Unappreciated

I’ve been very patient, but she won't talk to me. This has been going on for years, and I should have accepted it by now. But it still hurts. It isn’t as though I’ve stopped talking to her. Maybe she hears the impatience in my voice, though, and decides to just twist the knife by remaining silent.

Yesterday, the sun shone through the bedroom window. “Hey! It’s a beautiful day! How about if I make you breakfast?”

No response. She lay there until breakfast was ready, then emerged from the bedroom—rumpled, making no effort at all to be more presentable. She ate without comment.

“Did you like it?”

Silence.

As I washed the dishes, she lay down on the couch.

“Yeah, you have had a hard morning.” Of course, she heard my mocking tone. But even a witty retort like, “After a breakfast like that, how do you expect me remain standing?” would have at least been something. 

I am aware of my tendency toward sarcasm, though. After she’d gotten her hair cut and her nails done, I said, “You look fantastic!” I was absolutely sincere. What do I get in return? Nothing but a bored sign.

Meanwhile, I pay for everything, and it’s never acknowledged. You know why? Because it’s all about her! She is pampered and thinks she has to do nothing in return, and I am sick of it!

One of these days, I’m going to get a new dog, and we’ll see who feels ignored then.

The Thoughts Are Alive

About a year ago, I went for my first long motorcycle ride with Bill, an old friend of mine who has been riding a Harley for thirty years or so. Having never gone on an extended ride, I was nervous. Beyond keeping distance between myself and other cars, assuming that to other drivers you are invisible, and paying attention, Bill said this:  "Look at the wall, go into the wall."

Here's what he meant: let's say you're in a tight turn. It's very easy, when you're inexperienced, to get nervous and look down, or look at whatever obstacle might be closest. I can't explain the physics or the psychology of it, but I know that when you do that... you're far more likely to fall. "Look at the wall, go into the wall."

I don't want to drive into a wall.

So, riding into a turn, I look ahead. The bike, in a sense, follows my thoughts.

I said I can't explain the physics or the psychology of this, but I have some ideas about the psychology. I have on occasion been advised by people with Qualifications and Credentials to avoid "negative self-talk." We probably all are prone to this from time to time: that familiar old rant we subject ourselves to about how x or y never works out for us, or how we're overlooked because we're too young or too old or didn't go to the right school or sucked at math. Why is it, we might ask, that I never catch a fucking break!? Or variations on that theme.

And if I'm alone in this, gee, am I embarrassed! But I don't think I am, so I will forge ahead.

Naturally, just as we're pulled into the wall when we look it while rounding a turn on a motorcycle, so are we pulled into whatever negative behavior or circumstance we focus on in our negative self talk.  I imagine that concept is familiar, even if from time to time it is very hard to use in order to avoid the negative self talk itself.

But I really have a larger point, which is playing out in Huttle on Fire, the 4th book in The Chronicles of Hurtle Trilogy. To illustrate that point, here's a brief excerpt, which is set in a lecture hall at Yale, where a professor of Neurobiology is speaking to a class of freshmen about the brain's use of energy. A student raises his hand.
----------
            "Professor Winkler smiled and gestured to him with the tip of his whiteboard marker. “Yes, Mr...?”

The boy smiled. “Uh, Twombly.”

“What have you got to add, Mr. Uhtwombly?”

The boy rolled his eyes, then lowered his hand. “I’m wondering where that energy goes.”

“Goes?”

The boy scooted forward. “After, say, some dude thinks some… thought. What happens to the energy?”

Winkler sat on the corner of the desk. “I’m afraid I don’t understand your question.”

Twombly bit his lower lip, then spoke. “Well, the law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so--”

“Ah! I see you’ve been taking physics, too!” A chuckle rippled through the class. “Well, in the case of bio-electrical processes, that energy—that twelve-point-five watts of electrical stimulus--transforms to heat. Body heat,” Winkler explained. “Now, I think we can--”

“But I don’t really mean, exactly, just that type of physical energy.”

“What other type of energy is there?” Reflexively, Winkler’s eyebrows rose with the question.

Twombly looked up, as though whatever thought he was searching for hovered overhead. “I mean… thought energy.”

“Which is…?” Beyond the firing of synapses, no one really knew what thoughts were anyway. But that went beyond the scope of this class. Still, the conversation had taken an interesting turn, even if it was off-topic. Some of the other students had set down their phones and were watching Twombly intently. This was a positive sign.

The boy clearly felt their attention, and sat up straighter in his chair. “Well, you know how sometimes, if you want some particular thing, you think about it… and then it happens?”

Winkler’s shoulders sank. He had hoped the boy had an interesting point somewhere in there, but this was sounding very squishy indeed. He glanced at the clock. Two minutes. Why not indulge the young man’s curiosity? He was just a freshman, after all, and it took a certain degree of courage to speak up in a large lecture hall. “Go on.”

-----------

As everyone's sixth grade book reports ended, "To find out what happens next, read the book!" And when it's done... which is some time off... I hope you will. In the meantime, what was interesting to me was exactly Twombly's question: what happens to 'thought energy?' Those of us who engage in occasional negative self talk have probably concluded that it reinforces the negative emotion or behavior. I suppose the opposite is true of positive self talk. But what about all of the other thoughts that pass through out brains? What about, let's say, those lengthy dialogues we stage in our minds when grappling with some issue? Or those witty remarks that arise a couple of hours after they might have really effectively put another in his place? What about the imagined conversation you had with person who you had a fleeting moment of connection with and did not, in fact, approach? What about that fantastic scene you imagined for your novel, yet never wrote?

