myself alone and, while I can’t say I liked it, I certainly didn’t seem to be doing anything to change it. Looking back, I see that I had put myself in a sort of “time-out” from women. At first, probably just to show myself that I didn’t need a woman, but then later, more like a sort of cleansing process. I’d been at this about 3 years before the “C” word popped into my head as anything other than a passing notion: Celibacy. People go through periods of their lives where sex is not available to them, and perhaps even not that desirable, but celibacy is something more than that. It’s saying that you are willfully avoiding sex.

A friend of mine decided that the answer to all my problems was simply for me to “get laid”. From the long perspective of a few years without, this statement sounds more agricultural than it does erotic. Like I had to have a gland expressed or something. A friend of his girl friend’s was lined up for me, a date was set, and I found myself completely relieved when she backed out. This gave me pause. Why was I relieved? I did a fearless and searching moral inventory and discovered a few things:
1) It gives me a feeling of control. Control over my body, my relationships, my life
2) It feels cleansing, purifying
3) I realized that I had unconsciously related many of the problems of my adult life to decisions or actions revolving sex.
4) It is not physically “necessary”. At least not in the ways I had been led to believe. My body has adapted quite well to it.

I’ve been celibate for nearly 5 years now. Is this how I want to spend the rest of my life? No. Right now I’m too busy trying to reinvent myself to throw a complex relationship into the mix. So, for now, anyway, I celebrate my celibacy. It’s not a life style (at least I don’t think so), but it does feel right, at least right now.

Later.

Jim

A Reasonable Response to Swine Flu

2009-10-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

In this season of divisive, rancorous debate over politics, with media sources entrenched on the right and the left, there's one thing you will see them in agreement on: Hyped up fear mongering of the H1N1 swine flu outbreak. My two youngest kids came down with swine flu the first week of school this fall, initially scaring the heck out their mom and I. About ten days, a couple of doctor visits, a few boxes of Kleenex, a gallon or two of hand sanitizer and some Tamiflu later, we came away a little wiser about the nature of this new flu. Sure, they got high fevers - both around 102, 103 for a few hours - and yes, they developed bad coughs, had sore throats, but you know what? It looked and acted a whole lot like any flu I've ever seen.

During the course of this, I did a lot of research on H1N1 and was surprised to see how trumped up much of the coverage about this "pandemic" was. Here are some widely reported assumptions:

1) It is disproportionately striking down the young and healthy. "Regular" flu is supposed to attack only the old, very young, and those with underlying health problems. The statement is essentially true, but it's what is not being said that tells the real story. The CDC itself is assuming that the reason older people may not be getting H1N1 is that that have been exposed to a similar strain at some time in the past. So, the real statement should not be "it's striking down young people", but "it's not striking older people". Same result, very different fear factor.

2) Swine flu is deadlier than the regular flu: The current death rate of H1N1 cases is about 1%, lower than that of the regular seasonal flu. This is a rate currently lower than the regular seasonal flu. But the significant fact here is not that it's any more virulent. It's just new. Few people have any immune defense against it.

3) Face masks work: Viruses are so small it has only been with relatively recent microscope technology that they have even been able to image them.They are thousands of times smaller than bacteria. Trying to stop a virus with a store bought "dust" mask (the disposable paper sort) is like trying to catch water with a tennis racket.

An old Poli Sci prof of mine said something once that I have never forgotten: "Media does not exist to inform you. It exists to sell advertising". And this is just as true of Fox as it is MSNBC. Whatever your politics may be, if you're concerned about swine flu, take some time to go through the CDC site's pages: Centers for Disease Control.

Why I Don't Do Follow Friday

2009-10-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

To you on Twitter, you recognize this term as heralding the weekly day of friends referral in which you post account names to your timeline for others to consider following. Who knows how this started, but it certainly caught on. In the early days of Twitter (or at least in my early days) I was an enthusiastic participant. I've changed my views about it, however, as my number of followers increased.

Twitter, as a social network app, was originally intended to form small groups of "followers" to post updates to one another answering the basic question "What are you doing right now?" As a few trillion people joined the service, this basic concept had the doors blown off it as people (either through direct actions or by force of their celebrity) garnered thousands, even millions of followers. I have always sought to use Twitter as a means of communicating directly with people. This obviously becomes impractical, even impossible, if you have a few hundred thousand followers. Communicating with everybody is impossible, so of course some sort of selection or culling has to take place. This is where Follow Friday gets a little problematic. Let's say you have a thousand avid followers. Of these thousand, let's assume that 100 of them actively seek interchange with you. While you may be able to keep up with this many tweets as long as they don't all come in at the same time. It's kind of hard to say that you're really in communication with them, at least not on any kind of personal level. So, along comes Follow Friday, and you find yourself in the business of recommending people to others for following. Do you:

a) Recommend all 100 of them, being egalitarian? If so, all 1,000 of your followers will see that you have selected 100 of them, possible offending the other 900. At 140 characters per tweet, you will also flood your timeline, and that of your followers, with tweet after tweet of recommended account names.

b) Cherry pick the 15 or so that you really communicate with (either through @replies or DMs). This can really look snobby if not handled really well.

c) Select just one or two a week for really special reasons (offending the other 9,999 who are wondering why they aren't special).

d) or simply not engage in FF. Which is what I do. And which can also look snobby if others are recommending you and you're not returning the favor. In this regard, it can be a lot like Christmas cards (and about as sincere).

I have chosen option D, at least for now. I think in the long run, I'd rather not get into the cherry picking business at all. My favorite tweeters are those that engage me, and there are simply too many of them to refer each Friday. I guess I'd rather run the risk of offending all a little bit than offending some a lot.

I appreciate everyone who follows me. Moreover, I appreciate everyone who engages me by reading and responding to what I write. But Follow Friday has taken on the aspect of Mother's day where you are expected to show your love and gratefulness or risk offending mom. I always like my mom's view of Mother's day. 'I'd rather you showed that you loved me the other 364 days a year and not make Hallmark rich on this one day". I hope that in some way, through my tweets, I'm showing everybody who engages me that I appreciate them, and I hope they know that I implicitly recommend them all without having to prove it once a week. To me, your follower count is not a popularity contest. It's also not a marketing tactic. They are people that have chosen to "listen" to me, and the number of them is the least significant thing in the world to me. Each one is of value. Follow them all!

Later,
Jim

A Reasonable Response to Swine Flu

2009-10-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

Why I Unfollowed Alyssa Milano

2009-10-04T20:57:00.000-07:00

Twitter can create the illusion of closeness. It’s easy to read a Tweet from Ashton Kutcher chatting about his lunch and think you are close to him in some way. You and 5 million other cozy friends.

I fell dead, deep, stupid in love with Alyssa Milano years ago. How on earth you can fall in love with someone you’ve never met, I don’t know. I suppose a therapist would say that I’d “idealized” love, and chosen some remote, safe, impossible epitome of love, free from any possibility of heartbreak. Which is, of course, exactly what I got.

I’ve been on Twitter for about 6 months I think. At first, I followed a few celebs just to get the feeling of the thing when someone from an old fan site of hers found me and told me she was on Twitter. I was following in 5 seconds. Amazingly, after a few weeks, she followed me back. I don’t really know how this happened, but you can imagine my delight. I promised not to geek out on her too much in a DM (direct message to you non-twitter users, only she and I could read), and things went along swimmingly for a while. Gradually, the reply tweets and even response DMs trailed off, then stopped altogether. In her final DM to me, in response to my asking if I’d said something wrong (don’t I sound like the pathetic guy in high school who just wouldn’t get a clue that you didn’t want to date him??), I got a terse response: “Been busy. Seldom check my DMs”. This is the Twitter equivalent of “I have to wash my hair tonight.” Alyssa follows almost exactly the same number of people I do. You have to follow a person in order for them to DM you. I get about 8 DMs a day. Pretty hard to miss.

In earlier days, when I’d first joined Twitter, she was open, unguarded, colloquial. But one could watch her follower count go up, literally by the minute, and as it did so, her tone became more reserved, official, distant. No longer a chat room, peer-to-peer network of any kind. She was now standing at a podium in front of a couple hundred thousand loyal faithful hanging at her every word. Her personal tweets virtually stopped. Her interaction with Twitter notables increased, however, most notably Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter whom she idolizes (probably because he early on ID’d her as a high end celebrity Twitter user. He’s no fool). I found myself suffering something of a heartbreak, and felt even more foolish than I had before.

Today, I unfollow her. A celebrity with 200 thousand followers who followed me, and I am unfollowing her. Most of her fans would think I’m insane. Last night, in a melancholy moment before signing off for the night, I wrote this:

Two words of endearment so casually spent,
Pliant, quiet, composed of light

I took them to heart, my heart spent their currency
And reflected the light of them harshly into a dark corner
Where there was no one to see the shimmer

The words, so impermanent, dimming, transient
I wanted to fix them to you like a brooch
You weren’t there. No one was.

A thousand million hearts at sea
Mine as small as a light bird trapped in the canopy
I want to own them, possess them – it’s not my choice
A random act of fondness lost

I run out of water before my boat has risen
Sitting in it, oar in hand, making the sign of the cross, the rose
I will, after time has passed, stand, rise, depart
And, leaving, curse the boat, not the water

Two words, misspent, like my errant youth
Two words, recalled, anonymously
Two words, released, relieved, retrieved
Two words, too quick to be believed
“Love you”

Above all, I think I am embarrassed. What a ridiculous old misanthrope. There is so much distance between the head and heart, though. The head knows too well the distorted logic I deployed throughout this. The heart, though, that lonely hunter, does not deal in logic. It was difficult to write this, to publish it. I am outing myself as a “celebrity stalker” of sorts, I guess, although it felt lot more real than that at one point. The lies we tell ourselves.

Just hit the unfollow button. There’s no fool like an old fool.

Later,
Jim

A Poem For the Person Who Will Never Read It

2009-10-03T20:18:00.000-07:00

Two words of endearment so casually spent,
Pliant, quiet, composed of light

I took them to heart, my heart spent their currency
And reflected the light of them harshly into a dark corner
Where there was no one to see the shimmer

The words, so impermanent, dimming, transient
I wanted to fix them to you like a brooch
You weren’t there. No one was.

A thousand million hearts at sea
Mine as small as a light bird trapped in the canopy
I want to own them, possess them – it’s not my choice
A random act of fondness lost

I run out of water before my boat has risen
Sitting in it, oar in hand, making the sign of the cross, the rose
I will, after time has passed, stand, rise, depart
And, leaving, curse the boat, not the water

Two words, misspent, like my errant youth
Two words, recalled, anonymously
Two words, released, relieved, retrieved
Two words, too quick to be believed

“Love you”

How Are We Using Twitter?

2009-09-07T08:42:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a friend last week about Twitter. He told me that he occasionally checked in on my tweets, which surprised me, since I didn't even know he was on Twitter. Turns out he just follows me (under an account name I wouldn't recognize) without tweeting. In internet parlance, he "lurks" me. My instant reaction was "Hmm. I wonder what I've said on Twitter that I wouldn't have said had I known he'd been reading." I teased him a bit for being a lurker, asked him why he didn't tweet, to which he responded by saying "People are using Twitter as a chat room. I hate chat rooms." This stuck in my head, and later that night I realized he was at least partially right. But people use Twitter for many things, and probably most of them far outside the intent of the application designers.

What are we using Twitter for?

1 Social network: Friends, coworkers, project members. Small, close knit, linked by close personal or business relationship. Ranges from business to personal tweeting. All two way communication. This is probably the closest use to the original intent of the designers.

2 Social network: Make/find new friends. Heavy personal tweeting. All two way communication.

3 Self promotion: This can range from celebrities who merely broadcast their stuff, following and responding to few if any folks, to people just trying to get others to buy their music, read their blogs, etc. Some personal tweeting, some interaction, but limited. Mostly a one way communication.

4 Marketing: These are people who use Twitter for one purpose only - to make money. Very little if any personal tweeting. Two way communication (if you buy their product...)

Subgroups: By Use

1 Chat room. Looks and acts just like instant messaging, used as same. (You're right, Kirk!)

2 Broadcasting: A one way communication designed to notify fans, friends, others of news.

3 Marketing: Open attempt to connect purely for purpose of selling a product or service.

It's easy at this to make proclamations about how Twitter should be used. I've done this myself in the past, but I have come to believe that Twitter can be used for any (legal) purpose that Twitter allows. Some tweets can be offensive, intrusive, unwanted, but we always have the option to unfollow and block if necessary.

Who knows what the future of this app is. Personally, I'm glad they are keeping it sleek and simple. By comparison, FaceBook, to me, has become so obtuse through "enhancements" that it is navigationally daunting and off-putting. I hope Twitter stays simple.

If you want to check out how I use it, I am @banjoist123. Hope to tweet you there!

Later.

Infant Son

2009-08-26T16:59:00.000-07:00

When I lived back across town, I used to jog down a little country road to get to the park. At the bottom of the hill on this road was a small stream with a two lane bridge. I've always been a water nut, after having grown up on a farm with a small creek running through it, and am not able to pass over a stream without at least a casual glance to see if the water's clear, muddy, any fish, how deep, etc. I'd been running across this bridge for month's, maybe even a year and never noticed anything other than a narrow clear water stream running over some rocks and moss. This day the covering of trees aligned their branches just right and allowed a shaft of sunlight straight down on something as I passed, and it caught my eye. It appeared to be a partially covered license plate, nothing of terrible interest, although I did slow to see if I could make out the year. What I saw stopped me in my tracks.

INFANT

That's no license plate, I thought. Later that day I came back with some boots on to cut through the brush surrounding the creek on either side of the bridge. Dropping into the creek somewhat abruptly, I almost landed on the object. It was a stone. Cut stone, almost immediately recognizable as a head stone. I didn't really do anything for a while. I just stood there wondering how the hell a child's tombstone wound up in a creek bed. The bridge behind me had scary looking graffiti under it. Maybe this was some sick satanic thing, I thought. Maybe this was where the child was buried?! No, it couldn't ever have been anything but a creek bed. Someone had thrown this off the bridge, perhaps stolen as a prank, then discarded. I had to repatriate it. I began digging and soon found that the stone extended deeply into the creek bed. It took perhaps five minutes of digging to even get the stone loose enough to rock in its bed. Another couple of minutes to get it to move, slowly, sliding up out of the muck. The part of the stone that lay beneath the water and mud was blackish green with algae, but words could be made out.

INFANT
SON OF
MR. & MRS..
B. F.
GILLENTINE
1918

I felt a strong wave of sadness pass over me. A nameless infant. A son. Was he the only son? The only child? Did Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Gillentine still live, and if they did, did they lay at night, just before sleep, wondering what sort of son he would have made?

