Black belt, my ass

A while back I stumbled across an interesting article on one of the intranet portals where I work.  It had the headline “Business Black Belts breaking down silos”.  I was looking for a link to information about my online W-2, and I almost wish I had not been so easily sidetracked.  Otherwise, I would have been left with my original, perfectly self-amusing impression:  a mental image of a circa-1970’s Bruce Lee movie fight scene, slightly altered to include a bunch of tough-looking badasses wearing business suits, surrounding the protaganist while loitering in threatening poses, each waiting his turn to get his ass kicked, while our man defends his family farm’s outbuildings from certain destruction.  (I know I could have gone another way, and inferred missile silos, but first impressions are what they are).  Curiosity piqued, I clicked into the article and read it.  It started,
“Seventeen Home Office associates now meet the highest standards for Black Belt testing, but you’ll never see them break boards or smash bricks. Armed with the knowledge, discipline and inner strength of a Black Belt in the martial arts, they’ll use their skills in a much different way – to reduce operations costs and improve service quality. These associates are Six Sigma Black Belts and they’re experts in a business management philosophy called Six Sigma. If you haven’t heard of Six Sigma, it’s a program to optimize system design and performance for virtually error-free business performance. With tools in hand, these Black Belts are on the offensive to eliminate defects through methods that emphasize understanding, measurement and processes improvement. These associates help manage a wide range of projects that will ultimately improve the development and delivery of products and services at xxxxxxxxxx. ”

First of all, wait just a cotton-fuckin’ second here.  I have a problem with anything calling itself a martial art that doesn’t include breaking shit or beating the crap out of people.  Even the dance forms carry at least a hint of menace.  What the seventeen people have mastered is not the ability to kill, maim, deflect attacks, throw razor-sharp stars into an opponent’s jugular, or even deliver a Maxwell Smart-style karate chop to the collarbone–no, what they have mastered is a “management philosophy”.  Let me state that again, while you pause just a second for that to sink in:  a “management philosophy”. It sounds like any vapid little douchetard or leg-humping weiner dog could could take this class, and not end up with even rudimentary self-defense skills.  In fact, I would bet that only a small handful of the seventeen could mount an adequate defense  against even such faux-tough guys as David Carridine, or Ralph Macchio, or Steven Seagal.

As for the rigorous training,
“The journey to achieve Black Belt status is not easy. The process includes five weeks of classroom instruction, four half-day exams and completion of at least one project that produces quantifiable return on investment. While the minimum acceptable test score is 75 percent, [these] associates have achieved an average score of 87 percent on all the exams.  Exams behind them, these associates are ready to think smart, drive results and enable operational excellence. ”

Ok, hold on a second…WTF?!?  The 17 Grasshoppers never had to snatch the fly out of the blind Shaolin Master’s hand before being allowed to move the urn of burning charcoal (which leaves a permanent dragon scar on their forearms, by the way); nor drill for weeks in Mr. Miyagi’s garden (“Wax on!  Wax off!”) as the elderly sensei belabored them about the thighs with his cane, leading up to a climactic and tense fight where they get a broken ankle but then hand the bullies their asses anyway; nor be demoted from Navy Seal to lowly ship’s cook before redeeming themselves and saving the ship from terrorists bent on world destruction.  In fact, I am having trouble imagining a scenario where a practitioner of this martial art would be called on to administer a roundhouse kick to the face of an opponent, causing said opponent to fly backwards across a–a what, a conference room?–and land on a table, snapping it to splinters.  Here is what they had to do, instead:  they had to attain a C average in a series of classes.  Now, I will grant that they prolly had to study real hard, and they should get credit for that, but if on the basis of their training they consider their hands lethal weapons, and subsequently begin taking nighttime strolls around the rougher parts of town looking for trouble they can quell, they will be sorry.   Being “…on the offensive to eliminate defects through methods that emphasize understanding, measurement and processes improvement” just won’t get you very far in a knife fight.

Finally:  I read the article twice, and there was not one damn thing in there about silos, either.  Context notwithstanding, if initial alliteration is what they were after, along with some kind of tie-in to our country’s agrarian heritage, the obvious headline would have used “barns” instead of silos, wouldn’t it?  I mean, wouldn’t it?

L.B.I.

It occurs to me that it is going to take longer to document my recent trip with my kids than it took to actually be on it.  I can’t figure out if that is a bad thing or not.  After all, M*A*S*H was a great TV show back in the day (except for some of the more ponderously moralistic and heavy-handed Alan Alda-directed episodes where he channeled his inner SNAG (that stands for Sensitive New Age Guy, by the way)), and it lasted way longer than the Korean War ever did. The shooting part, anyway.  I think they are still over there, staring daggers at one another and whatnot, even though I’ll bet you could count on two hands the number of actual dagger-starers who actually know what the fuck the staring is even about anymore. Not to suggest, either, that I think M*A*S*H was a documentary of actual events like this travelogue is.  Just that the telling outlasted the events, by a long shot.