What Twombly and I are wondering is this: if thoughts about ourselves manifest themselves in behavior and reality, what happens to all the other thoughts? 

Enter, the Multiverse. People with Qualifications and Credentials--specifically, physicists of some renown--posit the existence of not just multiple dimensions, but of multiple universes. Trillions of them. I couldn't explain the physics of it to anymore than I could explain String Theory, but the idea is very intriguing just the same. It's my conceit in Huttle on Fire that all of those thoughts are manifested in other universes, some probably matching our own entirely, save for the addition of one person, or one event, or... maybe you just have a different favorite color.  In one universe, you might have gotten that job--or gotten fired from it--and everything would have been different. In another, you turned left instead of right. Or you voted Republican. Or were born in Somalia. 

In Huttle on Fire, Chris Westphal is an author who has written several books about a character named Tom Huttle. Tom Huttle is aware of the books, and they are very embarrassing to him.  Consequently, he detests Chris Westphal. Can't say I blame him, either. Chris Westphal has often really made Tom look like a fool. As a fictional creation of Chris Westphal, Tom Huttle was "born," if you will, of Chris Westphal's "thought energy." Because our thoughts manifest in reality, he does exist, albeit in another universe. Tom Huttle is a writer of cheesy espionage novels, and the characters in those also exist, in yet another universe. 

In Huttle on Fire, all of these universes crash together. I'm very curious about what will happen!   

Free-fall

Several years ago, I had the great thrill of going skydiving, in what's known as an Assisted Free Fall jump. This is not the skydiving where you're strapped to the belly of another skydiver. In AFF, you jump out of the plane, flanked by two experienced skydivers. They're there to yank your ripcord if you pass out, or panic.

But once you pull the ripcord, you're on your own; floating over the landscape like you're in a giant swing suspended from the sky. In my case, I looked down and--with my really flawed sense of direction--and had no idea where the airport was. Suffice it to say, I found it and landed safely, but not before some very anxious fantasies of landing in someone's swimming pool in Taft.

This, though, is about the free fall. When I jump off of anything higher than a shoebox, I get this stomach-in-the mouth feeling. One of the most interesting aspects of the free fall in skydiving was that I didn't have the sensation of falling. Instead, I felt like I was floating. Floating with a 140 mile-per-hour headwind, but floating just the same. I started the jump at 13,000 feet, and there was no sense of the earth rushing up to meet me and splatter me all over its face.

Not that I wasn't aware that before too much time--a minute or two at most--I would be, well, let's not sugarcoat it: DEAD.

In any event, even with the blasting wind, and the knowledge that I was falling at a velocity that was or could be terminal in several senses, there was a certain calmness that prevailed during that free fall. I'm certainly not the first to observe that extreme danger has a way of focusing the mind, and despite all of the safety precautions, I was keenly aware that there was a very thin line between being a functioning, conscious human being, and being a pile of broken bones and smashed organs. Really, death is always just a moment away. None of us knows when our time is up. We are just not conscious of that most of the time. Plummeting toward earth, I knew that life was precious and fleeting.

The free fall lasted 20 or 30 seconds, I think. It felt like a lot longer, and not in the way that having the dentist drill your teeth feels like longer than it is, but in the good sense: time stretched out. I was aware of everything, and in that way felt connected to my body, to what I needed to do, and to the experience itself in a very exhilarating way. This is a feeling that might be described as being in harmony with nature, and perhaps even with the cosmos, but above all with Life itself.

It is the feeling that I had yesterday, as I worked on my new novel. I was sitting in a cafe, so (as far as I know, regardless of the strength of the coffee) I wasn't in physical danger. But, however briefly, I achieved what contemporary thinkers call "flow;" complete connection with what you're doing. It is the same sense of bliss and mastery that a painter has when the paint is flowing, or that a musician has when the music carries him away.

You need to know a little about the book to understand why this was a magical experience. I won't attempt to describe the plot entirely, because that is an evolving thing. But I will describe a couple of the elements of the story.

The book that ultimately became The Pyongyang Paradox features Tom Huttle, the hapless writer who has been at the center of the other three books in the trilogy. Yes, I know that a trilogy is a collection of three books, and Pyongyang Paradox is/ will be the fourth. It's a JOKE! 

Anyway, in the version I was working on at the time, since revised, re-directed, and otherwise vastly changed, Tom knows he's been in those other books. As a result he is very resentful of someone named Chris Westphal, the author of the books. Tom feels that Chris Westphal has, in writing about his various misadventures, humiliated him.

For years, Tom has tried to write an adventure novel: The Pyongyang Paradox, an espionage thriller. In the now abandoned version I was working on at the time I originally wrote this essay, Tom had adopted a the nom de plume: Colonel Cyrus Horton, USAF, Ret.  Tom believes that an author with a military background will give The Pyongyang Paradox the gravitas that it needs to succeed.

Tom creates all sorts of background information about the good Colonel, using various blogs, etc., to establish his credible existence. And, to Tom's extreme surprise and delight, The Pyongyang Paradox is a smash hit. I had some ideas as to why that might be so, but for now it's not really important.

Now, remember that Colonel Cyrus Horton, USAF, Ret., is the fictional creation of a fictional character, who is himself the creation of a fictionalized Chris Westphal. I don't--as my eponymous character does--believe that Tom Huttle is real.

But I was fascinated by Col. Horton, and wrote a chapter from his point of view, as though he had, indeed, really written The Pyongyang Paradox. For Tom Huttle, writing a novel is (as is the case for me) a very difficult process. One might describe it as arduous. For Colonel Horton, it was a couple of weekends in his spare time.