I cleaned up the stone that night and made some internet inquiries into the name. The closest I could ever come - and I thought I had hit it on the head - was a Benjamin Franklin Gillentine in far West, Texas, hundreds of miles from the Dallas area where I live. I got him on the phone, a very old man, somewhat gruff and either not comprehending what I was asking, or simply thinking I was trying to sell him something. In short, I gave up, and put the stone in my garage, where it's been for nearly ten years. Perhaps I'll restart the search for a relative, a grave, a cemetery. In the intervening years, the internet has burgeoned, and perhaps more genealogical information is there now to help me find a resting place for the stone.

1918 was the year of the Great Flu Epidemic. It swept through Texas as well as the rest of the world, killing the young and old alike. I found a guy through the local library who tracked all the headstones in all the cemeteries in Arlington, Texas, and he couldn't find the name. He said there was dozens if not hundreds of nameless infant graves from that year.

It's a sad thing to have lying around the house, and I feel a little like a vandal myself, just having it here, like the remnants of some bad Halloween prank. And it may in fact be just that.

I'll try again. This headstone belongs somewhere. My daughter suggested we just take it to one of the little country cemeteries around here, but that doesn't seem right, either, like taking a child to the park and leaving him there. I'd rather have the stone here.

Later

Waterman, Illinois, June 28th, 1878

2009-08-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

My dad, a successful commercial designer of some note, decided he wanted to be a farmer when he hit 40.I don't think the term midlife crisis existed back then, but I'm sure this act of vocational insanity on his part qualified as such. I was about 6 years old, and saw our move from comfortable middle class suburban Batavia, Illinois to the little farm town of Waterman as an enormous adventure. The farm had been a steal, and we soon found out why. Situated on 140 acres, the farm house was so dilapidated that the previous owners had kept chickens in the living room, which was sectioned off from the rest of the house with chicken wire and plywood. Rat holes were covered with old license plates. The original deed on the farm had been signed with an indian tribe, the Shabonna Indians, in 1865. It was the oldest building I'd ever set foot in. Dad immediately started spending every free weekend moments dragging us kids out for "work weekends" trying to get the house habitable, which, to his credit, he eventually did, making something of a local landmark of the place. In the process, he tore into walls - ancient pre-sheetrock lat and plaster walls, and discovered what I considered to be some of the greatest wonders of my young life.
Once upon a time, when people still actually used razor blades, when they changed them, they would slip the old blade into a slot at the back of a recessed medicine cabinet. If you see an old medicine cabinet, look for this slot at the back. It's just the size of an old double edged razor blade. When dad tore into the bathroom wall, a torrent of ancient razor blades came pouring out. These were startling, but not much in the way of collectibles. This was not all that came out of the walls, however. Here's a list, as best I can remember:

1 - One woman's high button "greave" shoe, with perhaps a dozen buttons running up the side. Shrivelled from age, it was still impossibly small by modern standards, and yet black, clearly an adult woman's shoe.

2 - Corn cobs. This as a complete mystery to us. At first we thought that rats had taken the ears of corn into the walls, depositing the cobs. We later learned from an old neighbor that people used to put cobs in the walls as primitive insulation.

3- A letter (copy below) dated June 28th, 1978. This floored me as a child, like taking a time machine back to the time of Civil War. The edges had been nibbled off by rats, so many of the words are missing, but the general meaning comes through shining across the decades. A young woman is not going to a dance, and most certainly going nowhere with "Georgie". In fact, she's not even going to be at church on Sunday, but safely at home. Poor Georgie. Was this a letter sent and received, secreted in a wall, or written and never mailed.

Etta, I love you across time, feel your pain, think about you sitting at home at the farm house hating on Georgie, but probably really wishing you were at the dance. Thanks for sharing your house with me, a hundred years later.

Later.

Regarding bicycles, pedestrians, and what happens when the twain do meet.

2009-08-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

Short blog post before I piss off anymore bicyclists on Twitter. This path I’m talking about is a long very nice concrete two lane job running something like 18 linear miles along the Trinity River in Arlington, Texas. It’s a “multi-use” path, and is clearly marked as such throughout. It is also clearly marked with signs as follows:

· Speed limit 20 mph.
· Announce “Passing on left” when passing
· Bicycles yield to pedestrians.

As you can see, the warnings are mostly pointed at cyclists. Not many of us run fast enough to pass anything other than turtles and snakes. I’m pretty sure the world record 100 meter dash is not much above 20 mph, so that’s pretty much for bikes, too.
Now, the real problem lies in this whole “multi-use” business. Because of this, you have a range of users from high end cyclists on 2 thousand dollar bikes and competition dress to mother’s walking their toddlers. Not a good recipe for sharing. Having said this, though, for right or wrong, the signs say cyclists yield to pedestrians. Not “when appropriate” or “when I feel like it”, but in all cases. Are there jerky inconsiderate (mostly just clueless) pedestrians? Sure. They just tend to be outnumbered by bicyclists bent on pushing the speed limit, riding two across (in your lane coming at you) and not announcing anything except “Look out!” at the pedestrians when they get in their way.

The cyclists need their own path. That’s the real solution. But unless and until, as long as there is no enforcement out there, it’s actually dangerous to be a pedestrian. The difference is this: a pedestrian is not going to cause a pedestrian collision. Bicylces can not only cause these with peds, but also with other cyclists. I’ve seen two cyclists bitch each other out for not minding lanes. This is a pretty serpentine path. Cyclists sometimes don’t anticipate what might be around the next bend. On foot, that’s not a problem. At 19.9 mph on a bike, it can literally be a life or death situation.

So, at any rate, here’s what happened today.

I am running in my lane headed eastward. A woman jogger with child in a jog stroller in front of her is about to pass me in the oncoming, opposite lane. At this moment, a cyclist at or near 20 mph approaches in my lane from behind me. I don’t hear him, but see the woman jogger’s eyes go huge. The cyclist yells something at her while, at speed, passing BETWEEN US, in both our lanes, yielding to neither of us, not announcing his pass, not touching his brakes. If I had stumbled and fallen to my left, it would have thrown him into her path, her child’s stroller, at a speed easily high enough to kill the child. I was freaking furious. He didn’t slow down at all, but actually had the gall to call some kind of admonishment back AT US for not making way for him! If I’d been a cop, that guy would never sit on a bicycle again.

I have a theory. I was actually a cyclist too, up until I started running about 9 years ago. You don’t go to school, read books, take classes and tests to become a bicylclist like we do when we learn to drive a car. So, our dad pushes us down the driveway, let’s go, and the whole rest of the body of our bicylcle instruction is self taught. Kids don’t know about stop signs, yield signs. Ever see a kid on a bike stop at a stop sign? And a lot of that is because this sort of loose self taught, non regulated method for learning doesn’t have anything to do with the rules of the road. Most of us were too busy jumping sidewalks, hedges, sprinklers, whatever, to avoid stop signs. So, there we are, 20, 30 years later, gear strapped on, climbing onto our 2 thousand dollar bikes, with the same attitudes we had riding the neighborhood as kids.

So, yes, pedestrians can be jerks on the park path, too. The difference is that they don’t have any where near as much potential to do great physical harm. And there are a great many very good cyclists whom I pass every day. We say Hi to each other and sometimes even stop to talk.

This is not about all bicyclists. Neither is it about pedestrians. It’s about rules and safety. It is about jerks, and they can be on foot, in cars, on bikes, in planes, everywhere.

Why I Hate Aphorisms

2009-08-02T07:08:00.000-07:00

Well, I really don’t hate them. I mean, what’s to hate about “A conceited person never gets anywhere because he thinks he is already there.” Or “A winner never quits -- a quitter never wins.” An aphorism is defined by Webster as: 1 : a concise statement of a principle, or 2 : a terse formulation of a truth or sentiment. They’re the sort of thing that slowly puts a wry smile on your face, or evokes a knowing nod, or a wistful sigh. And I just hate them. They always hit me as trite, contrived, sappy, corny, any of a host of negative reactions, but that’s not really my beef with them. Here, then, is a list of things I find irritating about aphorisms:

1. They really aren’t very original. When was the last time you heard one that was truly unique? For me, about 30 years ago.

2. They’re usually just a reformulation of something that you already know. Sort of a “preaching to the choir” thing. When was the last time you really had your mind, life strategy, attitude changed by an aphorism? I mean REALLY changed?

3. They tend to be things that we don’t so much follow as simply find comforting, reassuring, calming. We feel better about ourselves not for acting in response to them but in sharing them with others, as if we are the wise old sages.

4. We tend to feel better about ourselves not by following the wisdom in them, but by SHARING the wisdom with others. I watched a 5 or 6 tweet long “dueling aphorisms” episode on Twitter a few weeks ago, one aphorism evoking an “Oh, that’s a good one! Here’s another one?” like the two tweeters were passing along old family recipes.

5. They are just saccharine. I have really only ever felt truly nailed in the forehead by about 2 aphorisms, and this was because they were truly unique, truly wise, and hit me at exactly the right moment.

6. They are too clever, too contrived.

7. They don’t represent how we actually communicate. I mean, did Kahlil Gibran really speak this way? Wife: “Kahlil, honey, what do you want for supper?” answer: ;” A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.”

8. They all tend to sound like your high school basketball coach. At least they sound like my high school basketball coach.

9. They can take the place of original thought, insight, experience, wisdom. On Twitter, at any rate, I would much rather hear what YOU have to say, and not Rumi. (Whoever he is.)

10. There’s an air of condescension, arrogance about them. If you really spoke like this to other people, you’d be branded as a tool. Even just repeating them for others implies that you are doling out wisdom from a place superior to others.

I would love to be at a dinner party where Kahlil Gibran, Winston Churchill, and M Scott Peck all happened to be at the same table. Can you imagine the aphorism showdown? It reminds me of the scene from “Tombstone” where the Doc Holiday character and the Johnny Ringo character start trading quips in Latin while others look on in awe. This may be how people write, but it’s not how they speak, at least not where I live. And even if it is how they write, they better be pretty damn wise to get away with it. I notice from looking at some of the famous aphorism websites that there seem to be certain criteria for doling out this wisdom:

· Being dead appears to give you a bully pulpit. Gives a sort of timeless wisdom aspect to them. Also protects us from copyright infringement.

· Being obscure lends an air of mystery and wisdom. If it weren’t for his aphorisms, most of us would probably think Kahlil Gibran was one of the convicted 9-11 terrorists.

· Being a world leader, religious icon, famous person is a distinct advantage. If you are nobody, you ought to be pretty damn wise before expecting to get quoted.

· Coming from another culture appears to give a boost. Adds to the air of mystery, I guess. There's a distinct bias towards Eastern knowledge, I find. From Persia to China. I often wonder how well these are even being translated.

· Coming from another era seems important. Most of these come from at least the last century.

But, really my problem with aphorisms is this: I suspect that we don’t intend to share wisdom, brighten someone’s day, make the world a better place, etc. at all, so much as we are really just wanting people to think “You know, he’s a pretty savvy guy.” It’s not about the message, it’s about us. We say we are trying to brighten another’s day, but I suspect we are just trying to brighten our own in the good old fashioned way – through hubris. They say “ I am sage. I am well read. I know who Jonas Salk is.”

Here, then, are some of my favorites, and why

· Dense, oblique: “A reasonable man adapts himself to suit his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” G B Shaw. This one makes my head hurt.

· “As the fly bangs against the window attempting freedom while the door stands open, so we bang against death ignoring heaven.” Doug Horton. The absolute impenetrable nature of this one is topped only by the fact that I have absolutely no idea who Dough Horton is. But my life has been changed forever.

· “"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."” Lewis Carrol. Truly oblique.

· “Education is civil defense against media fallout.” Marshall McLuhan. Double-U Tee Eff?

I will end this, then, with my favorite aphorism by Voltaire, whom I have now managed to suggest to you that I have read, or at least know who the hell he was, by quoting him: “A witty saying proves nothing.”

Later.

What to Tweet

2009-07-26T09:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve been refining and developing my Twitter style for a number of months now, and while I don’t claim to be any kind of expert Tweeter, I don’t think anyone really can. I mean, the app has only been around for a year or so, and nobody’s handing out degrees in it. There’s a lot of writing out there having to do with how to connect with people through following, but not so much on what to actually write about, so I thought I’d put down some of my observations.

Perhaps the biggest problem with getting started in Twitter is that at first you don’t have many people reading what you write. If you have a dozen followers, you may have less than 4 or 5 actually reading what you tweet. Of these 4 or 5, perhaps 1 or 2 will actually respond to your content. Because your first followers are probably pretty familiar to you, these tweets will tend to be about friends or family news, like “Are you going to Aunt Gladys’s birthday party next month?” Well, obviously you have to know who Aunt Gladys is, and care about her birthday to some degree, to even be able to relate to this tweet. I believe from what I’ve read that this was actually the original intent of Twitter; to provide for a little mini blog network of people who would all relate to the same people and events. You could speak in company or family shorthand, and everybody would know what you’re talking about. But then, as you get recommended to others, soon you have people following you who don’t know you at all, your family, your company, project, etc. So what do you tweet about? Popular topics read like the table of contents in your Sunday paper; Politics, news, views, culture, media, healh/wellness. This is where Twitter gets a little tricky, though. You still want to relate to the people you know in your immediate circle or original followers, but you also want to relate to a slightly broader audience. How do I “speak” in Twitter?

Developing a Twitter Voice

Some of my favorite tweeters handle this beautifully by blending personal messages with general interest tweets while still managing to sound colloquial at the same time. Imagine that you are hosting a small radio talk show with topics and questions coming in from people you mostly don’t know personally, but with whom you want at least a friendly interchange.

· Don’t lecture. Lecturers get unfollowed (by me, at least) pretty quickly. Twitter has become a great social media for political commentary. There is a fine line between commentary and lecture, but there is a line. Suggest, don’t command.

· Don’t speak in shorthand. In 140 characters, your challenge is to write something interesting and engaging while still remaining interesting to all of your followers. If you want to follow a thread with an individual, @reply them. Don’t post to your whole stream with something like “I can’t believe they think we’ll kowtow to this!” Who is they? Kowtow to what?

· Don’t be shy. Don’t be afraid to talk about what you’re thinking about. But when you do, make sure that you’re saying it in a way that will be interesting and relevant to all your followers.

· Have some interesting information. Either retweet something good or have something interesting to say. This doesn’t mean you have to be a White House reporter to come up with things of interest. I’ve read 140 character tweets from people who cracked me up explaining how they could not understand what their dog was trying to say to them. I’ve also been bored to tears by someone flatly reporting some epic event they attended.

· Use DMs. If you get involved in an ongoing discussion with another tweeter, remember all your followers are seeing the tweets. If it’s personal, or just not of interest to more than just you two, go to DMs.

· Don’t be too “quiet.” I follow a couple of people that tweet about once every three or four days. I follow them because a) I am related to them, or b) those tweets are very interesting (like coming from Air Force One).