Sunday morning we set out from Weehawken, got on the GSP and headed south.  Less than 40 minutes later I was off the Parkway and on the phone to my friend Ray.  Ray lives in Jersey but had spent the better part of two years as a technical consultant on a major project where I work, in Columbus.  He sat right in my cube most days, and we ended up getting along great.  He has since formed his own company, still in the same line of work, and we keep in touch occasionally.  I had gotten his address and mapquested it, and written down directions and done all that navigational due diligence.  But here I in Perth Amboy, trying to make out the new Mapquest directions back to Woodbridge on my Blackberry screen, when I finally called Ray back and asked him to talk me down from the ledge.  He pulled up beside my car in a gas station parking lot just as we heard the screech of another car locking up its brakes to narrowly avoid assholing the car in front of it out on the street.  Ray leaned out his window laughing and yelled, “Hey, huh? How’s about the ringside seats to the demolition derby!”  That was my kids’ introduction to him, and they liked him right away.

Since the last time I saw Ray at work, he and his wife have had a son, also named Ray.  We had stopped in Weehawken at Toys Backwards ‘R’ Us (or as it is properly known in some quarters, “We ‘B’ Toys ‘N’ Shit”) and bought a stuffed animal for little Ray, who had just turned 15.  (Months.  I have often wondered what the protocol is for switching from Months to Years as the appropriate measurement of age, as parents of youngsters will sometimes say “18 months” or “23 months” instead of “one and a half” or “holy shit they weren’t lying about the Terrible Twos.  Kee-Rist!”  After I turned 40 I tried it for a while:  “I am 483 months old.  It took a long time to recover my self esteem after I totally fucked up on that APGAR test score, but developmentally I am almost where I am supposed to be”.  That was like 130 months ago now, and since then I have way outgrown madcap antics of that ilk).  Anyway, we finally made our way to the home of Ray, Rena, Ray-ray, and Chester, who is a 3-legged dog with a bullet fragment still in his chest near the stump, that they traveled through a blizzard to pick up from the animal rescue.  I always pictured Ray as kind of a pistol, or maybe a little bit of a loose cannon.  Quintessential New Jersey guy, assertive with occasional hints of a temper, but real nice and down to earth.  I thought, when he got married, that his wife would certainly have her hands full.  But then I met his wife in person, last Sunday.  She is just a trip–quick and funny and no-b.s.–and it was clear right away that Ray is the one who has to toe the line.  And their kid is cute and sweet and easygoing.  Their dog is basically a 65 pound lapdog, well adapted to his new gait. We had burgers from the grill, pasta salad and potato salad, iced tea, and a very nice visit for a couple of hours.

At this point Jillian and Ian and I still had our actual destination up in the air.  Would it be Seaside and Tom’s River, or farther south to Long Beach Island?  We settled on the latter, and with good directions we lit out for the New Jersey Turnpike. And about 45 minutes later, there we were!  I had made many trips to various points up and down the shore in my high school and college days, and this area has long been my favorite.  Long Beach Island is about 18 miles long, and consists of several municipalities all up and down the island, each with its own character and flavor.  Beach, Ship Bottom, Surf City, Harvey Cedars, Barnegat Light, to name some of them.  Some of the towns have touristy business sections with coffee shops, arcades, beach stores and restaurants.  Some have the kind of old-fashioned general stores that remind me of the ones in quieter sections of the South Carolina Grand Strand.  Some had a higher density of what appeared to be year-round residences (this inferred from the property upkeep, landscaping and how lived-in the houses were), and some with more rental properties and seasonal condos.  We found a cool little old-fashioned motel called the North Shore Inn in the town of Barnegat Light, about 3 blocks from the northern end of the island.  From the motel room it was about a 3 block walk to the beach access path.  The path itself is about a quarter of a mile long, through grassy dunes and scrubby shore flora and sandy dunes, before getting to the actual beach.  It is actually more rustic and quiet than I emembered, but the places I used to stay were farther south on the island, surrounded by far more commercial activity.  There was some kind of weather or Gulf Stream phenomenon that I’m not quite clear on, that caused the water temperature to be at about 55 degrees the whole time.  Our first view of the ocean was breathtaking and weird.  The air above the sand was warm and clear, but above the water there hovered a blowing mist, thick like a fogbank, that was clearly delineated where the sand met the tide.  It looked like some kind of hackneyed visual cliche out of Stephen King, such was the starkness of contrast between the mist and the beach air.  The wind was from the south, and the fog was moving right along, but still thick enough that visibility was extremely limited. 

 

Jillian got some pictures, too, but I don’t have them yet.

About 1/3 mile from the oceanAt night...