In any event, I feel I wrote a pretty compelling chapter, in which the good Colonel gets a call from his agent--who is, also, Tom Huttle's agent--wanting to book an appearance for him on The Daily Show. 

I won't give away any of the other nuances of the plot right now, but the exercise of creating Colonel Cyrus Horton, USAF, Ret., consolidated some themes, and current interests of mine. I'm fascinated by quantum mechanics, and by the theories supporting what astrophysicist Brian Green calls "the multiverse:" multiple dimensions of reality. A favorite book of the past couple of decades is The Golden Compass, by Phillip Pullman, which explores some similar ideas.

My particular take on it was to wonder this: what if fictional characters--such as Tom Huttle and Colonel Horton, and everyone else populating my various novels--actually exist in some unseen dimension? The actual theory of the multiverse allows that there could be millions of versions of us, each taking different paths, with the branching multitude of life's possibilities developing therefrom.

For example, in one of these universes, there may be a "me" who went to Japan at 21, as my father offered me the opportunity to do. There's a version of me who continued working as a reporter. Another whose television writing partner didn't destroy his TV career. Another who went to law school, but probably dropped out. The variations are endless. Fiction comes into play in this way: all of the choices I didn't make in life leave a certain residue. I call it "thought energy."

The law of the conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only changes. So, does thought energy manifest somewhere as a version of reality?

Why not?

Physicists know, I hasten to add, that the "observable universe," that is, all of the matter and energy that we can detect either visually or electronically or by other means, comprises only about 4 percent of the universe. The other 96 percent is a mystery, called Dark Matter and Dark Energy. No one, including Stephen Hawking and Brian Green, know what it is.

Consequently, there is plenty of room in space and time for multiple versions of all and everything. Even me. Even my fictional creations. Even the fictional creations of my fictional creations.
So that's what's happening in this book. Somewhere--I don't yet know where, but I know it will happen--they will meet and something will happen. I hope it's something funny, as well as at least a little insightful.

I would like to claim that I had this idea to start with. But I arrived at it only by writing about 200 pages of narrative in which I really had no idea WHAT was happening. I should say that action was happening, conflict was happening, and scenes and characters were being developed, but the unifying theme--what the book was about--was elusive to me. I just knew it was there if I kept moving forward. That's why yesterday was so exciting.

By the way, I'm not pretending that I'm the only writer who's ever explored this territory. The Paper Men, by William Golding, is a wonderful book, in which a writers characters come to life and plot to kill him. I'm sure someone did it before Golding, too. And he won the Nobel Prize.

Anyway, every plot has been done, so I feel no shame in that.

And I am writing it my way, with my characters, and my take on the nature of humanity, and of reality. It is a lot like free falling, in the most exhilarating way. 

ADDENDUM: I modified this post a little, but further explanation is warranted. I'm writing this addendum in January, 2020, and I see that this entry was originally posted in June of 2014. It took me six more years to finish the novel referred to here. In the interim, I also wrote another novel, but let's not worry about that now. My original title for the book was Huttle on Fire, but over time it became The Pyongyang Paradox, and it evolved vastly from where it was in June of 2014. Col. Cyrus Horton, Ret., was jettisoned. Tom's belief that Chris Westphal was maligning him is no longer a part of the story. However, the plot that ultimately developed incorporates a lot of the ideas I was batting around six years ago. In the now finished version, Tom is writing an espionage novel, The Pyongyang Paradox, that features a swashbuckling, bigger-than-life hero, Buck Samson. Through a confluence of electromagnetic forces, Tom switches places with Buck as he is in the midst of one of his missions. Hilarity ensues, and I'll leave it at that for now. On a final note, though, reading this entry from six years ago, I absolutely marvel at the twists and turns my mind took during the creative process. I followed many, many, many tangents that led nowhere. However, all were important, because distilled from them (pardon the mixed imagery) emerged a coherent plot emerged. Consequently, I can't say that any of the perhaps six hundred pages I wrote and discarded were wasted. I simply needed to pluck from them the elements that supported the story I wanted (perhaps entirely subconsciously) to tell. The final draft is four hundred pages long. I suppose I wrote a thousand or more pages, all told. A viability ratio of 4/10.   

Comic Potential

My morning routine is to walk down to the neighborhood drug store and buy the newspaper. Today, having done so, I was walking back home as I distractedly glanced at the day's headlines, and I couldn't help but feel my foot twitching a little, as though to pull me off course.

Looking down, I saw it: that iconic symbol of slapstick mirth; that crescent-shaped object with the viscosity of whale oil and the stealth of a jungle tiger: a banana peel. It tried to exert its mystical force on me and lure me close, but as an experienced practitioner of the comedic arts, I was immune.

Perhaps I would not have been so inoculated from danger had this been simply (I say simply, of course, but clearly there is nothing simple in this object!) a banana peel. But it was, in fact, the whole banana; black and over-ripe to the point that even the fruit flies ignored it. However, even in this state, the potential for slip-and-fall hijinks was powerful indeed. If there had been any bushes nearby I would have hidden in them until the unsuspecting laborers appeared, each of them holding one end of a long sheet of plate glass, and enjoyed the ensuing hilarity.

But I continued home--though it really did amuse me to see a banana peel there, lying in wait.