· Don’t be too “loud”. Or frequent. You have to tweet enough to draw a crowd, but if you get to be like a circus barker, you will run the crowd off. Nobody wants to be in a conversation with someone who only talks and does not listen. Unless your famous and people want to hang on your every word, tweeting every 15 seconds about your life has got to be pretty darn interesting to hold people’s attention.

· Retweet, but not too much or little. Retweeting (forwarding and tacitly recommending someone else’s tweet) is a balance thing, too. It will gain you followers if done well, thoughtfully and actively, but too much is too much. Remember, people want to hear what you have to say, too. If you do nothing but retweet (and there are many) you better be really good at managing interesting content (and there are some).

· Abbreviate, but do it well. There’s a real skill to this. Tweetdeck actually has a pretty good tool for doing this for you, but I still abbreviate by hand. This is a balancing act, too. If you have so much to say such that you have to abbreviate too many words in a tweet, try rewording or breaking into two tweets. Overly abbreviated tweets get to looking like desperate telegraphed dispatches from the front.

· Be friendly, and where possible, personal. Bother to learn people’s names. Go to their profiles, learn about them. Engage. Simply using a person’s first name is an enormously effective tool in engaging someone. Many times, when people get a “bully pulpit” on Twitter through fame, notoriety, reputation, or whatever, they take on a sort of aloof, imperious tone. You better be awfully interesting to listen to if you take this approach.

· Tweet like somebody’s listening. Even if you are new and have just a few followers, develop a sort of conversational tone that sounds as if you are familiarly addressing a larger group of people. It lends an air of credibility. Don’t ever, ever, for any reason tweet either “Is anyone out there?” or “Hello? I’m bored. Is anyone listening?” They soon won’t be.

· Don’t admonish your followers. If you have a problem with what a particular tweeter or two had to say, address them in DM or at least in @reply. Don’t “blanket” your followers with admonitions. It comes off imperious and arrogant. The people you are really referring to probably won’t catch it, and the others will just be offended.

· Don’t Auto-tweet, auto-respond, ever for any reason. This is about interaction.

· If you are marketing something, attract people with tweets, not offers. If you have something interesting to say, I'l read it, even if you are selling something. If your only attempt to contact me is to spray me with offers, I'm not interested.

· Don’t repeat yourself. Don’t, for any reason, retweet the same tweet over and over. Even if you are not a bot and not auto-posting, you sure look like you are.

· Whenever possible, directly respond to ALL attempts to contact you. This is a core concept of Twitter, to me. Recently I had a surgery on a Friday and missed a whole “follow Friday” set of recommendations for people to follow me. I wound up sending out a general not-directed-at-anyone-in-particular tweet saying “Thanks for all the kind FFs”. I hate this. If someone took the time to individually recommend me, I feel I should reciprocate. If it’s simply an RT or an FF, I don’t feel this obligation. Twitter, to me, is all about interaction. There are plenty of people on Twitter (mostly famous folks) who joined with the notion that they’d use it as a networking tool, but soon found themselves followed by 100s of thousands of people who want to interact with them. Some handle this better than others. If you have 300 thousand followers, and you tweet that you attended a baseball game yesterday, and 387 people immediately ask you if you had a good time, of course you can’t respond to each. Rather than get defensive, distant, and aloof, perhaps it’s time to “close the door” (protect updates) so that people essentially have to follow the “friend request” model to follow you and ask for your approval. Perhaps it’s time to examine what Twitter means to you. If you have too many followers to relate to, perhaps FaceBook is a better solution. To me, one of the most disingenuous things a celebrity can do on Twitter is tweet really colloquial, personal stuff as if they are in a conversation, then reply to no one, (or one or two people). It comes off really manipulative and self-serving. I have followed a couple of lower level celebs with fewer than 2 or 3 thousand followers (there are tons of non celebs out there with ten times this number of followers) who followed almost no one in return and responded to no one. This has got to be the epitome of self-absorption. Unfollow. You are nowhere near as cool or hot as you think you are.

Twitter gets to be a bit like being at a large party. There are lots of people congregated in cliques talking about everything, laughing, joking, shouting, being obnoxious, being quiet and withdrawn. The trick is to manage to be engaged with as many people as you can at one time without appearing to be exclusive of people. Imagine you are at the center of one of the largest subgroups at a party. Several, if not many, folks are listening to what you say and some are replying to you. People from other nearby groups may even hear these conversations and may wander in. But remember that it’s a conversation, not a lecture. Don’t “hold forth” on a topic. This puts people off and acts as a barrier to engagement. Twitter is not very good for arguments. Flame wars 140 characters at a time, tend not to last long, and your followers get pretty tired of watching a mud fight pretty quickly. It’s too easy to block and unfollow contentious people.

So, you’re at the party. Hang around, introduce yourself to people. Initiate conversation. Listen intently and politely. Mingle. Move from group to group. Reply to everything said directly to you. If too many people are talking to you at once, maybe it’s time to go to a more exclusive party. But remember most of all that the coolest guy at the party is not the one who has the most people listening to him, or the one doing the most talking. He’s usually the guy in a spirited conversation with a few folks on a topic of interest to more than just a few, and he’s an avid listener as well as a good speaker.

Later.

Why I Follow (and Why I Don't) on Twitter

2009-07-21T07:43:00.001-07:00

I find that as time goes by, my rules of engagement with Twitter evolve. I suppose a lot of this has to do with the fact that Twitter itself is evolving. As more people join, and more people follow and are followed by more people, the systems we all develop for how we relate to each other evolve. But, I’m evolving as well. I’ve developed – or am developing, rather – a Twitter personality (for better or worse).

My simple rule for following used to be “If I follow you, attempt to contact you, and you don’t respond, I unfollow”. That’s still pretty true, but I’ve tempered the view to be a little more flexible. There are a few “news and information” people I do follow that don’t respond to me. My hard and fast rule about “this is a social networking application” is not so hard and fast anymore. But this is still very different to me then following some celebrity who posts updates to their life with no intention of ever interacting with their followers. And this is fine; there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just not anything I choose to participate in. I’d rather pick up a copy of People.

I use to automatically follow anybody who followed me. This has shifted, as well, as the porn spam bots and the “I’ll show you how to get 100,000 followers a day!” tweeters proliferated. The first thing I do now when I get a new follower is to read a page or two of their tweets. You can get a feeling pretty quickly about what sort of Tweeter you’re dealing with this way. If the follower only posts once or twice a week, no follow. Here are some things I look for:

1. Do you only retweet? I still pretty much look for interaction on here, and with a few notable exceptions, “news feed” accounts like these don’t attract me much. If you do only retweet, it’s got to be pretty darn informational for me to follow. (And there are some. @raybeckerman, for example. Highly recommend.)

2. Are you selling something to me? I’m a “pull” rather than “push” consumer. I tend to seek out the things I want to buy rather than let them seek me. No follow. To me, it’s ok to use Twitter to “market yourself”, ie. Circulate your book idea, song, poetry, blog, as long as that’s not ALL you are doing. This is not the same as direct selling indiscriminately to me. We’re all trying to “market” ourselves in some way, after all. Just don’t let it be the only reason you’re using Twitter. (I’m looking for interaction.)

3. Do you only publish inspirational aphorisms? I have to say that these things all tend to blur together after a few days of reading them. Ghandi can’t possible have said all this stuff, can he? When was the last time you read one that was truly unique and new? They’re OK in small doses and when genuinely unique, but some folks do almost nothing but speak in aphorisms on Twitter. I was reading a stream of these between two Tweeters a few days ago, replete with “Good one!” and “Wow, where did you get this one!?” Like dueling aphorisms. Appears shallow, insincere and vapid after a while.

4. If your tweets are totally focused on getting me (and you) “100s of followers a day”, we probably don’t have much in common. Why would I want 100s of followers a day if it weren’t for the purpose of selling them something?

5. If you are a “life coach” I’m not much interested. My life coach has a few letters after her name (LPC, MA.) Call me old fashioned, but there are some things I think you ought to be government certified to do, and this is one of them. And I certainly didn’t find her through a free internet social network application.

6. How many people do you follow? If you already follow 10,000 people and your bio says you’re a “social networking media guru”, I’m pretty sure you’re not going to miss my tweets if I don’t follow you. Again, looking for REAL interaction.

7. Are you in stealth mode? I understand that identity theft is a big issue, but if it’s that big an issue, perhaps you shouldn’t be using the internet for social interaction. If you have no name, no location, no profile, why would I want to follow you? Again, it’s about interaction. Still, I have some great twitter friends who are in stealth mode, but they sought out real interaction with me first. That’s the key. I have only asked for one permission to follow a protected updates account, and that was because she was referred to me. This is too much like the FaceBook and MySpace “friends request” deal which is antithetical to the whole Twitter experience to me.

8. Are you following me in response to something I said? I will almost automatically follow someone in this case. A “blind follow”, or a follower who found you by bot doesn’t present much of a promise of interaction to me.

9. Do you have anything interesting to say? To me, this is the number one reason to follow, perhaps even above and beyond the chance of interaction. But more importantly, the question I ask is “Do you have anything interesting to say to me?”

10. How much do you tweet? Too much and too little are key to me. If you tweet once every 15 seconds or only once a week, I’m not much interested in you feed.

11. Do you have “auto this and that” turned on? There are some accounts that spit out tweets ever couple of minutes that are obviously coming out of some canned app. The same tweet will recycle every couple of minutes. Like following an answering machine.

Looking at this list, I think there are two keys to following. Interaction is certainly most important. Informational can trump this, but the information has to be from someone really interesting, or be in itself very unique and informational. I really think the very core concept of a social networking application is direct interaction, and choose to use Twitter this way. Your mileage may vary, though!

Later.

A Child's Ghost Story

2009-07-06T07:13:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a story coming from a child bears greater weight than if it came from a college professor. Something about the pure simplicity and innocence of a child’s story lends it gravity. Sure, kids can fabricate from whole cloth, but this is almost immediately identifiable. A child generally doesn’t have the language skills and sophistication to fictionalize convincingly, which makes a non-fictional story from them all the more convincing.

We were riding home from a vacation a couple of years ago, passing the time telling ghost stories. My daughter, who was then about 8 years old began telling us of something that I at first took to be a dream, even though she insisted it wasn’t. She proceeded to tell the story, which, although I remember it clearly, I still managed to file away as a sort of half remembered dream. Fast forward a couple of years. Under similar circumstances – another long car trip – the subject came up again. If you ever want to really fact check a child’s story, ask them to retell it a few years later. She recounted the incident to us, almost verbatim, and I confess to a slight chill running through me. Here it is, my best attempt to tell it in her now 12 year old voice, with my questions interjected:

“You know how you are when you’re just about to fall asleep, not really awake, but not really asleep? I was in my old bed at mom’s house which looks right straight out at the hallway where the fish tank used to be. There was a little girl standing there. I wasn’t afraid, but I knew that I was no longer asleep at all, and actually leaned up on my elbows. She was about 7 or 8 years old, long blonde hair, but the ends were curly. She had a dress or nightgown on. I couldn’t tell which. It was either a frilly nightgown or an old style dress. She was standing looking at the wall.”

“Could you see her face?”

“Oh, yeah. I could see everything about her. It was like she had her own light. It wasn’t like she was glowing, but not really. It was like she was in light, but there was no light there. It was dark in the hall. And it wasn’t like she was glowing, because she wasn’t giving off any light on anything around her. She looked confused, like she was lost. She had a blanket or something like it in her hand, hanging over her arm and it looked like she was trying to figure out which way to go.”

“Did she move?”

“Yeah, she turned and looked at me!”

“You’re kidding!?”

“She looked right at me, we looked at each other, and she was just as surprised to see me as I was to see her.”

“And you weren’t afraid.”

“Unhuh. Not even after.”

“What do you mean after? What happened next?” (I was totally enthralled at this point.)

“She took a couple of steps towards me. It wasn’t like she was walking on the floor, though. Not like she was gliding, but walking, but it was like her feet weren’t where the floor was.” (I remember the chill I felt when she said this).

“Did she approach you?”

“Just a little, but then she just wasn’t there. Not like she faded, or vanished or anything. Not like anything I can explain. She just wasn’t there anymore. The hall was dark and empty, but I don’t remember her going away or anything. Just not there.”

I drove for a while after hearing this story a second time imaging it, trying to put myself in the scene, imagining my daughter laying there in some sort of communication with a girl about her age. Perhaps that’s why she saw her. My dad instinct kicked in and I felt a pang of concern for this little girl, lost, with her blanket. Perhaps she was looking for her daddy.

Later.

Twitter Observations, continued.

2009-06-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

The more I use Twitter, the more I’m aware of the complexity of the whole nature of the follower versus the followed and how to manage my interaction on Twitter. There appears to be a multiplicity of variables at play in how the service is being used, and how it can be used, and the variables are all intertwined:

· How many people do you follow?
· How many do you tweet?
· Of those, how many respond?
· How many people follow you?
· How many contact you? How many do you respond to?
· How many do you tweet to? How many respond?
· How many people do you want to follow?
· How many followers do you want? And why?

I’ve been on Twitter for a few months now and continue to come to different conclusions on how this service is being used, and perhaps how it should be used. Folks seem to be falling into three groups:

1. Those aggressively seeking greatest number of followers.
2. Those following the greatest number of people possible.
3. Those with few of either, involved instead in small group communication.
4. Celebrities. Vast number of followers, variable number of followees, variable amount of interaction.

In the case of number 1, I’m not quite sure what is to be gained by getting a vast number of followers. I suppose if I had something to sell, this would be some way of getting my brand out there, but I’m not sure Twitter has proven this to be a viable goal. Eventually, you will invariably get to the point where you can’t interact with the number of people who follow you. This is fine if you are just using Twitter to broadcast stuff about yourself to your loyal followers, but it kind of controverts the core concept of Twitter; that of a social network application.

In the case of #2 above, it becomes difficult to manage the flow of tweets from such a large number of followed twitters, whether you seek interaction with them or not. This is kind of a voyeuristic approach to Twitter, but so what? There’s no user manual for Twitter.

In the 3rd case, we’re probably closest what sort of use was envisioned for Twitter by its developers. Groups of smallish networks of people involved in one project, for example, or the members of an extended family keeping track of each other. I would love to know how many of the millions of people using Twitter actually use it for this purpose.
In the 4th case, that of the celebrity Twitter, I’m guessing the Twitter developers probably got the most unforeseen response. I doubt any of them were supposing that someone like Ashton Kutcher could come along and garner literally millions of followers. Celebrities manage this differently. Some, as in the case of Kutcher and his wife Demi Moore, use it as a sort of informal bully pulpit, promoting social causes, playing pranks, all in a sort of informal manner that leads the follower to believe they are “talking” to them. All 3 million of them. Some celebrities with relatively smaller numbers actually do a pretty good job of interacting with their followers.

Twitter Do’s and Don’t’s

1. Don’t orphan your Tweets. When responding to someone, either RT (retweet) or include a reference to the original. If I post something and get a response 15 minutes (and 15 tweets) later saying “I agree completely!” I have no idea what you’re agreeing with.

