Another Note, A Different Friend - 8th August 2009

My Friend,

At this moment, I listen to Keyboard Sonata in E Flat major, H. 16/52: Adagio, a song that my iPod nano randomly picked for me. A wasp flies by, all while I sit in the garage, under the cover of a house, preventing direct sunlight from scorching my skin.

Chuck Mangione leads me into this second paragraph, accompanied by a neighbour's lawn mowing machine. Normally, I would correspond with you using electronic means. Instead, the quiet, warm day called me outdoors and insisted on an equally quiet, warm greeting to a friend, replacing my working on a remote-controlled airplane I crashed into the woods a couple of days ago, in need of repairs.

"Party Out of Bounds," by the B-52s owns the ambient musical interlude for this paragraph, making me wonder how much the rhythms and lyrics of others influence my writing style and choice of words. As much as I let it, no doubt.

Speaking of influence, I write this note in slow penmanship time to consider the friendship of two colleagues who crossed paths randomly but have maintained a relationship that transcends a single workplace or corporate project (an improvisation for countertenor by Chanticleer moves the song selection in a different direction). What motivates us to stay in touch?

A cloud passes by, casting a muted shadow over the woods, the color of maple leaves losing their yellow reflection in a respite from the sun's summer solar heat.

You and I exist during the Internet Revolution, transforming many members of our species into online junkies, addicted to instantaneous communications with others. During this phase of our cultural shift to shorter and shorter intervals in which we interact with and react to those around us, you and I have the luxury of being thinkers, those who look ahead to moments implied by the trends of the current moment (Mozart's Requiem now streams through my earbuds).

So, while you burn weekly through 60 billable hours toward the success of your co-owned startup business (and by now, after three years, "startup" is probably inaccurate, eh?), I invest my time during this global recession giving students at a local technical institute some insight about the workings of an office environment, including tips and tricks for succeeding in a technology-based job (primarily the computer-related technology with which we're familiar, of course). During our daily activities, we strategize both about personal and professional futures.

We are childless husbands to our wives, providing comfort and support as life partners rather than parents. In addition, you support a local church as a full-fledged member of local society, whereas my community support has waned after starting the Christmas tree recycling project in Huntsville and getting a revival going at a church in the 1990s (including advertisements on the local Christian rock station and flyers distributed/posted throughout the area).

We have benefited from both Boy Scouts and military college scholarships so we understand the intricacies of social networking, analog and digital, that make (or give) young people good citizens.

An ant about an 1/8-inch long works diligently to drag the dead body of a granddaddy longlegs that spanned 3 inches when alive ("Mishima/Closing" by Philip Glass appears on the MP3 player). I suppose you feel like the ant, dragging a large burden behind you, seeking the colony, delivering a small meal essential for survival, and then off to the next ant-sized food pack to find, like Sisyphus at times. As you said, you look for the big payoff, the large-scale manufacturing order.

On the other side of the mountain, I sit in my cabin, having obtained both my vocational and avocational aspirations, paying off my house and finding a low-stress teaching job to provide the salary needed to cover the creature comforts of a life with little overhead. Retirement, even in a severely extended recession, has not hurt my living style, only made me aware of a few luxuries I can do without, such as big restaurant lunches every day.

Bach's Chorale "Nun freut euch, lieben Christen - g mein," starts this page for me. We are intelligent beings, are we not? We use our intelligence differently because we are not the same, depending on perspective. You work with people already prepared for the workplace while I attempt to prepare more.

Recently, you and I have been moving the mindsets of a few engineering types into believing in the prospect of others helping them to succeed in getting their invention to market. At the same time, you have been working on me trying to find where our meeting of the minds will benefit us personally and professionally. Reminds me of the conversation I had with a Methodist minister who told me he was in the afterlife insurance business. I asked him how he reached out to nonbelievers in the community. He told me he didn't - if he could just get the believers to church, he'd have the biggest congregation in the world. In other words, convert the converted because true nonbelievers will never convert.

I knew when I was a teenager that I was destined for a life in business, seeing that the corporate world enhanced my background and training. I also saw I was not a conformist who simply followed the rules because I knew that rules were not always written for the intent implied in the logic of the rules. You seem to have a similar mindset. Some people call it thinking outside the box [and worse... ;)]. By the way, that ant has moved in a circle three times while attempting to find a way to get to the dead arachnid over the gulf between the concrete garage floor and the concrete driveway.

Where do we go from here? As you know, I am not motivated by money, you only partly so as it relates to funds toward supporting the community. If our lives are two subsets of the superset of our species' likely conditions, what is the definition of the intersection of what you and I are doing for ourselves and those around us?

For instance, the ant and I live on the same planet. I could repurpose the ant's life by taking away the arachnid, thus changing the ant colony's nutrition balance, which in turn may decide the number of ants available as food for other insects as well as holes in the ground for a competing ant colony to take over. You see what I mean? What consequences do we intend to cause, knowing many unintended consequences will happen outside our influence?

In your personal and professional strategies, do you have a set of strategies for society at large? Are there changes you hope to make beyond ones within the technology realm? Rachmaninov's Polka de W.R. entertains me now while the ant finally got the arachnid corpse down into the gulf and is trying to drag it out the other side.

I don't know what societal effects I cause or intend to cause. So far, all I've figured out is how to have fun in every moment while getting others to enjoy the moment with me, keeping an eye on how many resources I use in comparison to the resources I need, sensing that the Earth is large but not infinitely abundant. I enjoy the technological advances (that's why I made sure I referenced the iPod in this letter) but I also enjoy watching the slow progress of small parts of this planet (thus, the ant tale; interestingly enough, a grasshopper landed an inch or so near the arachnid corpse and peers down into the space that separates house from yard - an Aesop fable in real life, n'est pas?).

With one of Bach's harpsichord concertos strumming along, I ask what's next. Do we sit down and see how closely our views of the Big Picture line up, agree to disagree on minor points, and then work toward mutual goals? We've taken small steps but I sense we've halted due to a lack of clear vision. Do you not agree? Let's get together and draft plans for the future, knowing our place in the global economy restricts our current actions but also opens up unlimited opportunities for a couple of boys from the backwoods and mountains of NE Tennessee and NE Alabama. Be prepared!

Your friend,
Rick