Wearing Off My Fingertips

Well, the world is not coming to an end this week but boy, I tell you what, I'm not sure about some of my stock picks. I thought Rio was a good long-term buy (and given a long shot for a robust recovery of the economy by 2012, it will be) but news today implies that Rio's debt sinks the company like Somali pirates after finding a ship full of jungle camo parkas -- with no ransom, to boot.

So be it. I want cheap stocks to buy and that's what I get. Rock-bottom, in the cellar, down in the mine shaft CHEAP!

Anyway, I haven't had a lot of time to search for good stock deals this month. Instead, I've let my fingers fly over the keyboard piling bad phrase upon tired anecdote in an effort to complete a new novel for NaNoWriMo 2008. And I did it! Since I now have no fingerprints after typing like a coffee-coddled medical transcriptionist for the past few weeks, maybe now's the time to start of life of crime. Just kidding. In any case, mission accomplished for this month -- 53,467 words and counting.

Time to start thinking about a delicious lasagna meal for Thanksgiving!

Wooo, Pig, Sooie!!

This was my "culture hog" weekend (you know, when you go from one art trough to another, soaking in, slopping up, and stuffing yourself on the high culture, low culture, folk culture, or popular culture). Saturday, I saw the Metropolitan Opera perform "La Damnation De Faust" by Berlioz via HD theater. Definitely a blued-hair crowd at the Regal Hollywood 18 in Huntsville but that's okay. The music was classic Berlioz with a set similar to the multilevel jail set from the movie, "Chicago," with acrobatics and infrared-controlled video projection a la Cirque de Soleil (during one of the intermission interviews, I found out the opera's director, Robert Lepage, also directed the set of a Cirque de Soleil show). Glad that opera has been modernized for us young folks. LOL

The only negative about the opera was the lead female singer, Susan Graham, who looked a decade (or two) older than the character she was portraying, Marguerite. John Relyea as Mephistopheles clearly upstaged and out-acted Marcello Giordani, a decent-acting Faust with a bland face but an even better singer with a good French accent.

Sunday morning I attended a local Methodist Church in Huntsville, built in the style of wood-and-brick European cathedrals, to enjoy singing the old-time harmonious church hymns, hear a halfway decent choir and hope for a good organ solo (and a bonus! -- the boring annual "time to pledge your money and services" sermon by a newly ordained minister).

Last night, I watched the swingin' performance of the Miss Tess Trio (a smaller version of Miss Tess and the Bon Ton Parade) at the Flying Monkey Arts Center in Huntsville. Wow! They had three to six couples toe-tapping and dancing on the floor at any one time. I felt like I was back in the Jazz Age, what with the brown-baggin' going on and moonshine jug sitting on the table nearby. The opening act, Helen Keller's Ukulele was more interesting, as far as music style goes (imagine a mix of circus music and Tiny Tim) but not something to dance to -- that music was more appropriate for a soundtrack, in my opinion -- the lead singer wearing what I call grandma glasses, shoulder-length hair and a green scarf, sang with a soft voice. I drank a bottle of old-fashioned ginger ale from the Buffalo Rock company -- great fizzing sensation!

Anyway, the band inspired me to sketch them in action. The band members autographed the sketch after the show and asked me to scan and email it to them because they thought it was cool (so do I, knowing I drew it in dim light from the stage!). I forwarded the sketch to the band this morning.

Helen Keller's Ukulele inspired me to rewrite my novel and retitle it from "Passing The Time" to one of the following:

· Rational Exuberance
· A Period Not Yet Justified
· A Space Not Justified
· Capitalized and Justified
· No Photos Outside Tourist Areas
· A City Goes Silent
· A Space, A Period and A Capital

The novel is a prequel to the next one which will star the illustrious Kay (a/k/a Belle) and Phyllis (a/k/a Sofia).

Here's a sample from the novel:

A few weeks later I found myself at home alone, with my wife gone on a business trip and my cats just wanting to be left alone sunning in the dining room. Bored, I drove over to Fredirique's house so I could once again heave open the ancient garage door and face the daunting task of solving the mystery of Japanese rice burners. I knew Fredirique wasn't home so I could work on the bike in meditative peace, sort of like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, only I haven't read the book so I know about as much about it as I did fixing the bike.