2. Don’t broadcast Tys (thank yous) If your cat died, you tweet about it, and 5 people respond with genuine compassion, don’t send one tweet to all 5 of them saying “Thanks for your support”. That’s the Twitter version of a form letter.

3. Respond to ALL direct attempts to contact you. It takes about 2 seconds to say “Thanks!” in a Tweet. If you have too many followers to respond to, well, you have too many followers! What can you do about this? Send out a tweet to the world saying “I’d love to respond to each of you, but I’m currently getting ______ (fill in number of tweets directed at you) tweets per hour, and just can’t”. THEN (this is important) DON’T cherry pick who you are going to respond to. People will see this in their twitstream and know they didn’t hit high enough on your radar to warrant a response. This is drawback to Twitter and how it handles privacy. If you follow me you will see all my Tweets that aren’t DM’s. This is not initially obvious when getting into Twitter.

4. Be brief. Don’t seek to use all 140 characters each time. Doing so presents an obstacle to those who want to retweet you as they won’t have enough space.

5. Don’t tweet too much. If you set up an almost constant stream of tweets, people will go from reading them, to scanning them, to not reading them.

6. Don’t tweet too little. If you only tweet once a day, well, you’re just not interacting with your network enough to really even justify using it. It’s a balance thing.
I suspect that we, the users of Twitter, are really the ones setting the agenda for the future of this application. We are determining the future of Twitter. It will be interesting to see where it goes, especially with the exponential growth its currently experiencing.

Later.

Bobcats in the Park

2009-06-02T09:24:00.000-07:00

February 16, 2009 - Monday

Bobcats!

I started running in December. Well, kind of run/walking. I did it in December so that I could say that it wasn't a New Year's resolution. I'm not going to join the ruck of the bobtail joggers out there all in their 50s out to change their life starting on January 1st. No, not me. I'll start two weeks earlier. I'll be a seasoned pro by the time the first rolls around. I was actually limping, I think, by January 1. I jog/run/walk/limp in River Legacy Park in North Arlington, Texas, a "linear" park that borders the Trinity River for a few miles between Dallas and Fort Worth. At times, the park bordering the river is pretty civilized - very park looking - but as it heads West the river swoops out behind a few straggling rows of apartment complexes, turning pretty wild. A cement trail runs the length of the park, approximately 8 feet across. Well, nature may abhor a vacuum, but it doesn't abhor a nice smooth cement path. I've had nearly a dozen North American bobcat sightings along it in just the past two months. These cats have become "urbanized" as they say, which means that they are living cheek by jowl with man in a setting in which they know they are protected from hunting, but where their proximity to man provides for an abundance of food down the food chain from them. We've both moved into their habitat one one hand, but also in doing so, we've provided a sort of incentive to them to hang around and even to enter suburban areas. I have come to believe they see us as something like cattle. We're big, sure, but slow moving, non-threatening, and as such, obviously not predators. We're also way too big to be a meal, so we're just kind of scenery to them.

My first encounter happened on one of those classic North Texas winter days; overcast, cold, windy with a chance of freezing rain. Sort of a miserable day to go jogging, and as such, the paths were pretty empty. I'd made it to the far limit of my excursion and had just turned around when, while making a turn in the path, I saw what appeared to be a large house cat facing away from me, sitting, sunning himself on the cement. As I approached, the cat stood and turned and I was immediately drawn up short. Brilliant black and white spots stood out on a deep golden background on this animal's coat. In standing, it had turned sideways and taken a step or two, which was enough to make it immediately apparent that this was not house cat. A stubby fluff of white flicked the air where a long cat's tail should be. Thick padded feet protruded from slightly overly long legs. Black tufts of fur stood from it's outsized ears. It was about the size of a small spaniel; much larger than a house cat. I watched, waiting for it to notice me, and even risked a step or two in its direction. It was half turned to face me but never once looked at me. Is slowly - very slowly - walked off the path not away from me, but sort of towards me but to the left. I couldn't believe that the animal acted as if I wasn't even there. By the time it made it through the little ditch at the side of the trail, and into the woods, it was no more than 20 feet from me! I felt a slight twinge of fear, but not much. There was absolutely nothing threatening about this animal's behavior. I watched until it passed deep enough into the trees to be hard to pick out amongst the limbs and branches. Then I looked around to see if anyone had witnessed this, but I was alone for as far as I could see.

The next encounter was perhaps a week later. This was a different cat; larger, less brilliantly colored, and nearly the size of a small retriever. I turned a corner after having passed a stop bicyclist who was following at some distance. This cat was walking directly towards me on the other side of the path as if he knew the convention of passing on the left! These paths are about 8 feet wide throughout the park system. He was on the shoulder just off the path and as he approached - not making any eye contact whatsoever or any motion that indicated he was even aware of me - I found myself subconsciously taking a half step off the path. This was a big cat. I turned to see if I had witnesses and saw the bicyclist who had seen this encounter and had stopped, watching, about 20 yards behind me. Behind him, though, a park maintenance cart was coming up the path, making a low motor noise. This was the only thing the cat seemed to notice, and it had his full attention. Unbelievably, as the cart got within eyesight, the cat - who just opposite me on the far side of the path - stopped completely, standing staring ahead! We were absolutely no more than 9 feet from one another! I had never experienced anything like this in my life. As the cart approached, the cat thought better of things, and slowly walked away from me towards the trees, not because of my presence at all, but because of the cart. For that moment as we stood across from each other, I felt so completely a part of the world around me, the natural world around me, and yet at the same time so completely insanely juxtaposed to this suburban park setting. I was amazed and felt a sense of honor. I had been accepted, allowed, tolerated, by the most wild creature I have ever seen outside of a zoo.

The third encounter ocurred no more than 10 days ago, and was perhaps the most moving. It was kind of a misty morning, so hardly anyone was at the park. There's a bridge about 50 yards in length that carries the bike path over the Trinity as it heads west to Collins/157. This is pretty close to the main park, and as such it's pretty unusual to see any kind of wildlife there, but here I am, approaching this bridge and I see a full grown bobcat standing at the other end, right in the middle. I walk to about midway down the bridge and she begins slowly approaching me. It's one thing to be on a path with one of these animals, but to be on a bridge 20 feet over the river which is about a foot deep there, well, I wasn't above backing up, but my options were beginning to narrow. She proceeds slowly, and as she does so, I notice that she periodically stops and sticks her muzzle through the bars of the bridge railing and mouthes something. I never did hear her - it must have been quiet - but she was clearly vocalizing for some reason. I wondered if she was confused at finding herself suddenly 20 feet above the river or something like that, but then as she got about 20 feet nearer to me, it became clear what was going on. Pop! Up comes this little fluff of grey fur up onto the bridge from the far side. She was calling her cub! The cub, which was about half her size, or about the size of a regular house cat, only stockier, ran to her and brushed up against her. Mom turned and nonchalantly began walking towards me, once again pretty much ignoring me. Not so with the cub who was all eyes as they approached, hanging back just a little bit. Ok, so this is now one of those wilderness situations that you see on the Discovery Channel where some idiot finds himself between a mother bear and her cub, but here I am, half way across the bridge and twenty feet in the air myself at this point, so I just stood still while they proudly walked past. We were not 4 feet apart. The mother just casually turned her head a little towards me just like she was making sure it was OK, but for the most part she just kept marching while junior followed up the rear. I watched them all the way to the far end of the bridge and off into the brush before I could even bring myself to move. There wasn't another soul in sight.

Most recent experience, no more than 4 days ago, and I'm walking near where the first encounter happened. This time, I round a bend in the path to see no less than three bobcats no more than 20 yards ahead of me. It's a mother an two cubs, larger than the last, maybe a year old, I'd guess. This time, however, we're all going in the same direction. I followed this threesome for 5 minutes before it became apparent that not only did they know I was behind them (I'd even begun calling to them to see if I could just get one to turn around), but they didn't seem to be much concerned about getting out of my way. They were walking very slowly, half the speed I was walking, so I had to stop from time to time. Finally, the mom heads them off the path, almost as if she was annoyed at my impatience. This time she made eye contact, though. As she was just about to disappear into the understory growth, she turned her back to a downed tree, peed on it, and locked eyes with me. The message was clear: "Just in case you were wondering, these are MY woods!"

I started carrying a camera after the second encounter but so far have not had a camera on a day I see them, but when I do, you will see a YouTube posting, if I have any luck at all!

The Twitter Ratio: To Follow or Not to Follow. That is (Part of) the Question

2009-05-30T09:20:00.000-07:00

I posted a while back about the Ashton Kutcher/Demi Moore/fill-in-the-name-of-about-a-100-different celebrities phenomenon and what it meant for the future of Twitter. Over the last month or so Twitter has gotten even bigger, more heavily used, and has risen even higher on the cultural radar to the point that Kutcher in his competition with CNN to get to a million followers made headline news. Which begs the question:

Why does one need a million Twitter followers?

Well, if one is a celebrity, I suppose it would not be a bad way of marketing oneself. And that’s fine, I suppose. If a person’s goal is to get a bunch of followers in the interest of forwarding their popularity, and if a bunch of followers are satisfied (as they seem to be, in their millions) with this one-to-many relationship in which their chances of getting a tweet responded to by said celebrity are about as great as getting struck by lightning, that’s fine. My first reaction to this is “But this is not what Twitter was intended for.” It’s a social networking app. It supposed to be this place where you and your group of friends, confidants, coworkers, etc. join to follow one another and post little quickie updates on how each other is doing. Because of the homogenous nature of the application, a tweet from Ashton Kutcher about what he had for lunch looks just like a tweet from Aunt Sarah on the same subject. It doesn’t say “And, oh by the way, 1.97 million other close intimates of Ashton just got this same post”. So your response “Was it good?” to Aunt Sarah will probably get a response. Chances of a response to your question to Ashton are about that of hitting the next Powerball. But should we criticize Ashton Kutcher for simply drawing millions of followers? Depends.

Let’s say I’m an up and coming actor, breaking into Hollywood. I set up a Twitter account and immediately start Tweeting to anyone I can find trying to get them to follow me. Ok, no problem there, either. But there is a certain form of etiquette in Twitter, at least in how it was initially envisioned. You are expected to respond. “Follow back” as it is called. If you follow me, I notice you are following me, and decline to follow you, well, I’m certainly free to do that. Perhaps I don’t know you, or like you. But what if 10 thousand or so people respond to my overtures to follow me, I in turn respond by following 5 people (there are actually worse examples of this), and, to make matters worse, when my followers tweet me, I don’t respond to them. To me, this is beginning to look more like fan mail than a social network. Penn Jillette has 625,000 followers and follows 2 people. That can't even be all the people in his house with a Twitter account. This pretty much sends the message "You must hang on my every word, but I couldn't care less what you have to say."

Now, of course, a celebrity with 40,000 followers can’t follow back all 40,000 of them (although some do. You can set up Twitter to “auto-follow” people who follow you. At first, I thought these celebs were Twitter champs until it became apparent that they were actually responding or interacting with any of those they were following). But some of them do yeoman’s work in this regard. Alyssa Milano has about 90k followers. She follows a couple hundred which is a pretty good number of people to follow. And she responds to them.

To me, there are some countervailing factors at work here.

1. How many people follow you AND attempt to communicate with you? Lot’s of people follow folks simply to get the twitter stream updates. Of the people who contact you, how many do you in turn respond to?

2. How many people do you follow? Personally, I think this number can’t go much above 200 and still allow you to maintain some kind of communication with your followers.

3. Do you attempt to contact your followers, or simply wait for them to contact you? Simply following them back is deemed courteous, but is it really if there’s no subsequent communication?

4. You may have a 1 to 1 twitter ratio based on 100 followers and 100 followed. You will have the same ratio if you have 100,000 followers and follow 100,000. The amount of interaction between you and your followers is going to be vastly different in the latter case.

5. In my experience, there are two kinds of people with extremely high twitter ratios. First are the celebs who simply put their accounts on Twitter and who through no direct action of theirs garnered thousands of followers. Second, though, are the folks who are out to garner the greatest number of followers they can for whatever reasons. Their intention may not be to interact with followers at all other than to broadcast to them.

6. Whom do you follow? Consider this scenario: I am a celebrity. I have 40,000 followers. I follow 100 people. Not a bad follow number, but they are all other celebrities. Meanwhile, the 40,000 other people who do follow me are not followed in return at all. Celebrity broadcasting system in disguise.

7. Do you respond to people who follow you, even if you don’t follow them? This is even more confusing. I tweet with a person who has a few thousand followers, and even though she doesn’t follow me, she does respond to my tweets. To me, this is just as important, if not more important than whether she follows me or not. You don’t have to follow someone to communicate with them.

8. Spam factor: You may have 1,900 followers and follow 1,900 people. Great Twitterratio, but you may also be a “bot”. No real interaction going on at all.

To me, all ratios aside, optimal use of Twitter would be based on:

1. How many people contact you (either direct, or reply) that you don’t respond to?

2. Why do you want a number of followers so high that you can’t manage their attempts to contact you?

3. If you have an insane number of followers and in turn follow less than 10 people, is this a social networking app to you at all? Or a celebrity broadcasting network?

One of the underlying elements of Twitter that leads to this confusion is that it differs from other social networking apps in that you don’t have to have permission to follow someone. This doesn’t happen in Facebook or MySpace, for example, since a “friend’s request” is necessary to set up a communication. So this is new ground being tilled, and we’ll be discovering more uses (and misuses) of it as we go along.

Later.

Coach John Burkett

2009-05-24T18:46:00.000-07:00

Running is like walking. We all think we know how to do it because we’ve pretty much done it all our lives. You parents hoist you up, give you a nudge, and off you go. No instructions necessary. Running, if not altogether instinctual, is at least learned by example from watching others. I mean, what’s to learn, right?
I see a lot of runners in the park, including some pretty hard-core types that are there every day, mile after mile. I see lopers. I see bouncers. I see draggers. I see lurchers. I see stumblers, but unfortunately, I see very few people who really know how to run.

I grew up in a small farm town in rural Illinois. Illinois isn’t just a big basketball state. It’s also well known for cross-country running at the high school and college level. I am long legged with a spare build, not enough upper body strength to be much of a force on the basketball court, but it just so happens bone thin, long legged, spare build is just what the doctor ordered when it comes to distance running. Running, like just about any other farm kid, was just about the most natural thing I did. In school, I could either get off the bus at the end of the farm block when the Watkins kids got dropped off – about ¾ of a mile from my house – or ride the bus for an extra 45 minutes and be the last kid let off at my own driveway. I often rode my bike down to the Watkins’ house, and thought that it couldn’t be that much of a walk. I wasn’t really as concerned about the distance as I was the time. I figured it ought to at least cut off a few minutes from the circuitous bus route. And it did, but I soon discovered that if I ran it, I could really chop off some time. Like 20 minutes. Carrying schoolbooks, I remember running this distance and getting home neither winded nor sweating. Ah, youth.