An hour or so later, I passed by the same spot again and was not surprised to see that the end of the banana was squished; someone had had a narrow escape. And maybe the banana peel was evolving; stripping down to its comedic essence; in a sort of inside-out metamorphosis, the peel was shedding its cumbersome core to emerge in all its comedic splendor and wreak havoc among the unsuspecting pedestrians. I realized that it was only a matter of time before the peel would be open like a tempting and slippery flower in the center of the sidewalk. Whole troops of Oakland hipsters would soon veer unknowingly toward it, then slip and slide in a scene choreographed with the precision of an Ice Capades spectacular.

Or not. Its possible that in an hour or so, a bicyclist or two will have squished the banana, and some passerby will have crushed it with a boot. The sun may have dried it out, and someone might have kicked most of it to the curb. All that would remain would be a harmless black smear. Comedy is like that. Not like a harmless black smear, but like the banana: the potential is there, but it takes a particular combination of things to actually make it funny.

Humor is rooted most importantly in surprise, but there are some important qualifications to the nature of that surprise. Namely, it is the type of surprise that is neither threatening, nor promising a benefit. If I had actually slipped on that banana peel and fallen, I might have been amused IF I hadn't been hurt. If I were hurt, I'd just feel like a fool with a limp.

But let's take a step back. Let's say you were watching me as I distractedly walked along the sidewalk, reading my newspaper. You see the banana peel. Your expectation is, probably, that I'll step on the banana peel and slip. If you've made a judgement about me for reading the newspaper while I walk--that is, that I'm a fool to do it; that I'm a clueless rube--then if I slip on the banana peel you might laugh because there's a certain surprise and satisfaction in seeing fools get their due.

But maybe you haven't made that judgement about me. Ironically--given the cliched nature of this scenario--if you're watching and I do slip on the banana peel (ideally doing some dramatic twists and turns on my way earthward) you'd probably laugh anyway, not because you're surprised by the actual fall, but because you're surprised by the fact that I did the cliched thing. In part, you'd be laughing at my ignorance, and in part you'd be surprised by your own predictive skills. After all, we don't expect to see our predictions actually come true in the moment.

However, let's say I were an old man (older than I am at least) and I slip, with no slapstick panache, and I break my hip. As I writhe in pain, you'd probably come running to help, and it probably wouldn't be funny to you at all. Unless you're some kind of sadist. You're not, are you? Good. I didn't think so.

I suppose though, even if I were injured in such a fall, and I were in traction in the hospital, recovering, I'd consider the scene and I'd probably laugh at my own stupidity. I'd be surprised by it (though I should never be surprised by my own stupidity) and the pain medication would have kicked in too, so it would be all the more easy to laugh about it. As the observer, you, my rescuer, would probably look back on the scene and laugh, too, because the pain that you observed would by then have become something of an abstraction, and what would be left would mostly be the absurdity of it. You might tell the story at a cocktail party: "This man was walking along, not paying attention, and there was a banana peel RIGHT IN HIS PATH! He didn't see it--he just walked closer and closer, and I thought, c'mon, he HAS to see it. But NO! Bam! He fell! I couldn't believe it!"

Yeah, go ahead and laugh,  you cruel monster. Do you know how many months I'll be in physical therapy? And that was a serious break! They had to fasten my pelvis together with steel pins. I clank when I walk! I'm going to set off the airport machines for the rest of my life, just so you could get a few chuckles!  

But I digress. Here's another banana peel scenario: As before, I'm distracted as I approach the banana peel. But I stop in the nick of time, and look down at the banana peel as though to tell it it's not going to outsmart me. In fact, to demonstrate my resistance to the banana peel's legendary wiles, I do a little dance around it, as though to mock it. Yes indeed, I'm feeling pretty good about myself. And then I fall flat on my face.

In truth, all of this plays better on film than in real life because in film we know, even if the scene is very realistic, that it's fake. We know that no one was hurt, which removes some of the "threat" from the surprise. After all, that person slipping could be us; there is always a component of identifying with the subject in a film. That's why, to me,  the America's Funniest Home Video clips that show people crashing on a skateboard or a bike, or stepping on a rake, or getting hit in the face with a baseball, are not funny, because these people probably really got hurt, at least a little. They're real people, and that could happen to me. Consequently, the protective screen of unreality that film provides does not exist.

Much of the time, like that banana peel, comic potential is unrealized. The banana peel just lies there, a joke untold. It takes deliberate effort to bring it out, but there are many ways to do it, such as, say, writing a brief essay about it.

 