 We went in the water and right back out, and we kept doing that.  The surf was choppy and strong but excellent for body surfing and boogie boarding.  But after 5 minutes at a time we couldn’t feel our toes.  Monday morning started the same way, with the added bonus we hadn’t noticed before of a foghorn, very close to the north of us.   I was out on the beach for about 3 hours before the air cleared enough to see a long jetty, about 1/2 mile away, with the foghorn on the end.  In the other direction, on the other hand, the lighthouse was clearly visible all morning and all day.  As I said, weird.

From the end of our beach access

Tuesday morning we got moving around 8:30.  The route to the Pennsylvania Turnpike and home took us through the Pine Barrens, which is more or less a desert that takes up much of the middle part of southern New Jersey.  Sandy soil and pine trees, for miles and miles.   For such a densely populated state, the southern part looks sparse and rugged and wild; and being in it, you can easily imagine the context from which the legends of the Jersey Devil emerged. 

My car did this in Ohio.

     

We got home in the early evening, after about 9 1/2 hours on the road.  It was good to be home.

All in all, WHAT AN AWESOME TRIP WE HAD!!!!

Jetty at sunset

Driving

We got checked into our hotel, unloaded the car, and then headed into NYC, hitting the Lincoln Tunnel at about 6:30 p.m. on Saturday.  It has been years since I drove in the city, but I felt right at home, as if it is been in my muscle memory all along and I have been driving for years under unnatural conditions.  I have lived in Ohio for 24 years, but I am still not quite used to some of the midwestern driving styles.  Not that they’re wrong, mind you, just…different.  For example: when a traffic light in New Jersey or New York turns green, generally the entire line of motorists will at least take their feet off the brakes and the entire line of vehicles will start to roll, albeit slowly at first, at the same time.  The subsequent spacing between vehicles sort of takes care of itself as they pick up speed.  In the midwest, the tendency is for the first car to move, then the second driver will remove his or her foot from the brake and start to roll, and only then will the subsequent driver even consider doing the same, and so on.  For 24 years, if I am the 4th or 5th (or higher) driver in line at a fresh green light, I start getting antsy and drumming my fingers on the wheel in anticipation when it will finally be my turn to go.  I have more or less resigned myself to the plodding and deliberate pace of the staggered start–what else are you gonna do?–and to the fact that only a fraction of cars that COULD make it through an average green light, actually will.  And I really only start screaming in my head (or out loud) when someone is doing the vehicular equivalent of the Thorazine shuffle, or driving like a complete retard at the sight of the first snowflake or raindrop.

As it turned out, I hit a red light right at the exit vortex from the Lincoln Tunnel, and I was about 10th or 12th in line.  My big chance to demonstrate my pet peeve!  I turn around to the kids and say “ok, here’s what I mean”.  Then I think, I don’t know, maybe I’ve been bitching about minutiae for years.  I mean, go outside on a starry night, contemplate the vastness of infinity and check out how big the fucking universe is, and then come back in and tell me how important it is that I make it through this light instead of the next one.  Seriously.  But on the other hand…sure enough, the light turned and everyone–everyone!–started moving in unison.  There were no fender benders, no panicky skid stops, no weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, no subsequent exchanging of insurance information, or fleeing the scene.  There was simply a row of cars doing what it should, but in a well-coordinated, choreographed fashion, pristine in its symmetry.  Ah, home…

Then one of the kids asked me to tell the story about the wreck and fight on the parkway.  Back in the day, I had a warehouse job that was about 4 miles away from my apartment.  The job moved to central Jersey, about 60 miles away.  I didn’t have it in me to put on enough of a game-day face and go make a favorable impression on some new job and boss, so I did the 120 mile per day commute for a while.  Exit 163 of the Garden State Parkway, south to where the New Jersey Turnpike intersects in Woodbridge, and then a few exits down the Turnpike before getting off at the one near Dayton and New Brunswick.  One morning there had been a heavy early rain.  The sun was out but the roads were still very wet and slick.  There was a construction zone on the Parkway, and traffic was moving at a medium pace.  Around one curve it came to a standstill, and cars were packed bumper to bumper (“bumpetabumpeta” as my friend Joe used to say). I noticed a set of skid marks on the shoulder which led to deep tire gouges in the muddy cut where the road went through a former hill.  This was right next to another pair of skid marks and tire gouges, which the keen-eyed passing motorist could follow up the hill to where one car rested on its side, front facing down the hill.  There was another car resting at an oblique angle, the debris field around which suggested that one of the cars had t-boned the other before they slid to a stop in the mud.  A few yards farther up the hill there were two gentlemen who were discussing the nuances of their recent vehicular altercation.  By “discussing” I mean “beating the shit out of each other over”.  One of the guys had loosened his tie and removed his sportcoat, and the other was dressed for a more blue collar workday.  Both of them appeared to be avid negotiators, as neither was giving the other a single god damn inch.  From the mud stains it was apparent that they had both lost their footing at some point, but in the short time I saw them they were up and punching.  I looked around briefly at the other rubberneckers, and at least half of them were just laughing their asses off.  I’m sure it was a nervous laughter, but for some reason I found that funny, so I did too. 