One fall day we had a school wide physical fitness run scheduled for all boys of all grades. I was a freshman that year. We were to run part of the school’s cross country course which wound around behind the school, back behind the Lion’s club pavilion, back up around the parking lot, baseball diamond, and then to the rear of the gym, about a mile and a half. I don’t think I much even really knew what cross country was, much less what they did or who they were. I knew the junior and senior track guys, and had some idea that some of them ran cross country in the fall, although what that meant was foreign to me. I don’t remember much about the run except for two things. I came in third, behind the two top varsity runners, and the cross country coach, who’d never spoken to me before, barely let me alone long enough to take a shower and change. Very soon I was being sneaked into varsity meets and placing well.

We moved when I was a junior to a fairly large city with a much larger high school. I’d been touted as something of a basketball player (which never really played out) but kind of made it in under the radar as a cross country runner. One of the reasons for this was that the little school I ran for prior to that couldn’t begin to compete – either individually or as a team – with larger school. The cross country coach was a short, squat man with a growling voice and a constant grimace on his face. I’m pretty sure that in the 2 years that I knew John Burkett I never saw him smile. I suppose that everyone has a teacher, or coach, or minister; someone who impacted them and “changed their life” in some way. John Burkett was that man for me. I hated him. Or feared him, or both, maybe. I know the sense of fear was purposeful (he was actually kind of a big teddy bear of a man, now that I look back on these days). He had to keep us on edge. On meet days we met at his house at 6 am. No running. It was a day of total rest. His wife brought out plates of scrambled eggs and steaks. I’m not so sure it was even legal for us to go to his house under Illinois High School Athletic regs, but we did, and we ate well. Then no more food all day. Woe betides you if you got caught with a Twinkie. Then, by 4 pm we were well fed, digested, rested, and ready to run. He also had us on a program of these packets of vitamins (this was years before any sort of vitamin craze). We took two packets a day. Each packet had twelve tabs, each one about a half inch long. Our pee was bright orange. And in the summer (this much I’m pretty sure is completely outside of the ISHAA regs) we had TWO A DAY practices. We met on a golf course off campus, across town. Each morning, 5 to 7 miles. Each afternoon, 7 to 10. When I was a junior in high school, I was 6’3” tall and weighed something just a bit more than 140 pounds. I could hold my breath for nearly 3 minutes. My resting pulse rate, (diligently recorded per Coach Burkett, three times a day) just before dropping off to sleep at night was just over 40 beats per minute. I could hear the powerful thump in my chest if it was quiet enough.

And I could run. Oh, how we could run. At the time (if memory serves) the regulation distance for cross country was 3.25 miles. This was not run on a track, either, but very often over hill and dale on golf courses, country clubs, forest preserves. The best time I remember posting was just over 15 minutes. Today I run 5 miles a day in 45 minutes.

The first thing that coach Burkett did with us was teach us to run. Some of us had already met with some success and were just a little dismissive of this squat little man presuming to tell us how to run. And he never did run by example, either. But he talked. Or shouted. A fiddle maker friend of mine tells me that Ishtaak Perlman’s violin instructor never touches a fiddle, pointing and gesturing instead with a cane. Burkett got us to look at how we ran from the outside. To notice what our legs were doing. Our arms, our posture. Almost the first thing he said to me when he saw me run was a pretty typical remark from him: “You could be a pretty good runner if you’d learn how to use your legs.” And then walked away, purposely leaving me to hang on the words.

I watch these scufflers and draggers, bouncers and flouncers, bumpers and plodders in the park and I think of John Burkett. I can hear his words. “Pick your feet up! Your shoes shouldn’t make any noise when you run! Heel, toe. Heel, toe, Heel toe!” But mostly what people don’t do is the simple thing that he taught us; use the legs that you have. We assume that because we learned to run somehow that we know the only way – perhaps the optimal way – that our body is capable of doing this. I know for a fact that he got me to increase each on of my strides by nearly a foot. He got me to know where my head was. Your head should be on a string. Straight, not bouncing up and down. Torso upright, shoulders back. Arms serve a purpose – they are for balance. You are not running if both your feet aren’t off the ground at the same time. You are walking with style or spirit or something, but you aren’t running.

My junior year we went to an invitational meet that included the small conference that I had come out of. I would be running against some of my old competitors from my freshman and sophomore years. I can even name some of these guys, they had been such nemeses of mine then. Of all the runners in that conference in that meet that day, the nearest runner to my time was over a minute behind me. And I didn’t win the meet. I don’t remember where I placed, but I remember standing with my coach, nearly fully recovered, watching these runners coming in panting and wheezing. And I remember the tiny half smile that coach Burkett gave me as he turned to walk away.

Coach Burkett was probably 50 then, in 1970. He may still be alive, but judging by his beer gut and lifestyle back then, I’d be surprised. He taught me something else, too. Something that I didn’t know I’d even learned until well into adult hood. How to go through pain. When you think you’re done, you still have about 20 percent left. I can hear him say it. You always have more.

Thank you, coach.

Later.

Mary Elizabeth Penson Sept 14th 1917 - May 16th 2009

2009-05-20T13:56:00.000-07:00

My father died twenty years ago. Long enough ago that I really barely remember the service. I got to hold his hand while he died in the hospital, and this is the significant memory I carry from his passing. When my mother passed away last weekend, most of the services were setup to take place at the same places my father’s were. This necessary tie in helped to underscore the notion that they were together again.

My mother wrote the following article about 3 months ago for the local paper which was doing a series on married couples and how they connected. This is the article in full:

Features@ Star Telegram.com

For FEATURE, “I Do! I Do!”

"How do you know when you’ve met the man you are going to marry ? It’s not hard when you read the signals right.

We had just graduated, he from Morgan Park High in Chicago, and me from York High in Elmhurst, Illinois. We were both enrolled in a newspaper writing class on the downtown campus of Northwestern University. Two young men seemed interested in me; one had red hair, the other looked like Tyron Power. Both offered to do my research as I worked the latest and barely made it to a six o’clock class. Shameless hussy that I was, I accepted both offers, gleaned what was useful from both, and turned my paper in as the professor walked through the door. When it came time to discuss how to write an attention catching opening line, the professor used my paper as an example. That did it for the red-head. He no longer offered to do my research. But Tyron hung on. Actually he was an artist, and more interested in the composition of the newspaper.

We both now lived on the south side of Chicago, he with his parents in Beverly Hills and I with my widowed mother in a south side apartment near the lake. After class he got on the same elevated train I did, and sat down next to me. There was a little talk about where we both lived, and then he offered to buy me a White Castle when we got to my station, and we got acquainted over those mini burgers. And then there was that historical weekend when beer became legal and I got my first taste of what a hang-over was like.

But the true taste of mate-for-life material came one Sunday afternoon when we were walking along the lake shore toward the Loop. Large boulders extending into the lake for six to almost a dozen feet formed an embankment. We stopped to see what the crowd was watching. A small white poodle was trying desperately to gain pawhold and get onto dry land. I stood there mesmerize and then horrified as the waves slammed the pup against the rocks. I knew then that he was fighting for his life. So did Jack. Beside me he yanked off his shoes, rolled up his pant-legs and jumped over the boulders and onto the sand. He caught the dog and threw him up onto dry land where the pooch shook Lake Michigan all over the spectators and trotted away.

That was the day I knew whom I was going to marry. Before Jack died of cancer in 1980, we had forty-eight wonderful years and four great kids."

Mom, I love you. Angels speed you on wings to heaven.

Bluegrass Music

2009-05-08T08:47:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a home with a commercial designer and an English teacher. Great music and literature abounded. I remember listening to Liszt, Chopin, Boots Randolph, and Thelonius Monk. My mom, now 92 and a children’s author after retiring from teaching, read me Huckleberry Finn every day after lunch during one Summer vacation from school. By age 10, I was reading Robinson Crusoe, watching Masterpiece Theatre and going to the Art Institute of Chicago, where my father had studied art during the Depression, to see the Rubens and Rembrandts. I was a spotty performer in school. If a subject didn’t interest me, I’d get middling grades. If it did, I’d ace it. Big things were expected of me. I was encouraged to take Latin in high school by a counselor who was laying the groundwork for a medical school future.

One summer day I was going through my oldest brother’s album collection. He’s a good bit older than me, so he was off to college or some job; no longer living at home, at any rate. Mostly it was the college stuff of the day; The Lettermen, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and the like. I happened on an album by the New Christy Minstrels, checked it out with some mild interest until it came to a song titled “Billy’s Mule”. Folk, by this time (about 1964) was in the process of changing. In a few years it would take on nearly a unified protest theme, but for the time being, it was kind of nudging up gently against country music (its own form of folk, really). The song started out quietly and slowly, with a single instrument playing. I haven’t heard this song in over 40 years, but I can remember those notes clearly enough to be able to play them today. It was a 5 string banjo. The notes plinked, then “bent” or slid, one tone to the next, like an acoustic pedal steel guitar. I had never heard anything like it. I couldn’t tell you about the rest of the song because I just kept picking up the needle and dropping it over and over on the first few notes until the album was so scratched the song would hardly play.

I filed this experience away for perhaps a year. One evening I was watching The Andy Griffith Show with my family. I recall this episode pretty clearly. In fact, it airs fairly frequently on the classic TV channel here. In it the bluegrass band The Dillards appear as a family of mountain folk who come down to town to create trouble for Andy. Can’t tell you much else specific about the episode (which I later learned was not the first in which they appeared) except for a scene in which the boys play “Shady Grove”, an ancient Appalachian song, in the jailhouse. I was by now about 10 years old, interested in baseball and basketball mostly, fishing at the creek (I was lucky enough to grow up on a farm after my Chicago parents decided to do a “Green Acres” mid life move), running the fields with a couple of dogs, playing with friends in old hay lofts. The banjo player, Douglas Dillard, was leaned back in a chair, slacked faced, relaxed, staring blankly ahead while playing a crystal clear rapid fire staccato of notes that machine gunned out of the TV and shot me dead in the soul. The ancient tone of the 5 string banjo resonates with some Celtic corner of my soul. Within 24 hours, I owned a banjo.

A turning point came to me about 1973, while a freshman at college. Rather than study – ever – I would find a friend, some beer, and pack off with a banjo and guitar to play in a park, or down the railroad tracks. One night, a close friend, Russian exchange student and I packed off to play an open mic night at a club. As we were leaving the dorm, a pair of perfectly collegiate young girls passed us at the door, me with a banjo slung on my back. To this day, I can remember the disgusted stairs as they looked at the ragtag couple. At that moment, I realized that I had fallen off the merry go round. I had – unintentionally, inadvertently – made some decisions that would put me on a very different road. No more med school. No more pre-med. I had become a misanthrope.

Bluegrass music has always run just under the cultural radar. From time to time a song will come along that will cause it to perk it’s head up and get noticed. “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”, the theme song from the movie Bonnie and Clyde.. ‘Dueling Banjos” from the movie “Deliverance”. More recently, the movie “Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou” brought some interest with its semi-bluegrass, mostly just old rural Southern music. At these times, we bluegrassers take some pride in our music and occasionally get a little notice. Mostly, though, you can listen to the radio from now until Christmas and not hear one bluegrass song. It is niche music. I guess all music is niche music, but some niches are extremely broad and deep. Not bluegrass. If popular music is a mile wide and an inch deep, bluegrass is an inch wide and a mile deep.. If you go to a blues festival or rock concert, you will see big name bands on stage and spectators. Go to a bluegrass festival, and there will be more music going on in the park, campground, parking lot than on stage. Most people who follow bluegrass also play it.
When people ask what I do for a living, I softball my answer and just say “Musician”. If asked what type of music I play, I usually prefer “Acoustic”. If really pressed, I will more accurately respond with “bluegrass”, but only when I think the audience is open to it.

If you want to understand bluegrass music, do this. Find a good three day festival near you. (They’re there. Guaranteed. Just have search a little). Listen to the name acts on stage if you want, kill time, lay under a tree, but wait until dark. Then, as campfires light walk around and listen to the small groups of rank amateurs and band act pickers all gathered doing bluegrass communion in the night. Then, in the small hours when the night breezes come through the low branches of the cedars and elms, listen to Bruce Hornsby’s lyrics and hear the banjo wind and mandolin rain . You will hear the ancient tones.

“A cool evening dance
Listening to the bluegrass band takes the chill
from the air till they play the last song
I’ll do my time
Keeping you off my mind but there’s moments
That I find, I’m not feeling so strong

Listen to the mandolin rain
Listen to the music on the lake
Listen to my heart break every time she runs away
Listen to the banjo wind
A sad song drifting low
Listen to the tears roll
Down my face as she turns to go”

Later.

The Front Porch Boys Days

2009-05-03T17:10:00.000-07:00

I moved to Texas in the mid summer of 1976 after having failed to become a doctor or lawyer, scholar, or even a college sophomore much to my parent’s chagrin. My freshman year at Illinois State University just served to underscore how completely lost to music (and alcohol) I had become. Having come from a family of advanced degrees, artists, authors, professors, I became a… bluegrass banjo player. This affliction first struck me watching the Andy Griffith Show somewhere around 1964. The bluegrass band The Dillards portrayed the hillbilly family “the Darlings” (headed by the great character actor Denver Pyle) on this show after the success of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs on the competing show The Beverly Hillbillies. I don’t remember anything about the episode I saw other than that they played the song “Salty Dog Blues” in the jailhouse and their banjo player Douglas Dillard lay sprawled against a chair looking like he was about to fall asleep playing the banjo breaks to the song. It was an earth moving moment for me. 45 years later I can still get goose bumps watching this episode. I owned a banjo within about 48 hours.

A bluegrass banjo player in Northern Illinois in the late 60s had very little to occupy his time. I spent mine mostly dodging the scornful stares of my parents, working day jobs that ran from sporting goods sales to canning factories. My oldest sister moved to Texas with her first husband, and after a couple of visits during which I was able to find a little bluegrass, I moved to. My brother, who had taken a teaching spot at Texas A&M convinced me to have another go at college, and so I settled in College Station, living in a trailer with someone who drank almost as much beer as I did. One day my roommate asked me if I wanted to go hear some live music. We went to a pizza place where noisy A&M cadets and their dates ate pizza while a pale, long faced kid sang and played guitar for tips. I was immediately struck by the fact that this curly haired kid a few years younger than me had absolutely the smoothest voice I’d ever heard. My roommate introduced to the young photojournalism major and aspiring songwriter. His name was Lyle Lovett.

Within a few days I had worked music connections through Lyle to meet with a few other musicians that actually played bluegrass and lived on Church Street in an old house two blocks behind the bar strip near campus. Lyle lived nearby on Old Main, but spent much of his time there. I found the boys were actually a band, “The Front Porch Boys” and although students, were pretty accomplished musicians. The leader, himself an aspiring songwriter asked me if I’d like to join. This kid would later become one of the best of a good lot of Texas singer songwriters, co writing songs with Lyle. His name was Robert Keen, although he goes mostly by Robert Earl Keen today.