Sitting on the concrete floor in the suffocating heat of that day was bad enough but here I was trying to be a backyard mechanic, skillfully whacking at a stubborn bolt with a broken pair of pliers. After two hours of banging and cursing, I leaned backed, letting my neck rest on the cool vinyl of the weight bench. I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep, but only momentarily.

In my half-awake state, I heard the sound of an approaching vehicle whose engine noise reminded me of an old Volvo. Didn’t Fredirique own a Volvo, I wondered. The engine stopped and a door opened. With my eyes closed, I couldn't see the person coming but I imagined someone getting closer.

"Lee, are you all right?" a concerned voice said into my left ear. I looked up to see Fredirique leaning down over me. Caught as I was half-asleep, my mind raced through a multitude of personalities like a cat in a room full of catnip. In the same moment, panic swept through my mind, then relief when I realized I was not under attack by an invisible voice. At first, my platonic self looked at her sisterly eyes but then my caveman self took over and I glanced down at her shirt hanging open, exposing her white bra which, of course, led down to her hips shrink-wrapped in a pair of tight shorts. My eyes continued to slide down her thin white thighs until my self-conscience self took over (pretty well stereotyped by the psychiatrist-obsessed Woody Allen) and I found myself looking down at my hands stained with grease and engine oil.

"Uh, yeah, I just can't seem to get the engine case open," I managed to say out of my dried-out throat.

"Why don't you come inside for a minute and cool off? I can turn the air conditioner on for a little while."

"Okay," I mumbled.

"I've got some juice leftover in the fridge, if you want some," Fredirique yelled from her bedroom as she unpacked her suitcase. "There may be a beer or two in there, too."

"No thanks," I managed to say, sprawled out on the couch.

"Are you sure?"

I lay there in the cool silence.

"I'll get it for you, for a price," she said as she walked up to the couch from behind.

I leaned forward, craning my neck and cocking my eyebrows. "Like what?"

"Well, considering that I've let you keep your bike here for over a month and...well, you can see that the air conditioner doesn't do that good a job."

"It feels fine to me."

"Lee-e-e-e," she said in a nasally, whining voice, "I mean it. When you stop sweating like a pig on my couch, you'll see what I mean. You won't feel cold anymore."

"So, uh, you want me to fix your air conditioner."

"No, I had something else in mind," she said in a quiet voice, while beckoning me to the bedroom hallway with her finger.

I sat up on the couch. "So what do you have to drink?" I said as I got up and walked toward the kitchen.

"Lee, come here for a minute, will you? I have something to show you."

I stopped at the kitchen doorway. What exactly was going on here? Either I was misreading the signals or Fredirique didn't know when to stop teasing me. I shrugged my shoulders and turned back toward the living room. "What do you want?"

"Come on into the bedroom," her voice called out.

I stepped into the small hallway and stuck my head in her bedroom. Seeing her unmade bed with the covers piled up made me smile. Miss Architectural Digest didn't make her bed.

"No, over here," she said behind my back. I turned around to see Fredirique standing in the bedroom at the other end of the hallway.

I walked up behind her.

"Give me your honest opinion of what you think," she said, putting her hands on her hips with pride.

"Of what," I asked timidly.

Fall in a Maturing Maple Forest

Mid-day sun, an orchestra conductor warming up and delighting the crowd, a diverse group of beings, including shabby (some say a bit nutty) shagbark hickory trees, cedars always dressed for the occasion, stately oaks with their well-weathered skin, and the vast majority, young, fashionable maples showing off their golden, amber, and persimmon coats worn in late fall; chickadees, thrushes, and tufted titmouse birds, like children at their parents' feet, enjoy the 54 deg F air, restlessly flying from tree to birdfeeder and back, with tasty treats in their mouth. Red berries of a deciduous holly hang in undetected suspension, envious of the popular sunflower-and-safflower deluxe seed mix from Wild Birds Unlimited.

In this cozy atmosphere, I look down at the three tomes I recently purchased from Woodward Books, a "premium" used bookstore on 108 E. Jackson Avenue in the historic Old City area of Knoxville, TN:

Sophie's Choice by William Styron
The Limerick, edited by G. Legman
Crashing the Party (first edition) by Ralph Nader

Before I dive into discussing those heavy volumes, I pick up a book I have read and reread, laughing at the timeliness of human folly that I remembered from Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," that is summarized in other books like Sun Tzu's "The Art of War," but seemingly satirized best in Machiavelli's book written around 1513, "Il Principe" (better known as "The Prince"), which I hold in my hand.