While it was very I-don’t-know-if-”relaxing”-is-quite-the-word-I’m-looking-for-here to drive without feeling like a complete impatient nutjob, I didn’t want to spend all evening in the car. So I pulled into a garage at 47th and 3rd and we got out to walk.  I have been to Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and many other large and medium cities–Columbus!–and they each have their own defining character.  But there is a raw, frenetic energy that seems unique to New York. It is almost energizing at first, and in small doses.  I love the pace and cadence.  We walked to Times Square, with its crush of people and visual overstimulation and sensory bombardment.  We ducked into a little eatery where we got sushi and pizza, and sat on a bench to eat.  Shopped in the Virgin Megastore and looked in a few other shops.  We then descended into a subway stop, where I had to do that squinty-eyed slack-jawed tourist thing where I figure out how to read the subway map and the Metro Pass ticket dispensing machine. 

Side note:  Back in that previous life, I would occasionally drive in to the City after the 2:00 a.m. closing time for New Jersey bars.  The only rule in New York was that a bar could not stay open 24 hours a day, so they would close at 5:00 am and reopen at 6:00, giving the proprietors a chance to splash witchhazel on the floors and straighten up the chairs.  Some of those times I stayed well past my intended departure because I could not remember where I parked my car.  With typical drunken resourcefulness, the solution to that was to park, then write the nearest intersection on my palm.  That way all I had to do was read it, or hold my hand out to a passerby and say “where’s that?”   Have I mentioned that I am extremely lucky and grateful to be alive?  And that for several years in my twenties, I was an absolute fate-tempting dumbass?

We got a subway to Houston street and walked around SoHo and Greenwich Village for a while.  Listened to an a capella group sing “My Girl” in sweet 5 part harmony.  Walked through Washington Square, where an entertainer had rolled a spinet piano on a movers’ dolly to a spot near the fountain, and was playing some lively sounding classical music.  The crowd there was very quiet and attentive, and it almost felt like we were crashing a private party.  Found a bookstore that Jillian just absolutely loved–geared toward alternative and countercultural subject matter.  I leafed through some Bukowski while she browsed.  We walked several blocks down to the site of the World Trade Center, which is now a huge construction area.  I did not really expect a particular reaction to the traumatic history and the scar in the skyline, and I did not really get one.  A flash of sadness for the families of the victims, and a little bit of an under-the-ribs chill.  I went to college in Gettysburg, and spent many many late nights walking around the battlefield, and have felt that there, too.  It was late and kind of quiet, but there were still a lot of people walking around.  We walked down to the riverfront where we could see Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty to the southwest.  We caught a subway back to Times Square, which was still as hopping as ever, and got to the car at about 1:00 a.m.   It took me several laps to negotiate the vortex that is the feeder lane to the outbound Lincoln Tunnel.  I have no idea how I ever managed that back in “those” years.  We ended up back at the motel at about 2:00.  The consensus was that we had had a blast, and were tired.

Saturday at Doug’s, out of the blue…

I had not seen my friend Doug since 1990.  Before that I hadn’t seen him since 1984, when he dropped me off at the Newark Airport for my big geographical cure.  Doug was one of my best friends in high school.  At age 15, he and I and one other guy took a weeklong bicycle trip on which we rode our bikes from Allendale (waaaaay up north, near Suffern, NY) to Cape May (southern tip), and back to Tom’s River (middle part), where one of the moms met us and drove us home. 

After freshman year of college, Doug and I took jobs driving Pied Piper ice cream trucks (“sales and delivery of frozen dairy products”, I called it on job applications for years after that).  We had different routes, but always compared notes, and got into exactly the kind of shenanigans you would expect from that kind of job.  For example, we found out that ice cream trucks can pop wheelies (very top-heavy, spongy leaf springs, no shocks, fantastic torque and acceleration.  Get that baby rocking front to back with rhythmic taps on the gas, then PUNCH IT and bingo, the front end is airborne.  Might have only been 6 inches off the ground, but it felt like Evel Knievel flying across the Snake River Canyon.  Hey, I didn’t invent the ice cream truck wheelie, but after that one burned-out hoodlum Dave showed it to us in the parking lot, I couldn’t wait to show it off to all my customers.  Not all of them, just the ones who would be impressed, mostly teenagers and other burned out stoners, and a few of the cooler little kids).  I also found out that when you snap the a-frame on the front suspension of your ice cream truck and the front wheel toes in, disconnects from the axle and falls off on the street–presumably from one too many wheelies–you can make Ernie from the Pied Piper depot turn all kinds of shades of purple as he and another guy drive up from Paterson, NJ to Haverstraw, NY with a replacement ice cream truck and a towtruck.   That other guy was a mechanical genius to keep those things running the way he did, let me tell you what…