We lived, ate, and breathed bluegrass music. It was not at all unusual for us to play 10 or 12 hours a day. Any time two people weren’t at class, the instruments would get picked up. Although this band only lasted about a year and a half, I still see it as the most significant years of my life.

I met and married my first wife who owned a club that we played in, had two kids, divorced, moved to Arlington, got sober, met and married my second wife, had two kids and divorced about 6 years ago. I worked during my child raising years as a technical writer and web developer, but now do music full time. Bryan Duckworth, one of the FP Boys, is my closest friend still, and runs a violin shop in New Braunfels. Lyle won an Emmy, acted in some Robert Altman films, met and married Julia Roberts, and built a rock solid career as a musician. Robert continues to shine as a singer/songwriter.
I see Duckworth about 5 times a year if lucky, but have lost touch with Lyle and Robert. Wives, careers, my own sobriety gained around 1988, intruded on old relationships.

Robert’s parents had a ranch on a fresh water bass creek near LaGrange, Texas. We spent summer weekends there. Duckworth even lived there for a while. We spent as much time fishing as we did making music, but nights would be filled with bonfires, friends, songs. Years later, married to my first wife, long after the Front Porch Days, long after the crystal swimming fishing water August days on Cummins Creek, long after friends parted, listening to a recording of the Country Gentlemen sing the song “Letter To Tom” could take me there, choke me up, and get me to stare out a window.

“I've wandered by the village, Tom. I've sat beneath the tree
Upon the school house playing ground, that sheltered you and me
But none are left to greet me, Tom, and few are left to know
That played with us upon the green just fifteen years ago

The river's running just as still. The willows on its side
Are larger that they were, dear Tom. The stream appears less wide
But kneeling down beside the stream, Dear Tom, I startled so
To see how sadly I am changed, since fifteen years ago

But when our time shall come, dear Tom
And we are called to go
I hope they'll lay us where we played
Just fifteen years ago”

This post isn’t very well written. It reads kind of stiff. I think I’m unwilling to spend too much time thinking about it. Just write it, post it, and it’s done. Sorry. It’s an account of things, and nothing more. I’m sure I’ll write about elements of this in the future, but for now, just this terse piece that reads more like an obit than a memoir.

Later.

Twtiter Statistics Update: The Celebrity Factor

2009-05-03T07:20:00.000-07:00

An update to my blog of April 17th, “Twitter and the Culture of Celebrity” (http://banjoboyo.blogspot.com/2009/04/i-started-compiling-some-data-today.html.) I’ve updated my stats to reflect some changes; new folks, new numbers. Here’s a chart showing the ratio mentioned in that post, that of followers to following. This ratio expresses two factors: 1) the sheer number of followers that a celebrity can draw, but also 2) their “return follow” rate. A simple expression of 1 to 2 produces the following.

I’d like to welcome a few newcomers to the ranks of the “one way celebrity broadcasting network”. Brooke Burke, Al Gore, Penn Gillette all have posted some great numbers of followers while following a number equivalent to a small high school basketball team. Topping these ranks, however, are musician Dave Mathews and comedian/magician Penn Gillette, both with about a half million followers, and both following – get ready for this – 3 people. That’s can’t even be all the members of their nuclear family with Twitter accounts. These new additions make last week’s champs John Mayer and Katy Perry look egalitarian in their follows.

Special Twitter Etiquette awards, however, to Kathy Ireland, Paula Poundstone, Fran Drescher, Alyssa Milano, Steve Isaacs, Mariel Hemingway, for following their follows pretty impressively. Remember that this ratio expresses both number of follows and followers, so a celebrity with tens of thousands of follows has to follow proportionately more people than someone with a hundred or so follows to post the same ratio. That’s why I’ve provided the second chart which takes these same celebs and lists them ordinally based solely on number of follows, for a little perspective.

Interestingly, the inverse proportion pretty much persists. Dave Mathews and Penn Gillette still follows just 3 people. Paula Poundstone pretty much still follows everybody who follows her.

I’ll continue to track these numbers as Twitter matures and grows in general use. I know if I owned the site, I’d be looking at charging some of these celebs for the free marketing I’m providing them with.

Later.

Twitter Quitters

2009-04-30T19:33:00.000-07:00

A news blip today on the cultural radar screen reveals a statistic that shows that a lot of folks – 60%, I believe – try Twitter then don’t come back. This doesn’t surprise me at all, and I believe it has to do with the unforeseen use that people would make of this new social networking tool.

I wrote in an earlier post about celebrity narcissistic Tweeting, if we may call it that. This is the phenomena when some celebrity giant garners 6 million followers just based on their fame, and in turn responds by following 12 people. A Twitter rule of etiquette is to “return the follow” and follow those who follow you. Well, obviously John Mayer can’t follow the 798,000 people who follow him. He’d be buried in tweets. When you follow someone, Twitter allows them to tweet you directly. A “direct message”. They would receive literally thousands. In fact, it's kind of funny that even though these guys have hundreds of thousands of followers, they can only find a couple dozen people to follow themselves. I mean, if we're really talking about social networking, do any of us have a network of hundreds of people that we communicate with dozens of times a day? Still, I admire the celebrities that at least bother to follow some of their vast throng of followers (Paula Poundstone). And, Katy Perry, it wouldn't kill you to follow 20 people, you know? It's not like you're giving them your phone number. You can even block followers. But if it's avoiding the followers while being followed, is this really what Twitterr is all about?

So, my conclusion in that blog is that it’s really not a conversation within a social networking system, but more of a celebrity billboard. With all the free marketing that Twitter is allowing these celebrities to garner, I'm surprised they aren't considering charging them for the service based on a per follower rate.

Well, my guess is that these 60% folks join, and if they follow celebrities, they’ll read all sorts of posts. If they join only to connect with their friends, associates, and family, they probably had 3 follows and 2 followers. Not much fun. A whole lot of folks are using tactics and tools to gain followers, for narcissistic reasons, or, more likely, to market something (most of my followers are trying to sell me something. Ironically, some are trying to sell me tips and tricks to gain more followers. Something strange about that.)

Twitter is not becoming a social networking app. It’s becoming a celebrity reflection pond. I would love to see some statistics of number of tweets distributed across users. Or more importantly, number of followers of celebrities vs. regular joes. I’m sure the system is awfully top-heavy with celeb tweets. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s kind of fun to follow some of them. But if you actually think you’re doing social networking with them, well, you’re probably destined for the 60% bin.

Later.

On Being Meek

2009-04-30T18:55:00.000-07:00

I read once that a white male in this society at the age of 55 is at the very peak of his career and wage earning years. I was probably sitting at home sending out resumes or trying to kick start my business when I read this. Most folks don’t remember what the headlines read before 9-11-2001. I do. It was ‘Nasdaq Tanks as Tech Stocks Plummet”. In one two year period ending somewhere in 2004, almost one third of all high tech jobs in this country disappeared. I had been going through the usual ups and downs if IT work – periods of unemployment brought on by layoffs, downsizings, company buyouts, company failures – and decided to take my first love, music, and see what I can do with it. I am grateful in large part for the opportunity to pursue my passion, but I am paying for it. I make about as much money as a good poet. But, after sending out 1,000 resumes in two years, it was a change that I really didn’t have much choice but to accept.

I am a meek person. I am a man. For a man to say that he is meek is like saying that he is weak. In fact, the words even rhyme. The Bible tells us that the meek shall inherit the world. I’m struggling with this. I pretty much see companies, empires, countries - you know, the high end components of our culture - run by very much non-meek people. I suppose the Bible is telling us that money’s not everything; earthly pursuits are vain, etc. but it doesn’t say that us meek people will get our reward in heaven. It says that we’re going to inherit the earth. It reminds me of a bumper sticker I once saw that read “The Meek Will Inherit the Earth. The Strong and the Wise Will Move on to New Worlds” (Long bumper sticker.) Well, I’m ready for my inheritance. Or perhaps I could just get a small advance on my inheritance. Cash would be nice, but securities, something fairly liquid would help me make it to next month.

I like meek people. My very favorite people are pretty meek. Most non-meek people I know are rather, ummm, let’s say assertive? That’s about the best word I can come up with in polite company. When I am in their presence I can feel the life force sucked out of me, flowing into their veins with an almost perceptible flush of power and control. I can be made to feel just about like a 13 year old kid in the presence of a captain of industry. And, you know, I really don’t mind. If sharing this planet with non-meek people means letting them be large-and-in-charge in personal interactions, that’s fine. I can avoid that. What I can’t avoid is this notion that I’m supposed to be inheriting something. I’d like to see something tangible fairly soon. Not getting any younger. Devalued stocks, CDs, anything. Maybe we can start small. Like the keys to some small midwestern town. Nothing big. They wouldn’t even notice me. I’m meek. I’d ask their permission to take possession, probably.

So, an acoustic musician cum web developer is what I am, meek or not. I’m not really expecting to inherit anything except some old books from my mom some day. And, all things considered, I choose meek, inheritance or not. When I’m not starving to death or worried about getting the utilities turned off, I sleep well at night.

Later.

Gretchen Weiners

2009-04-27T18:24:00.000-07:00

Ok, I’m going to out myself here. I have a huge stupid freaking crush on a movie character. No, I am not 13 years old. I’m closer to 113 than to 13. Here’s the deal:

A few years ago I went through a divorce. After two 10 year marriages, I decided to get off the marriage-go-round and kind of took myself out of circulation. I didn’t purposely decide to not date; just to not pursue dating. At my age, it doesn’t take much not pursuing to assure non-dating. I was home sick one day trying to figure out just exactly what people watch on TV in the middle of the day if they can’t stand soap operas and fluffy talk shows. The movie “Mean Girls” came on, a teen coming-of-age, girls-inhumanity-to-girls type comedy, and I decided I’d rather watch it than the same 20 minutes news loop on Headline news for the 3rd time. If you’ve seen this movie, you’re familiar with the main characters, all “queen bees” of their high school. One, Gretchen Weiners, played by Lacey Chabert (who played Claudia on Party of Five) is a somewhat clueless, yet conniving, yet somehow fragile portrayal of a girl whose pedigree gets her in the top club, but now that she’s there, she’s not quite mean enough to pull rank on anybody, and therefore is willing (if not destined) to follow them in a sheep like manner. She is, however, completely, thoroughly, insanely, intensely beautiful to my old eyes. Ms. Chabert is of Cajun extract, her father being a French speaking Cajun originally from Louisiana. She has that beautiful dark complexion, hazel eyes, dark brown hair of a classic Cajun beauty. And she’s easily half my age. So, what’s the attraction? “What is this really about?” as my therapist would say.

Let me take you back to 1971. I was a junior in high school, a recent transplant from a smaller school, and as such, somewhat considered “fresh meat”. I was marginally successful at athletics and didn’t break mirrors when I passed them, so I was considered something of a “catch” in this little high school. I wound up dating the homecoming queen, herself a bit of a “queen bee”. She was no “mean girl” by any stretch, but she was top echelon. There was a girl at the outskirts of the queen bee circle who I had classes with and knew through friends, although not closely. Her name was (if memory serves) Jane Newirth. She was dark complected, dark hair, dark eyes, quiet, even a little timid. But I was going steady, as they used to say. (Do they still say that?) I found myself in many situations, even a couple after high school, where I would be in the same room as Jane, and friendly smiles would be exchanged, a little prolonged eye contact, but she was shy, and so was I. My relationship with the queen bee had fizzled out just as my freshman semester at college had, and I was “at loose ends” as they used to say about 300 years ago. I’d walked into about the only decent bar in town, and suddenly Jane planted herself in front of me - perhaps emboldened by a couple of beers - such that I would either have had to run her over to get by her, or ask her out. I didn’t. Jane was my Gretchen Weiners.

I suppose it is the provenance of aging folks that we should sit and wonder, wish about long times past; “What if” ourselves. I really regret having never had the nerve to ask her out. We may not have had anything in common, but we certainly both knew that we were connected in some basically physical, almost spiritual way. Now, these hundreds and hundreds of years later, I’m sure she’s a grandmother, although she’s fixed in my mind as that long, dark haired beauty planted in front of me at the Fyfe and Drum in DeKalb, Illinois. My memory might even be gussying this whole deal up. Perhaps she just wanted to talk. Perhaps she was leaving, although I doubt it. I was not the assertive jock that I might have been perceived of at first. I wound up on the creative writing team, for crying out loud. We were pretty timid. If I could go back, I wouldn’t be timid. I better stop now because I’m starting to sound like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite. Jane/Gretchen, you still haunt my dreams.

Later.

The Night Watch

2009-04-18T19:31:00.000-07:00

4-17-09 11:00 pm, from the soft white underbelly of the health care system, the emergency room at Harris Methodist hospital in Fort Worth,Texas.

My mother is 92. She remembers horse drawn wagons, the new electric lamps on the street where she grew up. Once, when I was a child, she fascinated me with a story about how when she was very little, she stood holding her father’s hand as the Memorial day parade floats went by in suburban Chicago, watching one wagon that carried little old men in blue uniforms with long beards. They were Union soldiers; Civil War veterans from that part of Chicago.

I listen as my mother lies in bed looking impossibly frail.

“Do you see him?” she asks.

“No, mom” I say, turning to look at the blank emergency room curtain in front of her rheumy stare. Her eyes, once china blue, my eyes, are now dim and misty, an indeterminate grey, like a puff of magician’s smoke A dull silver grey fish color is in them.

“The little old Dutch man.” She says, pointing.

Her health had been deteriorating for weeks. Kidney failure was signaling changes to come in the not too distant future. She’d fallen last night and hit her head, been groggy all day. She was mostly lucid, but she had been hallucinating. She had a subdural hematoma, the same pooling of blood on the brain that had taken Natasha Richardson’s young life not two weeks prior.

“He’s wearing a blue suit. He has a mustache.”

I play along. “How do you know he’s Dutch?” I ask.

“I’ve been listening to him talk. He’s been walking up and down, right out there.” She said, motioning to beyond the curtain that separated her little emergency room bay from the main floor, a little put out that I hadn’t obviously heard the Dutch being spoken not two feet behind me. I looked, and of course there were nothing but doctors, orderlies going about their duties.

“Are you going to take me home?” she asked, and I suddenly flashed back to a summer Illinois day on the farm where I was raised. My friends were busy, I’d eaten lunch and had to rest for a little while after eating. But that was OK, because she was reading Huckleberry Finn to me every day at this time. I remember looking out the window at the giant Sycamore outside the second story window. The leaves moved slowly in dappled sunlight. Huck and Jim were on the river. They’d “lit out”.

“You’re searching for the traditional Albert.” This caught me off guard. I asked her to repeat herself as I leaned closer, making sure I understood her words, thick and syrupy.