While the U.S. President-elect assembles his advisory staff, perhaps he can learn from the ageless wisdom and observation of previous advisors, as in the final section of Machiavelli's 500-year old political treatise, Chapter XXVI, "An Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians" -- [substitute "United States" for "Italy," if you will]:

HAVING carefully considered the subject of the above discourses, and wondering within myself whether the present times were propitious to a new prince, and whether there were the elements that would give an opportunity to a wise and virtuous one to introduce a new order of things which would do honour to him and good to the people of this country, it appears to me that so many things concur to favour a new prince that I never knew a time more fit than the present.

And if, as I said, it was necessary that the people of Israel should be captive so as to make manifest the ability of Moses; that the Persians should be oppressed by the Medes so as to discover the greatness of the soul of Cyrus; and that the Athenians should be dispersed to illustrate the capabilities of Theseus: then at the present time, in order to discover the virtue of an Italian spirit, it was necessary that Italy should be reduced to the extremity she is now in, that she should be more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians; without head, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn, overrun; and to have endured every kind of desolation.

Although lately some spark may have been shown by one, which made us think he was ordained by God for our redemption, nevertheless it was afterwards seen, in the height of his career, that fortune rejected him; so that Italy, left as without life, waits for him who shall yet heal her wounds and put an end to the ravaging and plundering of Lombardy, to the swindling and taxing of the kingdom and of Tuscany, and cleanse those sores that for long have festered. It is seen how she entreats God to send someone who shall deliver her from these wrongs and barbarous insolencies. It is seen also that she is ready and willing to follow a banner if only someone will raise it.

Nor is there to be seen at present one in whom she can place more hope than in your illustrious house [Historical note: refers to Giuliano de Medici. He had just been created a cardinal by Leo X. In 1523 Giuliano was elected Pope, and took the title of Clement VII.] , with its valour and fortune, favoured by God and by the Church of which it is now the chief, and which could be made the head of this redemption. This will not be difficult if you will recall to yourself the actions and lives of the men I have named. And although they were great and wonderful men, yet they were men, and each one of them had no more opportunity than the present offers, for their enterprises were neither more just nor easier than this, nor was God more their friend than He is yours.

With us there is great justice, because that war is just which is necessary, and arms are hallowed when there is no other hope but in them. Here there is the greatest willingness, and where the willingness is great the difficulties cannot be great if you will only follow those men to whom I have directed your attention. Further than this, how extraordinarily the ways of God have been manifested beyond example: the sea is divided, a cloud has led the way, the rock has poured forth water, it has rained manna, everything has contributed to your greatness; you ought to do the rest. God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.

And it is not to be wondered at if none of the above-named Italians have been able to accomplish all that is expected from your illustrious house; and if in so many revolutions in Italy, and in so many campaigns, it has always appeared as if military virtue were exhausted, this has happened because the old order of things was not good, and none of us have known how to find a new one.
And nothing honours a man more than to establish new laws and new ordinances when he himself was newly risen. Such things when they are well founded and dignified will make him revered and admired, and in Italy there are not wanting opportunities to bring such into use in every form.

Here there is great valour in the limbs whilst it fails in the head. Look attentively at the duels and the hand-to-hand combats, how superior the Italians are in strength, dexterity, and subtlety. But when it comes to armies they do not bear comparison, and this springs entirely from the insufficiency of the leaders, since those who are capable are not obedient, and each one seems to himself to know, there having never been any one so distinguished above the rest, either by valour or fortune, that others would yield to him. Hence it is that for so long a time, and during so much fighting in the past twenty years, whenever there has been an army wholly Italian, it has always given a poor account of itself; as witness Taro, Alessandria, Capua, Genoa, Vaila, Bologna, Mestre [Note: The battles of Il Taro, 1495; Alessandria, 1499; Capua, 1501; Genoa, 1507; Vaila, 1509; Bologna, 1511; Mestre, 1513].