Another summer, after sophomore year of college, Doug and I had a job sort of lined up, to work on a salmon trawler out of Seattle.  We spent 5 days hitchhiking to Seattle, during which we met an amazing and incredible variety of people.  (I have written about bits and pieces of that trip, and would like to put it all together some day).  We missed the boat (in many ways), and ended up working for Manpower and doing odd jobs in Seattle all summer.  Doug plays bagpipes–there was a Scottish motif in our high school–and he had brought them.  Day One of hitching, I was thinking to myself “what a knucklehead.  The fuck’s he gonna drag those things across the country for?  Jeez!”   By the end of Day 3, when those bagpipes had scored us all kinds of rides between New Jersey and South Dakota, and free drinks courtesy of local people in little bars in Illinois and Keystone, S.D., I was fully on board with Doug having his bagpipes along.  Doug got a busker’s license in Seattle and played his pipes at the Pike Street Market.  By the end of the day his case would be literally overflowing with bills and loose change, with the added bonus (where he was concerned) of baleful glares from the guys playing guitar and other, quieter instruments, who had far more pitiful piles of money to show for their musical efforts.  Bagpipes in real life are EXTREMELY LOUD up close, by the way.  I like the sound of them all the same.

A couple years later, after I had some, ahem, legal difficulties as a result of my dabbling in the, ahem,  subterranean economy in Pennsylvania, and was trying to make a fresh start by returning to New Jersey, I moved into an apartment with Doug in Midland Park, NJ in 1982. 

All this is by way of illustrating that Doug and I had some history together.  But my trajectory took me to Columbus, and I sort of let it slide, and we did not keep in touch over the years. 

So this past Saturday afternoon, I stood in the parking lot of our old apartment building and dialed information, asking for his number.  Turns out it was the same number we used to have, and he lived with his family about 3 blocks away.  He and his wife have three teenagers, and they live in a very cool house with a swimming pool and a nice yard.  He is CTO for a chain of Karate schools in NJ, NY, CT and FL.  He says it is a made-up title, and that there are only 8 employees in the technology division, but I am suitably impressed all the same. 

He also teaches bagpipes to–well, here:

http://www.northjersey.com/betterliving/news/A_pack_of_rockin_pipers.html

I said something like “nothing like short notice” and he said “I wouldn’t expect it any other way” and we caught up for a couple of hours.  My kids really liked his family, and we had a great visit.  I should really not wait so many years between visits. 

Later that afternoon, Jillian and Ian and I checked into a hotel in Weehawken, on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel….

Jersey Rules

We got on the road at about 9:00 on Saturday.  On driving trips, my dietary day usually starts out with good intentions.  I took half a bite of a sausage patty from the continental breakfast, spit it out, and quickly came up with a plan B.  Some fruit, a glass of orange/cranberry juice, and coffee.  My dietary day while traveling usually spins out of control very quickly.  I mean to stay hydrated, and I think about water and all, and I am dimly aware of the basic food groups.  But inevitably, by the last gas stop of the day my personal fuel choice consists of a Red Bull and a Tabasco Slim Jim or some other equally heinous gutbomb combo.

We had a pretty uneventful drive across I-80, punctuated by running commentary on the scenery (The sign saying “Mile Run – 2 miles” almost had us stumped for a minute, but the next sign–a mile away, coincidentally–got it exactly right).  The sign saying “Jersey Shore – 1 mile” just pissed us off.  Turns out it’s some founding fathers’ idea of a cruel joke on people bound for the real shore, who find that one mile beyond that sign is just more of the same–farms, grass, trees and shit–and they still have a hella long drive ahead of them.  Some day I will get a can of spray paint, cross out the 1 and write “several hundred”.  And an “s” on the end of “mile”, in the interest of singular/plural agreement. 

Jillian and Ian demonstrated a very solid grasp of (and adherence to!) the Shotgun Rules.

I gave Ian the wheel when we stopped at the Delaware Water Gap, at the PA/NJ border.  We took I-80 to Rt. 17 N (main north-south stem for northern NJ), 17 to Rt 4 in Paramus (shopping mall (and former big-haired Jersey girl) capital of the world), Rt. 4 west to 208, and 208 to Goffle Rd, where I used to have an apartment.  I showed them my old digs and walked around the grounds.  Across the street is an antique store that used to be a mill a couple hundred years ago when the Dutch settled the area.  There is still a creek and a pond and a dam, and several very old houses and structures. As I showed them around, I noticed that the feeling I’d been carrying and nursing a little, that little bubble of anxiety under my ribs, that latent fear of ghosts, had dissipated completely.  