Business Casual

Lisa at Nordstrom found a blue oxford shirt in the rack and I held it up to my face. "That looks good on you," she said.
"It's not too dark?"
"The lights will wash it out. And it's a good color for you anyway."
"Okay." I tucked the shirt under my arm and indicated the brown shoes I held--I'd dug them out of my closet an hour earlier. "Brown, or black?" I said.
She stood back, cradling her chin in her hand, looked down at the black shoes I wore. "Brown. It'll soften the look. She looked again at the brown shoes. "You..." she hesitated. "... could get them polished?"
"Oh, of course. Is there a place here?"
She pointed to another department.
"Great." I selected a brown belt to go with the shoes; she helped me find a pair of socks that tied everything together with the khaki slacks. The outfit screamed Business Casual--a look I had Googled before driving to Nordstrom. I headed over to get my shoes polished while she got my new shirt pressed, and a hundred and fifty-nine dollars later ("You get what you pay for," advised Lisa when I saw the $75 price tag on the belt) I was headed over the Bay Bridge.
I parked in an industrial area near AT&T Stadium and walked a couple of blocks to the address I'd been given. I was 45 minutes early, so I went up to the third floor and clicked in my stiff and shiny brown shoes down a long, wide corridor. Around a corner I found the office; a piece of white paper taped to the door said "Casting."
On the ground floor, I found a cafe and while the barista prepared an iced coffee for me, I used the rest room and when I emerged I saw a tell-tell dot of liquid on my pants, right where my... uhh... well, I could have splashed myself while I was washing my hands... couldn't I have?
Whatever the source of the liquid, I held my notebook at waist height as I made my way back to the cafe. Sitting, I crossed my legs as I drank my iced coffee and let the miracle of evaporation take place.
Ten minutes before my appointment I went again to the elevator. Coming through the door from the street was Young Businessman Incarnate: a handsome, dark-skinned guy with a neatly-trimmed three-day growth of chin stubble. I quietly regretted shaving. He wore a medium blue shirt, khakis, brown shoes, and a brown belt. I couldn't see his socks, but I'd wager they were a diamond pattern; tans with a dash of blue, just like mine. I smiled at him as I pressed the elevator button. "I bet we're here for the same thing." He looked at me like the competition I was, and we rode up the elevator together in silence.
Once again I found the office, but now there was a long line snaking out the door.
In the middle stood a stocky,  hispanic-looking man, with a shaved head, and he wore a black suit and a tie. I resisted the urge to shake my head and smirk. He was definitely not dressed in Business Casual. Didn't he read the notice? It explicitly said business casual. Boy, had he shot himself in the foot, I thought. Of course,  my competition was a lot younger than me--probably 42 or 43. And ethnic looks seem to be popular. This was an audition for print advertising for a big financial services company, and it stood to reason they would want to appeal to a wider audience than old white guys like me.
I shook myself out of it. Who knew what demographic the company was trying to appeal to? I certainly didn't--even though in my submission for the part, I had written, "I think I'm perfect for this part!"  
The casting agent was also looking for "Business Woman," and the majority of the people in the line were women in their early thirties to mid-forties. Unlike my elevator companion, they weren't my competition. If I got the part, maybe one of them would be my Business Partner. Or my wife. But given the age gap, probably my nurse. Were they casting nurses? No.
Two harried-looking women sat at a table, laptops open before them, and one of them motioned me forward. I crouched down to hear her as she opened a form on her computer and asked my name, contact information, measurements, and shoe size, entering the information in a form on the screen. Then she wrote my last name and first initial on a small whiteboard and directed me to the back of the line,
I stood behind a woman about 5' 4" tall, with long dark hair. She wore a shoulderless blue dress. "You do this often?" I asked. Only slightly less original than, "Do you come here often?" But I was really asking out of curiosity, and my own anxiety.
"Hmmm. A little. More for my kids."
"Ah. College fund."
"Exactly," she said.
She indicated no curiosity about me, and there seemed to be an unspoken code of silence here anyway, which was  just as well. I didn't particularly want to admit this was my first time.
In the center of the room, a photographer directed one of the women where to stand. First, she held the whiteboard up, chest high. This was more of a mugshot than a portrait. He shot a frame or two, then took the board from her. "Smile," he said, and shot a closeup. Then he stepped back and took a full-length shot. "Turn--face that way," he instructed, and when she was in position he shot a closeup and a full-body shot. Then he had her turn again to face the camera, and did one more full-body shot. "You're done," he said.
Next was a guy who looked like David Beckham: tousled blond hair, tan skin, fashionable stubble. Was that business casual... who could tell? I wondered if I should have shaved. He jutted his jaw forward for the closeup and bared his teeth. I thought, oh, c'mon! They're not looking for a super model, pal! They're looking for a businessman!
But who specifically was this businessman they were looking for? A tech entrepreneur, weeks out of college, launching his billion dollar startup and wanting to invest wisely? An inner-city merchant whose business is growing? A soon-to-retire executive worried about making his nest-egg last? From the group gathered here, it was impossible to tell. The notice said they were seeking "Extras," too, to pose as business people. Maybe David Beckham was auditioning as an Extra... but I doubted it. He seemed to know what he was doing.
My turn came and I stepped into the middle of the room and held the card in front of my chest. "Okay," said the photographer, stepping back.  (Smile. Shoulders back. Gut in. Hips forward. Chin forward.) Click. Click.
"Okay, turn facing here," the photographer ordered. I glanced at the computer monitor that displayed the images he had just captured. Gotta suck in that gut more! I turned. They say the camera adds fifteen pounds. (Shoulders back! Gut IN! Hips FORWARD--man, I'm glad that drop of water on my pants dried. Chin forward. SMILE, because business is BOOMING!). Click. Click. 
"Okay," the photographer said. "One more facing this way..." I turned, silently reciting my posing mantra. Click.
He looked at the computer monitor to make sure the images had recorded, then turned to me. "And you're done," he said.
As I stepped to the side I glanced at the images too. This may be bad luck in the world of advertising; Lot's wife looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah and turning to a pillar of salt--but I couldn't help myself. Well... no one was going to confuse me with David Beckham. And I didn't look like an earnest, upwardly-striving middle-manager, either. I looked... like a sixty-year-old guy--or maybe 58 year-old one--dressed in Business Casual attire, with neat gray hair of medium length, some lines in my face and forehead, a nice, though somewhat crooked smile. In each pose, my head is cocked jauntily to the side; something I was completely unaware I was doing. Business must be really great!
Leaving the office, I picked up the remains of my iced coffee, and the envelope I had brought, containing a couple of head shots, in case they wanted them.
I went down the elevator and as I passed people in the lobby and then on the sidewalk outside, I thought, "To these people, I probably look just look like a businessman, dressed in Business Casual, coming from a meeting. Had I made some different choices long ago, I might very well be that person, instead of pretending to be one for the afternoon.
I found my car and got into it. I'd been so utterly confident when I'd applied for the job, and really pleased when I'd gotten the audition. Now I had no idea whether I'd be cast or not.
But it's okay. I have an important task ahead: growing my beard. I have three and a half days until I go to a shoot, where I'll be an Organic Farmer. They want the stubbly look.