“You’re searching for the traditional Albert.” She repeated.

“You… are… searching for the traditional Albert!” She said, urgently, leaning towards me a little. Her face was suddenly intent. I had no idea how to respond, so I didn’t.

“You should be. It’s about that time.” She said, content that I’d finally gotten the message. These were the last clearly spoken words I heard from her, save for her calling me “Jack” about 3 am., my father’s name. I hadn’t heard her say this name in 20 years. It came out clear, succinct. I almost expected him to respond from somewhere in the cold dark ICU room. I’d checked her into the hospital at 7 pm. By 11 pm it was mostly gibberish, slurred words. By 3 am, after hours of fighting to get out of bed (“I want to go home now.”) the nurses put her in a restraint. This was necessary, but a kind nurse asked if I wanted to go outside, knowing what it looked like. I shook my head No. Watching someone restrain your mother is something no child should ever have to see. She fought, literally for 5 hours, to get out of the bed, at one time plaintively wailing what I think was “You can’t do this to me!”. At 4:45 am she fell asleep. I had been clenching my teeth so hard that my jaw hurt. I went to the waiting area to try to lie down, but an Indian couple had taken up camp there; magazine, food, TV blaring, newspapers. I wondered whom they were waiting for to die. I was on a death watch. You are close to death at all times in a hospital. It is the hush that floats over the florescent lit hallways, fake leather furniture. The empty chapels and consultation rooms wait like dugouts for the teams of life and death. I once said to a nurse friend of mine that with all the death that happened in hospitals, you would think that you’d hear all kinds of stories about haunted hospitals. She simply said “You’ve never asked a night shift nurse, have you? You just haven’t talked to the right people. When you’re sitting there at the computer in the nurses station and doors open and close with no one there, well, you’d think differently about that…’

Watching the sun rise grey amidst the hospitals steel, brick and glass towers, I felt no warmth or relief. The coffee had made me nauseated. It was Saturday morning. Hospital staff were starting the morning shift, slowly, quietly filling the hallways, but without imbuing the place with any sense of life. Just presence.

My mother’s condition improved today. Much of what she had been struggling with, despite the subdural hemotoma and kidney failure was simply a lack of oxygen and too much carbon dioxide. The more distressed she got, the less she breathed though her nose where the oxygen tubes were, and the more she gasped fish like through he mouth, worsening the situation. By 5 am, her struggle to talk had left her horse which, combined with the rattling of her breathing gave her the unnatural sound that the ghost in the movie The Grudge made. I looked at the clock thinking it had frozen. I had pleaded with her for hours to sleep, and finally given up when it was clear she didn’t even know where she was. As she fell asleep I prayed for understanding.

Later that day the news got better. She may even recover from this, although it’s by no means certain. My father died suddenly – for the most part. Rather, he lost consciousness almost immediately although his heart fought on for a few days. Mom always said she wanted to go this way. Her nightmare would be to malinger, and I had watched her malinger for 14 hours.
God in all his wisdom know where this will go, and we have little control over it. Tonight, while she is intubated, assuring the oxygenation, I will sleep, hopefully well, in my own bed. I am so tired.

Later.

Twitter and the Culture of Celebrity

2009-04-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

I started compiling some data today after a few weeks of stalking celebrities on Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter for almost 5 weeks now, so I’m clearly an expert.

As I wrote in an earlier blog posting, there’s a little bit (or a lot) of celebrity narcissism going on with Twitter. The whole concept is that you get your friends and family to join and you can send Tweets to one another. But you also have the ability to search for other people. You can search for, find, and follow anyone, theoretically. In a climate like this you can imagine that celebs would be buried with “follows”. While the rest of us are, well, not exactly buried. I’m down to 12 now. I lost one yesterday somehow. When you follow someone you see all of their “tweets”. You can even respond to them. In the friends and family model, you would post your tweet and Gramma, sister, cousin will all read and respond. You’ll read their responses and their tweets as well. Pretty egalitarian and balanced. Now imagine you are an A list actor. You have nearly a half million (not exaggerating at all here) follows. It’s considered “Twitequette” to follow your follows. Obviously they can’t follow all, any more than they could personally respond to all their fan mail. This gives them, as you can easily imagine a pretty huge voice in the “Twittesphere” (These naming conventions are already getting a little cloying.) So while it is pretty impressive that one person can have such an enormous voice, you can see that it’s also obviously a popularity poll. And it can easily lead to some narcissism. I started a spreadsheet to try to track some of these enormous inequalities in follower numbers, but then hit on the idea of comparing them to their following habits. Seems like there should be at least some relationship between the two, right? I mean, if I have a half million followers I should at least follow more people than somebody who has less than a hundred followers, right? Not so much. So I built in a simple division formula (number of followers divided by number of follows) to track this sort of response factor for celebrities of different stripes and levels of notoriety. To whit:

In graph form:

This produced some interesting results. Sure, the numbers are going to be heavily weighted against the celeb who has zillions of followers, but as you can see, this varies some from celeb to celeb. Paula Poundstone, bless her heart (as they say here) in Texas, is the champ at returning her fan’s follows by following them. She had at the time of this writing 8,600 followers, and was following an amazing 8,200. She deserves a Twitter award with some catchy name like “Twitresponder”. In the extreme opposite, John Mayer is the champ in the greatest number of unreturned follows category.

I don’t know what sweeping generalization I can come to about this. I mean, it’s no fault to John Mayer than he can’t respond by following each of the hundreds of thousands of people who follow him. The lad can’t help it. I think what bothers me a little is that I’ve read the tweets of some of these celebrities who talk about how “connected” Twitter makes them feel, and how they love being in a conversation with their fans. Well, as far as I can tell, Ms. Poundstone is about the only one who can claim that distinction.

It is the nature of celebrity that it be a one-to-many relationship with people. That’s kind of a given in the life of any famous person. The Internet has always been a leveling factor in our culture. Anybody can host a website with a home page that looks just as entreating and wonderful as Microsoft. It is somewhat iconoclastic just by its nature. And I think that’s what bugs me a little. That Twitter, designed for two way conversations should be, at the highest level, quite the opposite. I think the first time it really struck me was when I saw one celebrity in my follows tweeting to another celebrity. At that point I felt like removing my follow to both of them, and I had to do some digging to figure out why it bugged me. Did your high school have a “commons” or cafeteria that acted like kind of a social gathering place when you didn’t have classes? Well, if you’ve ever seen the movie “Mean Girls” you’ll know what mine was like. Certain cliquey tables only allowed certain people to sit at them. There was a sort of hierarchy of how this worked, radiating outwards in rows of tables to the hinterlands by the tray return which was so loud and smelly you could barely stand to sit there. But those top couple of tables talked to one another. If you happened to walk by for the most part they wouldn’t even lift their gaze to acknowledge your presence. As something of an athlete in high school, I was a member of one of these inner circle tables, so I know what it feels like from that perspective, as well as the perspective of the hinterland tables. This Twitter phenomenon has something of that feel to it.

While Ashton Kutcher is currently engaged with CNN in who can get to a million followers first, perhaps we all ought to sit back and reconsider where this new juggernaut of the Internet is going. Quite frankly, except for the following of celebrities, I have no use for it. My loyal throng of followers tweet about once a day, if that. At the high end, there are folks who are tweeting every few minutes. This is supposed to be a social networking app, but I think it’s fast becoming anything but that. Until everybody gets on here, including the people who you know and care about what they’re doing as well as those who care about what you’re doing, it’s more like a two-tiered system. If you built an upside down pyramid based on this ratio, you could easily scoop off an entire sector of celebrity tweeting. If, as I have also noted, they tend to respond to each other’s tweets to one another, there is even more of a sort of apartheid at work. Would this work? Would it benefit anyone? Of course not. I’m guessing at human nature here, but I sincerely suspect that some of these celebs wouldn’t even be involved in Twitter if it weren’t for their fan base of thousands. Not only that, but I’m guessing a whole lot of the hundreds of thousands of us who follow them wouldn’t much be interested in Twitter, either, if we were not able to follow them.

So what’s this all mean? Probably the only safe conclusion you can draw from this is that Twitter is almost certainly not playing out as it was intended to. Last night, in a competition with CNN, Ashton Kutcher reached over a million followers. If I changed his numbers today, I’m sure he’d surpass John Mayer on my charts. Is this social networking at all? It’s becoming less about networking and more about broadcasting in my view.

Later.

I'm all a twitter

2009-04-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

Twitter

The latest internet viral app appears to be Twitter, a messaging service that seems to be a hybrid of instant messenger, email and blog. It’s advertising says that it answers the simple question “What are you doing now?” What they don’t say is “And if you have no followers, no one cares.” I’ve been on for about a month now. I am up to 12 followers, 8 of whom are trying to sell me something. Of the remaining 4, at least 3 don’t respond to my Tweets, so I may, for the most part, be pissing down a well, as they say.

Here’s my best explanation of how Twitter works.

· You can follow anyone, absolutely anyone.

· Anyone can follow you, but they have to know you to find you in the first place

· You can respond to anyone you are following.

· Anyone who follows you will see your Tweets

Twitter has one substantial, fundamental flaw in my view. It presumes that you have a network of Twitter users to connect to. (If it continues to grow exponentially, you probably will, as more and more of your friends join). But let’s say that you join Twitter, ask a few of your friends if they use it yet, get mostly No for an answer. Can you use Twitter, and even if you can, is it relevant to you? Here are some of the things I’ve discovered.

Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher have about 1.5 million followers between them. If you are a celebrity, all you have to do is join and let one of the many sites that tracks celeb users post your ID. Remember, your activity will be dependent not on whom you know, but who knows you. And I don’t mean personally. You can elect to follow anybody. When you do, you get their personal little messages right on your computer as if the 1.5 million of you are having a cozy little chat with them. Your chances of even having your tweet read by a celeb, much less responded to, much less have the celebrity think “You know, this one guy here, out of 876,980 responses, is quite a wag. I think I’ll follow him.” Are about, well, one in 1.5 million. So who do the celebrities follow? Easy. Other celebrities. It’s getting a littttllllle bit cliquish in here.

So what are we all left to do until we can coax a few friends to try it out? I mean, it’s really nice to know that the lead singer for one of the top bands in the world is making a fresh salad for lunch, but I’m really kind of looking for a little more out of Twitter than this, and that would even be cool if he knew me, because I could then respond with “Hey, don’t forget the arugula!” And we’d have a good laugh between us.

With MySpace, for example, you can publish a page with your profile and have hundreds of page views in a month. The same “search based on key word interests” exists in Twitter, but it doesn’t have a critical mass yet. Demi and Ashton’s number of followers is growing exponentially. Mine is growing arithmetically, one at a time. At this rate, by Christmas I’ll have 18. Also, the tendency (no names mentioned here) for celebs in this one sided environment to use their tweets as a bully pulpit is rich. You’ll see a bit of evangelizing, some channeling of Zig Ziglar, and a bit of condescension in these tweets.

Think of this as a metaphor. Right now, tweet activity is based on you creating your own network of users. For celebrities, it is more like a constantly refreshing personal billboard on a busy freeway. They are free to say anything they want sure that what they say will be read by literally 100s of thousands of people, but those people can’t interact in any real sense with a billboard. Merely drive by and read it. So for me, with my 4 followers, it’s a little like posting a billboard in my back yard. I can see it quite well, but that’s about it.

Until Twitter goes critical mass, I’ll just spend my time reading about celebrities changing the oil in their cars and renting movies. Occasionally, I’ll post my own Tweet to no one saying “If a tree falls in a forest…”

Later.

Actors vs. Musicians

2009-04-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

Reading about Billy Bob Thornton’s recent bizarre interview with CBC Canada made me think about various interviews I’ve read or seen with other Hollywood actors who’ve also battled to get their music taken seriously. BB T had been interviewed by a Canadian radio station which referred to his acting first, rather than his music, despite the fact that he was sitting there with his band, doing an interview for his appearances in Canada with his band. He responded with truculent, terse “I don’t know what you’re taking about” type phrases, clearly peeved at the tone of the interview. I also read an interview with Alyssa Milano who, according to some sources, is better known as a singer than an actor in Japan, where albums she produced in her teens sold platinum. Asked if she would consider a serious musical career here and now, she responded with the observation that “actors aren’t taken seriously as musicians”. I’ve read a similar quote from Jennifer Love Hewitt. Perhaps the greatest and most outlandish example of this is the metamorphosing of the actor Joaquin Phoenix into the bearded rapper that you now see.

Because of my own music, this makes me think of Steve Martin. I’m a bluegrass musician, and as such when I think of Steve Martin, I don’t think “comedian”. I think “extremely good banjo player”. He’s not only very accomplished on the instrument, he’s also one of the biggest collectors and fans. And yet, to most of us, his playing his always been a sort of goofy prop to his comedy. Which is a shame. (Not that I’m out to evangelize for the bluegrass banjo, but if you think it’s some silly hillbilly toy instrument, just try playing one once. Sound of me stepping down off my soap box). I’ll put it this way; I’ve been playing for 40 years and I’m not as good as him. But, because he’s a comedian, he’ll never be taken seriously as a musician.

It’s not so much that this stigmatizing might be limiting these people from pursuing music seriously, it’s that the flow in the opposite direction doesn’t appear to be anywhere near as impeded. Hollywood seems to be experiencing a flush of newly minted actors who were formerly (or are presently) successful musicians. Here’s a first blush short list: Harry Connick Jr., Harry Belafonte, Mark Wahlberg, and Will Smith seem to have made pretty decent careers of it. David Bowie, LL Cool J, and in fact, many rappers have made this jump. (Ice T most notably).
One actor that appears to be simultaneously bridging this gap is Zooey Deschanel. Not only is she becoming a sought after A list actor, but she is being taken very seriously as a singer with a sultry chanteuse-ish voice that sounds wise and sophisticated beyond her years. Perhaps it’s because she is breaking out as both and actor and a singer at about the same time. That is to say that maybe she’s not yet will known enough as an actress to preclude her being taken seriously as something other than an actor.

I think the irony of all this is that musicians rarely, if ever, have any sort of dramatic training. Conversely, most trained actors took voice and singing lessons. It seems like the predilection for movement from one to the other almost ought to be to the actors. I’m always amazed when I hear the singing voices of actors. This year’s Academy Awards were topped, I think, but Hugh Jackman’s song and dance as host. Alyssa Milano and Jennifer Love Hewitt have beautiful voices. Lacey Chabert (formerly Claudia on Party of Five, now all grown up and beautiful, still acting, most recently in the newly released “Ghost of Girl Friends Past”) sang on the Ed McMahon hosted “Star Search” as a child, and sang the role of Cosette in Les Miserable on Broadway. These guys can sing.