Oh yeah, the Jersey Rules as I learned them*:

• If there is a space, fill it.
• When in doubt, floor it.
• Straight on red, with caution, if you think the light has been green for the other direction long enough.
• Never, ever establish eye contact with the other motorists.  It is a sign of weakness.

*They know not to adhere to these rules**

**At least, they act like they know, when I am in the car***

***Except the last one.  That one is still valid.

Fits and starts

We finally got underway for real at about 11:00 last Friday night (7/18).  Jillian got off work at about 8:30 and called, but I was still finishing up a bunch of mow the lawn, finish laundry, call the AC repair place, pack the car, get gas, go to the store for last minute stuff, and in general just run around like a some dude with plates on sticks or at least a Sabre Dance tune-wedgie.  One of the drawbacks of running your entire life by unswerving improvisation is that not everyone is on board with your whims at all times.  That tends to make me an agent of chaos, and Friday night was a bad time to be one of those in my family, what with the AC situation:  “Bummer about the AC, see ya Wednesday!”  Like I was kind of skipping out at a crucial moment.  What made it worse was that I had not told my wife of the current definitive departure time.  The plans had changed all day (Friday night! No, Saturday morning! No, Friday night! etc.) but in all that, the last thing I had told her for sure was that Saturday was the day.  I felt bad – Suse and Maddie were sweltering because the AC was broken for the second time in a week, and I sort of sprung it on her we were leaving.  Like we were skipping out.

And of course after getting to Pataskala where Jillian still lives with her mom, I realized I had forgotten some critical items, and had to return home before lighting out.  After the false starts we got underway.  We started off in great spirits, cracking wise and laughing.  It was fun to watch them with each other now, with their young adult wit and humor playing off their age-old ways of interacting.  I drove for about 3 hours, as far as the PA. border, past Youngstown.  Ian took over and drove until about 4:00 am.  I lay down in the back for a time and closed my eyes, and listened to them talk.  At one point I felt the brakes come on sharply, and I sat up to see we were in a fogbank with almost zero visibility.  Clear as a bell in places, with a thousand stars overhead, but we were moving in and out of thick fog for those couple of hours.  Ian has only had his license for 7 months, but he is a good driver.  When I was teaching him to drive last winter I would do things like hand him the keys and say “tonight’s lesson is black ice and snow fog”, and make sure he had experience driving in the crappiest possible conditions.  He usually does OK.

We stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, but it did not make me feel one bit smarter.  In fact, I felt sort of like a dullwitted, caffeine-addled chucklehead by this time.  It was in Clear something, or something Creek.  I don’t know.  Some damn wide spot in the road, in Pennsyltucky, in the fog.

That was Friday…

Plate on a stick

Sometimes I feel like those jugglers they used to have on the Ed Sullivan show or the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, who would have a bunch of pointy dowel rods sticking up in the air, on which they would spin plates.  You know the guys…by the time they get the 10th or 15th plate started spinning the first one starts wobbling so they race back to it, jiggle the stick to apply centrifugal force and stabilize it, then race back to start number 11 or 16, then race back to correct any other wobblers, and so forth and so on, all to the accompaniment of that Aram Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance, which is now a tune wedgie stuck in my head, especially that god damn trombone part (the descending bwaahwaah! part right after all the dah-yitditditditditditdit parts, by the way), thank you very much Armenia or whomever gave him that idea.  I used to play a trombone, so I know.  Anyway, sometimes I feel like those guys, even after I think it through and realize that I really only have a small number of figurative plates, and (to beat the everloving snot out of the analogy) they’re made of plastic anyway so they won’t break if they fall off, and even if they do, so what, is Ed’s ghost going to appear and hassle me because it’s not such a rilly big shew after all??

So I was on that trip with my kids between Friday and Tuesday, and I kept thinking I should be keeping up with work-related email or personal email or this thing right here, or figuring out the AC and other home repairs, or what-have-you, but I kept ending up relaxing or cracking wise or doing stuff with my kids, instead.  That didn’t keep all that other crap out of my head.  Mostly, though, the plastic plates all landed on a Nerf floor and didn’t break, again figuratively.  Fucking trombones.

Down the shore

I had in mind a trip to Ohiopyle, PA., to the Youghiougheny River for whitewater rafting, a ride on the beautiful rails to trails bike path to Connellsville, and maybe tours of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed houses at Kentuck Knob and Fallingwater.  That just sounded like a cool way to spend a few days, and I have the chance to hit the road with my two semi-grown kids (Jillian, 20 and Ian, 16).  I have made that trip a couple of times, and it is just unbelievably cool and enriching and energizing.  I asked them if they would be interested in that, and they both allowed as how yeah, that would be cool and all, but if given a choice they would rather go to the ocean, at the Jersey Shore.  So I says to myself I says, Huh.  Neither of them has ever been to New Jersey, so where the hell did that come from?