Eternal Damnation for $1.99

In the supermarket, I came across a display of brightly colored silicone spatulas, priced at $1.99. My kitchen gadget assortment is rudimentary at best, and from time to time a spatula might come in handy. In fact, three nights ago--and I know this sounds pathetic--I was mixing up some chocolate chip cookie mix... well, long story short, but it ended up chocolate cookie cake... but I didn't have a spatula to scrape it out of the mixing bowl. Which was actually a salad bowl... but I digress.

I was at the supermarket. I grabbed a spatula and threw it in the cart, then trolled the aisles and got other stuff I needed. After going through the checkout line, I emerged from the store and saw the spatula wedged into the cart. I thought at first that the bag technician had forgotten to put the spatula in the bag, but then I realized I hadn't paid for it.

Here was my internal dialog:
"You should really go in and pay for that."
"I know... but it's a buck ninety-nine. It isn't as though I hid it."
"But you know the checker didn't see it."
"I didn't remember it was in their either!"
"You know now."
"It's a dollar ninety-nine! They won't even notice." I did imagine the item turning up missing in the inventory control database, though.
"So what if they don't notice? You know you took it."
"But I had no intention of leaving without paying."
"Nonetheless, you did leave without paying. And stealing is wrong."
"I didn't mean to steal it."
"Just the same... "
I thought about a time a few weeks ago, when the barista at Trieste Caffe gave me change for a $20, when I had actually given her a $10 bill. I didn't realize it until an hour or so later, and returned to the cafe and told her what I thought had happened. She shrugged and thanked me. But was it my innate virtue that brought me back, or something else? Did I want to be viewed as an honest person, or am I an honest person at heart? Certainly, a part of me was thinking, "Hey, ten bucks is ten bucks. And it isn't as though I won't spend that and a lot more on coffee in the coming weeks. And what does a cup of coffee cost Caffe Trieste? Twenty cents?"
Then, as now, my arguments against doing the right thing were weak and self-serving.
But today I was tired. I didn't want to go back into the store, find the clerk, explain the situation... and it was a dollar ninety-nine! I continued to my car. I put the groceries in the back.
Then I imagined the interview process for Heaven. Now, I can't say I don't have serious questions about the existence of Heaven, let alone the admission requirements. Nonetheless, I imagined an angel going over my life and coming to this exact moment. "Do you remember what happened May seventh, two-thousand-fourteen?"
"Uh... no."
"Remember a bright green spatula? Lucky supermarket..."
"Seriously?" I said. "You're gonna lock the pearly gates on me for a dollar ninety-nine?"
The angel shrugged. "It's a small failing... but a deliberate one. The commandment isn't 'Thou Shalt Not Steal Big, Valuable Things That People Will Notice.' It's 'Thou Shalt Not Steal.' Period. A moral imperative. No qualifications."
He had me there. But the truth is, I've broken other of the Ten Commandments--definitely broke the "Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of Thy Lord God in Vain" about a million times, and I've coveted my neighbor's goat and sometimes his wife, too... so if there's a very, very strict rule about adherence to The Ten Commandments, I'm going to be spending Eternity somewhere other than Heaven anyway.
But taking something that doesn't belong to me; knowingly possessing something that has that questionable moral taint to it... that was a tough one.
One time in college, my roommate, Tom, came home with a rickety rocking chair that he had stolen off of someone's porch. It was weathered and faded, and hardly staying together. The thing was, Tom didn't even know why he'd taken it, and he said he felt bad about it. Like me, he was ready with a rationalization. "But it was just outside. It was falling apart," he said. "They probably don't even care that it's gone."
He didn't convince himself. Over the next several days, he took the chair completely apart, refinished it, and reassembled it. He did a good job, and when he was done it was really a nice chair. Unfortunately, Tom kept it in his room. He would have made a far different impression had he taken the refinished chair and put it back on our neighbor's porch. But he didn't do that. So now, almost forty years later, I relate that story as an example of moral failure, rather than one of realizing one's failings and doing what one can do to make up for them.
Carrying the spatula, I went back in the store. My intention at first was to return to the clerk and explain the circumstances... and I confess that fleetingly I imagined her doing what the barista at Caffe Trieste did: say, "Oh, that is so nice of you!," thus reinforcing my sense of myself as a moral person. But I didn't want to wait for the clerk, so instead I just went to the self-serve checkout, scanned the spatula, and paid for it.
Then I left the store, puffed up by my own virtue and I thought... do I really need a spatula?

Hell's Theme Music

Fifty-five minutes and counting on hold with Blue Shield to appeal a denied claim. When the hold music--a loop of an innocuous hillbilly guitar--comes to an end, there's the scratching noise that one used to hear at the end of a vinyl LP. There's probably some poor clerk in there, flipping the tone arm back to the beginning every minute or so.

Blue Shield probably paid a composer a few hundred dollars to write this obnoxious little ditty, and if it has the same effect on other callers that it's having me, which is to make me want to hang up and scream, it was money well spent. They don't have to answer our pesky questions or to reverse their unwarranted denials. Every now and then, a recorded voice comes on to inform me that they have an unusually high call volume (sure!) and to reassure me that my call is important to them and that my call will be answered in the order it was received... but if I'd like to call back another time, they're less busy early in the day.