So what is it with musicians coming in as actors? I think of Dave Mathew's role in the great kids movie “Because of Winn Dixie”. I don’t remember hearing anybody bust his chops for trying to pull off acting. Sure, no academy award noms, but not a shabby job. I’m thinking that this probably has to do with the fact that singing is something that people are all over the radar on in terms of self assessment. Almost everyone will say “I hate my voice.” This may lead extroverted actors, springboarding from their fame, to sing when perhaps they shouldn’t. And there are cases of this, no doubt. I remember both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy putting out albums at the height of Star Wars fame.

So, let’s cut the musicians cum actors some slack. Sure, Billy Bob’s a little quirky, but then so am I.

Later.

Britspeak in American Movies and TV

2009-04-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

What is up with all the British/New Zealandish/Walesish/Scottish/Irish actors sucking up great paying gigs in Hollywood? First, let me assure you that I have no axe to grind against the fair folk of the British Isles, former penal colonies of the Queen, and outlying island nations under her flag. My people came over huddled in the steerage of ships with the plague fleas from Liverpool, after all. I’m all for fair and open markets, too. Of course, I’m not a working actor in Hollywood, either, and I therefore don’t feel any competition from this. Having said all this, I am curious as to how this came about and what it signifies, if anything.

I was first aware of this, I think, when watching Daniel Day Lewis playing the role of Natty Bumpo in “Last of the Mohicans”. Ok, the guy’s probably the greatest actor of my generation, and I don’t see anything unusual about him playing roles outside of his Irish nationality. I would think it rather unusual were he to limit himself in this way, actually. I sort of filed this away until one fateful evening while watching “Batman Begins”. I was, by now, aware of the fact that Christian Bale was Welsh. I’d seen him in a couple of movies of no real significance in which he plays a person with a UK accent of some sort. Here I have to own up to my own addiction to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). My oldest son is a film maker and turned me on to it. It’s a classic example of the inherent genius of the basic internet model; a site that relies on the hyperlink to illustrate the incredible inter-relatability of people, places and things, and the entertainment industry is rife with this. So, IMDB in hand, I start surfing the character’s bios. It should be stated that this movie is, as you might imagine, all about deep, dark “Gotham”, (translate “every hick’s nightmarish notion of what New York must be like without ever having been there”.) Here’s a short list (thanks to IMDB):

Actor	Character Portrayed	Nationality
Christian Bale	Bruce Wayne, titan of industry in very Amercian “Gotham”	Wales
Liam Neeson	Henri Ducard, some kind of mystical Euro-guy martial arts person	Ireland
Gary Oldman	Jim Gordon, American speaking nerdy kind of guy	England
Michael Cain	Alfred the butler. At least this Brit speaking actor is playing a Brit speaking role	England
Cillian Murphy	Spooky psycho bad guy, American English speaking	Ireland
Tom Wilkinson	I love this one. He plays Carmine Falcone, a very Cicilian type mafia boss. Just at the edge of a New York Italian accent.	England
Rutger Hauer	Earle. American accent	The Netherlands (OK, so it’s not UK, but my underlying point remains)
Linus Roache	Thomas Wayne, father of Bruce, also, obviously, an American character	England
Sara Stewart	Martha Wayne, Bruce’s mom. American	Scotland
Gerald Murphy	Judge Faden	Scotland
Colin McFarlane	I love this one,too. This guy plays an American black character named Loeb. You guessed it good – he’s from…	England
Richard Brake	I love this one too. You’d recognize this guy. He not only plays American characters, but specializes in sleazy sort of Southern truck stop hillbilly guys with some kind of twitchy hair trigger emotional problem. He plays a character named Joe Chill.	Wales, of course
Lucy Russell	“Female restaurant guest”	England

I could go on. Ok, so when I tell my son about all this, he says “But Dad, the movie was made in England by an English director.” Which, I guess, is something of an explanation, but my rejoinder is then “Isn’t this like making “Tess of the D’Urbevilles” in the ‘States using all American actors doing English accents?” to which he responds with “Yes, Dad.”. OK, so the point is we’ve been doing this for years. I guess turn around is fair play.

A couple of weeks went by and I sort of put this on the back burner. Now, I’m a big fan of the TV series “Charmed”. Alright, I admit it. I’m a big fan of Alyssa Milano. I even watch the makeup infomercial she does just to see the 25 seconds she’s actually onscreen. She’s beautiful. Sue me. (Please don’t. I can’t afford a lawyer). There’s a recurring character on the show named Cole, an uber-demon of sorts who gets killed and resurrected about 15 times, each time with a distinctly American English accent. You would probably know him today as Dr. Christian Troy from “Nip/Tuck”. Another Amercian English speaking role. His name is Julian McMahon and he’s from Australia. His father was Sir William McMahon, former Prime Minister of the counry! Can’t get much more Australian than that! Ok, so he plays two roles with Yank accents. Then, one day I saw an interview with him on one of the entertainment shows. He did the entire interview not in character as one of his roles, but in what must be his overarching character of “Australian actor passing as an American”. Since then I’ve seen him a few times on TV, always as an American English speaker. OK, this is something different here. I guess that to an Australian actor, or an actor from virtually any country, Hollywood is Heaven in terms of roles and salaries. But to cop a completely new American identity? What must Australians think when they hear him doing this? I mean, we’re all over Britney Spears for speaking in a British accent for 20 seconds while buying snacks at a convenience store, but here’s a guy who’s living an entirely fabricated identity, and no one says anything at all.

I was listening to an interview not long ago on NPR with Christian Bale. He did the interview in his native Welsh accent but the interviewer asked him if it was true that he had done interviews during the promo period of “Batman Begins” in his Gotham character accent. He said Yes, a little defensively, stating that he did so so as to avoid “any confusion”. I’m sorry, but that is confusing.

More examples? Did you see “3:10 to Yuma”? No “made in England” dodge here. A very Western remake of a very Western movie done in the States by a very U.S. director for a very U.S audience. Lead roles: Christian Bale, Wales and Russell Crowe, New Zealand.

One of the things that surprised me about this phenomena other than the fact that no one seems much bothered or even interested in it is the observation that we, as Yank speaking Americans, seem to be completely either fooled or content with these accents. In fact, the real puzzle to me is this: I can spot an American actor from a northern state doing a Southern accent in a heartbeat. (They all think that Southerners drop their “r’s” like Scawhlett O’Haawaah). And I’m a native U.S English speaker. But these actors, on the other hand, seem capable of producing nearly flawless U.S. accents. I think the greatest example of this is Hugh Laurie who plays the title character in “House, M. D.” I was aghast when my son told me that he was from England. Not only does he do a dead solid perfect U.S accent, but he’s even got the flat, even, short vowel sound Mid-western accent so dead on it fooled this native Illinoisan. I’ve never heard a slip to bely anything but a native US speaker. Bale, Crowe, and McMahon, on the other hand, do occasionally slip, but so as not to tip there hand, or, if so, not to the point that it’s objectionable, apparently.

What I don’t get is this: I can watch Leonardo DiCaprio in “Blood Diamond” and balk at his horrible South African accent wondering what an actual South African must think of it, and here we are completely fooled by UK actors doing our own accent. I mean, Kevin Costner didn’t even try to hide his Midwest accent when doing “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”, a role that probably couldn’t get any more British. Is this because – as with international air transportation – the whole world is going to U.S English as the standard language and interpretation of it? Perhaps some day there won’t be an Australian accent. Hard to imagine.

We’ve always been in love with the British accent. Perhaps it has to do with our still working out our whole independence thing, but whenever we need to substantiate some character from some solar system light years away and thousands of years in the future, we give him a Brit accent to give him “gravitas”. (I’ve been waiting for years now to use this word in context). And here we see this sort of phenomena in reverse. In order to substantiate American roles we need native UK’ers to do the Yank accents.

I’m OK with this. Just puzzled at the Why of it. And the How.

Cell Phones

2009-04-11T18:00:00.001-07:00

I was at a bluegrass concert a couple of weeks ago in a very high end concert hall in Fort Worth. The hall, designed for full symphony orchestra, is nearly acoustically perfect by many estimates. A bluegrass fan, I’d been there to see Ricky Skaggs and his band Kentucky Thunder a few years earlier. At one point in the evening, after a break, he’d come back on stage by himself, walked to the microphone, and announced that he was going to try an experiment. Much to the concern of the sound and light people, he waked to the very end of the proscenium, out of reach of microphone and nearly in darkness, and began to slowly sing the bluegrass gospel song “Talk About Suffering” a ca pella. Skagg’s rich voice flowed effortlessly to every seam and fold of that building, and by the end of the song, you could quite literally have heard a pin drop. It is an experience I won’t soon forget.

This night, Del McCoury and his fine band attempted the same thing. All four singers in the band strode forward and began a rendition of “Sinner Man”, an equally haunting a ca pella song. A few bars into the song the first cell phone went off. Then another. Then two at once. Many heads turned to the offending sounds, myself included, and what amazed me more than anything else is that the people receiving the calls actually answered them and began speaking in low tones.

I grew up on a farm in rural Illinois in the 60s. That’s 1960s, incase you’re wondering if I go back to the War of Northern Aggression or not. Still, just 40 years ago or so, technologically speaking, it may as well have been 1860. We had a single phone in our house, hard wired into the wall. It was so un-portable that it wasn’t even plugged into a receptacle that would allow you to move it from room to room. It was hard wired. It had a crank. Yes, a crank. No buttons, not even a dial. I’ll never forget: our number was two longs and one short. If you wanted to call us on this little local farm town circuit, you turned the crank all the way around twice, waiting for the crank to unwind twice, slowly, then did three half cranks. Our phone would ring, and, if someone were home, in the house, not in the shower or basement, they’d answer the phone. I’m pretty sure it was a good 15 years before we had any kind of answering machine. If no one answered the phone, no one was home to take the call. And that was simply accepted. “Oh, the Pensons aren’t home.” You would think and try again later. Or, “They must be out in the garden.”

Eventually, phones became modular, then remote (wireless, but still tied to a base receiver in your house), then sort-of-portable (remember those “car phones” that were welded to the car’s console?). Then a phone they lovingly called “The brick” which looked like its namesake, weighed about as much, yet allowed you to talk to the three other people with a wireless phone in your state, as long as they weren’t indoors and were somewhere near one of the two existing signal towers in the country. Now, these days, it’s pretty rare to find a 3^rd grader who’s not checking in with his mom on his cell phone as he walks home from school. And this is good, right? I mean we have instant, global, uninterrupted access to our loved ones, friends, business associates, relatives, whoever. But that’s the problem…

Along with all of this comes the expectation; No, the obligation, to be 24/7, dead-of-the-night, in the bathroom, at church, in traffic, always available. In fact, if you don’t answer, you are somehow breaking this unspoken commitment to everyone around you. I teach music in my home, and have a pretty firm policy of turning my phone off during lessons. I don’t have a land line, just a cell, so I can effectively “turn off” phone contact completely for that one hour lesson. After the student leaves, however, I find myself almost running to my phone to turn it back on, check missed calls, voice mail, messages, anything, just to make sure that one of my children hasn’t been abducted, my mother hasn’t died, a comet hasn’t struck the earth, markets haven’t failed, or any other calamity hasn’t befallen me or a loved one. Sometimes I’ll get testy messages left by friends admonishing me for turning my phone off as if it is an open act of disrespect aimed at anyone who should seek to contact me; sort of the equivalent to being home, closing the blinds, and not answering the door. You know what? Sometimes I don’t feel like answering the freaking thing, OK?

Part of the problem is the cell phone itself. I just recently learned this from a History Channel show: Cell phones operate by sending and receiving two simultaneous but different frequency radio signals, one for incoming and one for outgoing. This doesn’t always work perfectly, hence the awkward “both talk at the same time five times in a row” thing that seems to happen on cells. As cell phones get smaller, they get a lot easier to carry around but infinitely harder to use. If you’re my age, you probably need a couple of pairs of reading glasses stacked on your nose to be able to see who’s calling or even dial a number. Talking into it is kind of like talking into your daughter’s toy Barbie phone. And even the best cell reception still carries the sound quality of a radio dispatch from the front, which is not very conducive to conducting a nice, relaxed conversation.

All parents see cell phones as a sort of life line to their kids. We all run these disaster scenarios through our heads in which our children have been abducted and are being held for ransom in some dingy prison and that single cell phone call alerts the police and saves their lives. I don’t know about you, but the last phone call I got from my kid was a wrong number; she meant to call her friend and peremptorily hung up on me.

I drive a very old pickup truck and feel somewhat comforted by having the cell with me in case of a breakdown. I went through this scenario in my head, though, one day while driving down a lonesome back road and couldn’t for the life of me figure out who I’d call if I did break down. I’m not a member of AAA. I guess I’d have to call a friend and ask them to Google auto towing on the web and give me a number to call. But this is kind of a false sense of security, anyway. If you break down somewhere, chances are the first three cars that stop to help you are going to have cell phones with them anyway, so you may as well have left yours home. And how long is it going to be before in car navigation systems like Garmin take over the role of onboard telephony?

If you call me tonight at 11:30 to tell me your niece got selected to study in France for six weeks, “and isn’t it exciting?”, I’m almost certainly not going to answer the phone. Pretend like I’m “not home at the moment”, but what I really am is “I don’t want to talk to you right now. Your desire to talk to me does not automatically trigger a similar, mirrored response from me. This does not mean you are any less precious to me. It means that I’m probably watching a Laker’s game while playing Spider Solitaire, and darn it, I’ve got voice mail, so please use it, and the first opportunity I get to trump up some interest in your daughter’s education, I promise I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

Pet Phone Peeves:

1) Voice mail saying simply “Call me.” You see, your wanting to talk to me does not mean that I share this desire. I am not responsible for initiating communication simply because you got my voice mail.

2) Text message saying simply “Call me”. This is the best way in the world to get me to call and leave a voice mail saying “Text me.”

3) Refusal to use voice mail, hanging up, redialing the number of times it takes to make me finally succumb and answer. This is the best way in the world to get me to turn my phone off and piss you off when you go straight to my voice mail.

4) Calling and asking me “Hey, what are you doing?” I’m probably going to answer by saying “I’m currently trying to surgically bisect my own Vas Deferens glands”, or more directly, “I’m wondering why the hell you called me.”

5) Calling after 10 pm. I’m a musician, and I do stay up late, but I was raised in that sort of sensible Midwestern way that says that Aunt Bertha better be damn near dead if you’re calling me after 10. She’ll still be dead in the morning, and there’s not a damn thing I can or will do about it tonight.

6) Setting your ring tone to your favorite song. NO ONE CARES! EVERYONE IS ANNOYED! Ok? No one is thinking “My! He must be a rather interesting young fellow to have chosen such a probing, well-crafted song for his ring tone! I think I’ll strike up a friendship with him!”

7) Using your phone in the car. If you can’t bring yourself to use your turn signal or rear view mirror because of the phone propped against your head, it’s time to question your priorities.

I know cell phones are here to stay. My hope is eventually they will merge with the computer completely, and my hand held computer can handle my calls.

Later.