Well, I moved to Columbus from NJ long before either of them were born, and I may have told them a story or two about my old stomping grounds.  I must have made it sound really interesting or something, because that is where we are going.  As the natives used to say, we are going “down the shore”.

The plan is to not really plan, and we are all really into keeping it that way.  I want to show them where I spent my formative years, up in Allendale and Midland Park in Bergen County; and then head south on the Garden State Parkway and the N.J. Turnpike until we hit the shore.  Maybe Tom’s River or Seaside Heights or Point Pleasant, or farther south to Long Beach Island, to see how things have changed in Ship Bottom, Beach Haven and Barnegat.

My kids are excited and so am I.  But there is one thing.  There is sort of an un-anchored and indefinable angstiness milling around inside me at the prospect of returning.  There is a ghost or two, if you will.

I left N.J. in 1984 (Here is where to visually cue the flashback sequence with dreamy montage of spinning calendars denoting the backward passage of time.  Maybe some mysterious harp music or something, and everything goes to sort of a soft focus black and white with sepia tones.  Whatever.)

May 22, 1984, 11:00 pm:  I am at the Newark Airport, sitting in a concourse across from a duty-free shop.  Not to get too bogged down in grisly details, but at this point in my life I am pretty much bankrupt–morally, mentally, emotionally, physically, fiscally, spiritually–as an ongoing human concern.  Total burned-out mess.  Lot of drinking, felony conviction for possession of a controlled substance, a worker’s comp injury that would eventually require 3 surgeries to address a shattered ankle, a whole bunch of other shit, and a lot more drinking.  There has been a long-distance intervention of sorts, and I am on my way to Columbus to become my family’s problem for a while, while I pull my shit together.  I am just beat to hell in many ways, but for the first time in a long time I am open to suggestion.  With my rebellious and defiant little world ‘tude of “hey you, why me” and the false pride that thinks  ”I got myself into this mess, I can get myself out”, all I have proven is that me trying to run my life is about as effective as steering a car by honking the horn.   All my worldly goods are stuffed in the trunk of my ‘72 Bonneville back at my apartment parking lot, and I am sitting with a cardboard box of clothes and my guitar.  I have exactly enough money in my pocket for plane fare to Columbus, and so I sit all night, waiting for the 7:00 am flight, contemplating the tax-free booze at the duty-free shop.  The budget-conscious traveler’s airline of choice is People’s Express, which employs the unusual practice of collecting your fare after you board the plane, like old fashioned train conductors. 
May 23, 1984, 7:15 am:  To my grim joy, I find that the attendant pushing the drink trolley down the aisle of the plane precedes the ticket collector by a few minutes.  Now, I have exactly enough money to pay the fare–about $65.–but the plane is in the air, so I buy two Bloody Marys from the attendant anyway.  My reasoning is, “what the hell are they going to do, kick me off if I can’t pay the fare?  And if they do, so the fuck what?”  Some more of that lucid thinking.  As it turns out, the ticket taker accepts what cash I have left and they hold my cardboard clothes box and guitar ransom at the other end until I can settle up.   As it also turns out, those two Bloody Marys mark the last time I will take a drink of alcohol.  What I eventually find out is, there is a connection between prolonged excessive drinking and drug abuse, and one’s life going completely off the rails and into the shitter.  Who knew??

Cue the dreamy montage denoting forward passage of time…no, wait, screw it.  This time, cue Emmet “Doc” Brown saying “where we’re going, we don’t need roads” to denote forward passage of time…

It has been a long time since that day, and I have long since processed and made peace with and made amends for and found closure with that former life.  But still…I can’t help but wonder whether any ghosts will show themselves.  (And if they do, I hope they are chipper little fucks like Caspar, and not some shadowy demonic visitation).

All that, up there?  That is encapsulated in a tiny little angst bubble putting a little pressure in my chest.  I think maybe I wrote it down because I am still acquiring and fine tuning the habit of writing often, and from what I understand there tends to be some gratuitous autobiographical spillage in a lot of the early efforts.  For the most part, I am really really looking forward to spending a few days with my kids, and seeing what the old places are like this many years later.

Leaving tonight, after my daughter gets off work.  Or maybe tomorrow morning, early.  Like I said, a trip without a real plan…

“Ug! Rent!”