Last time I tried calling later in the day, the system just kept me on hold until the end of the business day. So I'm not falling for that again.

I wouldn't subject myself to this torture without good reason, so here are the specifics, without getting too graphic. I have a chronically high PSA level, and six months ago I had a biopsy. My third. It was negative. However, my urologist in southern California recommended that I have PSA levels checked every six months. But I'm up in Oakland now, and don't have a urologist. So, with the six month time nearing, I got my doctor here to make a referral to a urologist I found on the Blue Shield site.

I went for the appointment and filled out a form or two.  I just wanted them to have my name in their patient roster so if I started peeing blood one day I'd have someone to call. But the good doctor--Columbia and Yale, so I think he knows his business--performed a brief examination and ordered a blood test. I didn't ask for any of this, but I suppose if I were in his position (it was more comfortable than the position I was in, let's say) I'd have done the same. All told, it took around 20 minutes. The bill was $1,096 dollars. Blue Shield paid none of it. They don't seem to want to discuss it, though. An hour and fifteen minutes now, and counting.  

I have the phone set on speaker, and the tinny music warbles out; a sound  track to my increasing annoyance. About forty minutes a ago, a human (or a very effective simulation) came on the line. I briefly explained the problem.

"Oh, let me connect you with claims," he said. I'd found the number I'd called on the Blue Shield website, but maybe I'd dialed some general number and not a specific one for claims.

"Am I going to have to wait another 40 minutes?"

"Oh, no. I'll connect you." And a moment later, the same theme music came on. I checked the website and indeed, the number I had called was the number for claims. You'd think Blue Shield could afford to commission another tune just so callers would know they were at least making progress.

So here I remain, having memorized every note, fearing I might have gotten onto a hold system that is eternal. Hells theme music. I've read about savants who can play a piece of classical music after hearing it one time. I'm not a savant, but I've heard this tune so many times now that I think  I could pluck it out. And I don't play guitar.

I took the phone with me into the bathroom when I had to pee, certain that if I left it unattended for more than five seconds another person at Blue Shield would pick up the line, say, "Hello? Hello?" and then hang up.

No reassuring voice comes on the line anymore to tell me that my call is important to them and that my call will be answered in the order it was received.

But the story has a happy ending. After an hour and 25 minutes on hold, Banny came on the line. She corrected the problem, and from $1096, my actual cost will be $62.40. I'm relieved, and I thanked Banny for figuring out the problem: the medical corporation that the doctor is with is "out of network," but the doctor is in it. I'm grateful to Banny, but I wonder how many people in my position--driven mad by hold music--would have just given up and paid the bill.

Old Photos

I returned to Oakland today after a week in Ojai, where I lived with my wife for 20 years. We raised our two children there, and lived in the same house which over those two decades we remodeled and expanded, making it entirely our own.

Now, after almost 30 years of marriage, Stephanie and I are in the midst of a divorce. It was a long time coming, and we both worked very hard to reconcile. At times, it felt like we might succeed. Ultimately, we didn't. That's why I live in Oakland now, 350 miles north.

But I still have close friends in Ojai, and it's a lovely place loaded with good memories for me. The house, too, is loaded with good memories, and also with stuff: everything a family accumulates over a lifetime together. Well, half of a lifetime anyway, at least as far as my life is anyway.

Among all that stuff, of course, are a lot of photographs. In total, I suppose there's a good-sized trunk full of them. On this trip, I brought back a couple of small boxes. When I got "home," (Oakland is, for the time being, "home;" not simply home) I put myself to the task of putting away the photos.

There are a couple of problems with that task. First, compared to the house in Ojai, I have a tiny amount of space. I don't know where I'll put any of it. Second--and this is the larger problem by far--I had to look at the photos. There's one, taken on a camping trip with my son, Drew, who was 4 at the time. We went backpacking in Yosemite with three other dads and their young boys. We're all perched on a huge granite boulder overlooking a pristine alpine lake.

Another photos was taken in Paris. Stephanie and I went there with Drew when he was just 11 month old. He took his first steps in Paris. There's Stephanie, smiling in front of some great stone building, the stroller at her side. She's beautiful, and fit, and happy.

There were other photos of Stephanie. In one, taken in our first house in Santa Monica, her face is covered with white cream--I think this is called a mask among the cosmetically informed--a not-unfriendly "why are you taking this?" smile on her face.

There is a photo of me and Stephanie together, taken when we were both teachers and had chaperoned the prom. We were in formal attire: me in a tux, of course, and her in a slinky black gown with see-through netting about the shoulders. She looks very sexy. As neither of us went to our own proms, we always referred to this as our prom photo, and at the time it was taken I remember thinking that this completed a portion of my life that felt undone. With Stephanie, my life at that time felt complete.

There are many pictures of my daughter, Kelsey. In one of them, taken when she was about two, she wears a little purple dress, and on a chair she is posing her cloth doll, who is wearing a dress that's the same shade of purple. She is every bit as purposeful as the photographer.

Photos of my mother were in the box, too, including her high school graduation photo, taken in 1935. She has short hair in tight curls, and by contemporary standards looks more like someone in her mid-twenties than an 18-year-old. There's a photo of my father, taken when he was perhaps 50; 10 years younger than I am now. The photographer captured a moment when he appeared to be about to break into a laugh.