I have three words for you, lady who sent that email:  Spell. Check. Er.  Now, I usually don’t get all fussy about it and fret, as would some of the real old guys I am related to, that the Mother Tongue is in irreparable disarray.  My dad was downright curmudgeonly about it, before he retired.  He used to whip out his red pencil and mark up his company’s printed monthly newsletter with carets and lines and arrows and corrections in the margins, and forward the corrected copy via interoffice mail to the Senior Vice President of whatever department was responsible.  Dad was a Senior Vice President of something else, which is how he could pull this off without consequences.  And my Uncle Bob, who by the way worked on the Shortridge High School (Indianapolis) daily newspaper with Kurt Vonnegut way back in the day (how cool is that?!), is a little bit of a language purist, too.  He wrote and edited for years for the Phoenix Sun and the L.A. Times, and was more recently a freelance editor for Arizona Highways magazine and the publisher/editor/chief cook and bottlewasher for a small newspaper in Prescott, AZ.  And Uncle Fred (smart-alec extraordinaire!) was a technical writer for General Electric for many years.  I come by my love of language honestly.

And so at work sometimes I am “the English major” by reputation and by disposition (and by the fact that I have a B.A. in English).  I am not a perfectionist, and I make my share of blunders, but there are things, mostly born of carelessness, that stick in my craw.  Some of those things I file in a folder called “Correspondunce”.  Just the other day I received an email with the words “UGRENT REMINDER” in the subject.  (Complete with the gratuitous upper-case shouting).  This memo was sent to several thousand home office employees, but if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t tell you exactly what the hell was being so ugrently conveyed.  Something about invoice processing I think, but I would not swear to it.  I just couldn’t get past the glaring typo, and my mind sped off on a tangent, conjuring up a Paleolithic landlord trying to get some deadbeat Cro-Magnon dude to cough up the vigorish on his monthly cave rental:

“Ug! Rent!”

“And Thag no get deposit back if make drawing on cave wall!”

Correspondunce.  More on that later.

Oh, hey.  It’s later right now, and I remembered something from a few years ago that made me laugh.  Our old mainframe-based email system had a feature that would automatically correct spelling errors according to some arcane non-context-sensitive linguistic algorithm.  A colleague sent an email demonstrating that no matter how foolproof you make something, the world can always produce a higher caliber of foolishness.  This fellow was trying to say “I apologize for any inconvenience” but his spelling was so far off the mark that the system autocorrected it to read “I apologize for any incontinence”.  We were all like “Baahahahaha!!” and “god damn it, peed on again…what the fuck, Barry?!”   Good times.

In medias res

There doesn’t have to be a narrative arc to these things; I finally figured that out.  I’m new at this.  Jumping right in:

I have some inspirational crap on my cube wall and desk at work.  I didn’t festoon the everloving shit out of the place–no pith or depth, no exhortations or testimonials, and fer chrissakes no posters of cats eternally being encouraged to “hang in there”, although I think that picture would be more effective if there were some menacing dude with a hockey mask and a blood-and-fur-matted chainsaw in the background–it is just couple of tattered pictures that have been in my possession since college, one other picture, and a figurine among all the other crap on my walls and desk.

Albert and Abe usually end up, in my mind anyway, doing some kind of exasperated face-palm gesture in reaction to whatever fresh outrage I have perpetrated against the virtues they represent.  Sometimes I even think they look at each other and whisper under their breath, things like “what a lying sack” (Abe) or “What a dumbass” (Albert)  Buddha mostly doesn’t let things bother him, but I think even he rolls his eyes and shakes his head (while muttering some real sarcastic zen koan, the answer to which I would never “get” in a million years) once in a while.  And the other guy usually speaks right to my heart, which usually doesn’t listen.

Albert and Abe are postcard-sized portraits, and the Buddha is a small bronze statue who basks serenely in the pale blue glow of my computer monitor.  The other guy is a picture I found on the internet.  These iconic figures are there to remind me of various things:  to try to be smart, and honest, and peaceful, when dealing with whatever comes up at work.  Note that I did not assert that I AM any of those things…if I were, I would not need the pictures and statues to remind me.  Truth be told, I am more like the other guy.

So, Albert:

 
And Abe:

 
And the other guy, whose advice I never take, even when I should:

 

Hey, look at me, with no madd formatting skillz and sucking at this shit right out of the gate!  Yay!

Anyway, what I will strive for in this endeavor is what I hope I have gotten by keeping that Abe and that Albert around for so many years:  some measure of honesty, and of intelligence, in what I offer.  And hopefully some of what Buddha and the nice cuppa guy in the other picture represent.  And prolly some other stuff, too; I just don’t know what, yet.  My voice is not the product of an orderly mind.  I have strewn snippets of prose and fiction and commentary and fragments of phrases, by the hundreds: across hard drives, jump drives, My Documents folders on dead computers in the basement under the boxes of old video game consoles, and in composition binders, spiral notebooks and miscellaneous scraps of paper.  Some of that stuff may well end up here over time. 

In the mean time, please bear with me as I adapt my voice and adopt a cadence suitable to this medium.

Like I said, I’m new at this…