Sorting through all of these pictures, I couldn't help but be overcome by nostalgia and sadness. My dad died in 1984, my mom in 2007. My son is off in New York. My daughter, who lives in Emeryville--just a couple of miles from me in Oakland--will in September head to France to complete a Master's Degree. Stephanie and I are in the midst of divorce. The house is for sale.

How swiftly things change. How brief is our time in this life. I think and hope that at the times they were taken that I appreciated that moment for all of the richness that it possessed. I hope I looked through the lens when taking a picture of Stephanie holding our infant son, and savored how blessed, how truly and remarkably blessed I was to have such a beautiful wife, and such a beautiful son. But every moment is not captured in a photo, and every moment is equally rich, really; even the most mundane one. This afternoon, rain was pelting down. I stood under an awning, talking with Drew on the phone. He's shopping for an apartment in Brooklyn and wanted my advice on it. As we spoke, there was a flash of lightning, and thunder shook the clouds. "Did you hear that! My god!" I said.

I'll forget that moment in a day, or a week, or a month, or a year, and there is no photo of it, but in its totality, it is magnificent, a moment in which I knew this: I'm close to my son. He seeks my counsel. I desire to help him. I'm proud of him. He has accomplished so much, and has so much to look forward to in his life. The weather holds forth, a glimpse itself of the magnificent forces at work in the world, a backdrop to this small and meaningful exchange between the my son and me, 3000 miles apart.

When my mom was living in Kensington, an assisted living place, I drove up from Ojai to spend a couple of days with her. Neither I, nor anyone else, suspected that she had only a couple of months more to live. She was active, and in good spirits. She had made interesting friends at Kensington. Her apartment was tidy, but small. I slept on the sofa in the living room that looked out into the garden. I remember lying there and reflecting on how grateful I felt to be able to visit her, and how happy it made me that she was doing well, and was at 90 just as bright and good humored as always. I have no photo of that time. Sorting through all of her belongings only a few months later, after she had passed away, I would be almost overcome by the volume of it, by the depth of it, by the time it chronicled which was now, with her loss, all gone.

I have wonderful memories of my life with Stephanie, and of raising my children. We traveled, we had parties, we entertained friends, we helped each other through struggles and sickness, we had setbacks and victories, disappointments and surprises... it was all so beautiful and so much more vast than any collection of photographs could ever capture. These few that I looked at today are hardly a glimpse of what has been a very good life that I'm extremely grateful for and proud of, my many missteps and failures notwithstanding.

Number Four in the Trilogy

I am struggling--struggling, I say!--with the fourth installment of my Chronicles of Huttle trilogy, Huttle on Fire. Yes, I know that when it's done I could call the collection a quartet, but that sounds like it ought to have a standup bass and a snare drum in it, so it will remain a trilogy.

This is humor, people.

Anyway, my struggle is this: I don't know how to define or describe the central conflict of the book! In The Spy Who Loathed Me, FBI Agent Terrence Tillberry is in love with KGB Agent Petra Tarasova. There's lots of intrinsic conflict there, and when you throw in the fact that Petra couldn't care less about him, and that everything he does to get her attention only makes him look like more of a jerk, well, there's plenty of space for humor.

Sometimes, the central drive of the story is apparent from the beginning. Arguably, that's an easier course to take. However, I enjoyed no such luxury with the first two books, In Huttle We Trust, and Huttle to the Rescue. I started with a character, Tom Huttle, who had a quest. In the book In Huttle We Trust, he wanted to complete his first book, titled Garbage.  In Huttle to the Rescue, Tom wanted--and believed he was poised to receive--a prestigious writing award. In both cases, severe and myriad complications arises as Tom sought his goal.

So far, Huttle on Fire has not revealed to me a concrete goal for Tom to seek. I've written fifteen chapters, and Tom done a number of things, and been tested to some degree or another in each chapter... yet the core; the thing that is driving him--remains elusive.

However, without revealing the plot in any way, I have been circling around some tantalizing themes, which I will expand upon at the end of this post. You see, humor is not just pies in the face and slipping on banana peels--though that is a good and worthy brand of it. Humor is also the human condition; sharp truths revealed with wit, so they cut deeper. Ultimately, the humor of a piece has to inform not only the plot, but the theme of the book. So, below are some of the areas I'm touching on. As the character develops and learns, the themes emerge. In the end, if I've done my job correctly, both the character and the reader have a little more knowledge about themselves, and about life.

Here's what I'm playing with.

THREADS & THEMES:

1) TOM BELIEVES HE MUST ENDURE PAIN TO BE A MAN OF VIRTUE. (He learns that sometimes, pain of some type is a consequence of remaining true to yourself and to your aspirations, but that pain itself does not impart virtue.

2) TOM BELIEVES HE IS UNIMPORTANT AND WILL BE IGNORED, EVEN WHEN HE HAS A SOLID CONTRIBUTION TO MAKE. (He learns that he must have faith in his own qualities and step bravely forward day-by-day and hour-by-hour. He will be heard how he’s heard—not exactly as he might like in any given instance—and he must calibrate his actions accordingly, or not. What others think of him is none of his business)

3) TOM BELIEVES THAT THE WORLD IS ONE OF THREAT AND STRUGGLE. (He learns that the world is neutral. There are good people and bad ones; fewer bad than good. Everyone is struggling in some realm or other.)

4) TOM BELIEVES THAT THE ONLY TYPE OF PERSON WHO CAN OVERCOME THE NATURE OF THE WORLD IS REALLY NOT HUMAN AT ALL. (He learns that to be human—experiencing the full range of sorrow and elation available only to people, in the moment and in all its dimensions—makes the world a place to treasure and be grateful for.)