If, therefore, your illustrious house wishes to follow those remarkable men who have redeemed their country, it is necessary before all things, as a true foundation for every enterprise, to be provided with your own forces, because there can be no more faithful, truer, or better soldiers. And although singly they are good, altogether they will be much better when they find themselves commanded by their prince, honoured by him, and maintained at his expense. Therefore it is necessary to be prepared with such arms, so that you can be defended against foreigners by Italian valour.

And although Swiss and Spanish infantry may be considered very formidable, nevertheless there is a defect in both, by reason of which a third order would not only be able to oppose them, but might be relied upon to overthrow them. For the Spaniards cannot resist cavalry, and the Switzers are afraid of infantry whenever they encounter them in close combat. Owing to this, as has been and may again be seen, the Spaniards are unable to resist French cavalry, and the Switzers are overthrown by infantry. And although a complete proof of this latter cannot be shown, nevertheless there was some evidence of it at the battle of Ravenna, when the Spanish infantry were confronted by German battalions, who follow the same tactics as the Swiss; when the Spaniards, by agility of body and with the aid of their shields, got in under the pikes of the Germans and stood out of danger, able to attack, while the Germans stood helpless, and, if the cavalry had not dashed up, all would have been over with them. It is possible, therefore, knowing the defects of both these infantries, to invent a new one, which will resist cavalry and not be afraid of infantry; this need not create a new order of arms, but a variation upon the old. And these are the kind of improvements which confer reputation and power upon a new prince.

This opportunity, therefore, ought not to be allowed to pass for letting Italy at last see her liberator appear. Nor can one express the love with which he would be received in all those provinces which have suffered so much from these foreign scourings, with what thirst for revenge, with what stubborn faith, with what devotion, with what tears. What door would be closed to him? Who would refuse obedience to him? What envy would hinder him? What Italian would refuse him homage? To all of us this barbarous dominion stinks. Let, therefore, your illustrious house take up this charge with that courage and hope with which all just enterprises are undertaken, so that under its standard our native country may be ennobled, and under its auspices may be verified that saying of Petrarch:

Virtu contro al Furore
Prendera l'arme, e fia il combatter corto:
Che l'antico valore
Negli italici cuor non e ancor morto.

Translation:
Virtue against fury shall advance the fight,
And it i' th' combat soon shall put to flight:
For the old Roman, valour is not dead,
Nor in th' Italians' breasts extinguished.
--Edward Dacre, 1640.

==========================================

While researching medical companies worthy of my investment, a friend asked me if there were solar companies that might give us a better ROI. I think she's got me there. From a quick look at the industry, including a blog, industry news, and analysis, it appears that the price of solar and other alternative power stocks has dropped significantly lower than the general market, offering a good buy opportunity, IF AND ONLY IF the alternative energy market will recover anytime soon. I don't see that happening, assuming history is correct. We saw the same thing back in the 1970s, when the oil embargo pushed Americans into thinking that alternative energy might save us from the influence of foreign oil. For a few years, solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave energy, nuclear and human power gained the attention of the general public. Many people found a way to adapt their daily living to alternative energy sources but the vast majority continued to use oil and coal-based power to fuel their lives.

My father taught energy efficiency courses for Virginia Tech in the late 1970s and showed me then what I still know today -- when it comes to sources of energy, the average American citizen wants something cheap, reliable, and easy-to-use (e.g., an electric car will not work for the family that likes to travel long distance; the noise and vibration of neighborhood-located wind turbines is unacceptable). I perfectly understand -- I live in the woods but I've found a way to use solar at home (photovoltaic cells to re-energize rechargeable batteries). We use CFL bulbs in the house. We close off heat pump vents and doors to unused rooms. On the other hand, I drive a used 1995 6-cylinder BMW 325i that gets 34 MPG on the highway at 57 MPH, not a hybrid Prius that gets 50 MPG, simply because I can't justify new car payments for what boils down to a slight decrease in monthy gas bills. With the recent plummet in oil prices and the tightening of the credit market, I doubt many Americans will adopt alternative energy on a large-scale basis unless the U.S. government heavily subsidizes or mandates it. Therefore, until I see concrete evidence that the Obama administration will add alternative energy to the budget deficit, I will continue to watch the solar market but not invest in it.

Now, returning to my crystal ball and the investigation of the medical business. Hmm...medical supplies or medical services? Health insurance companies or outpatient physical therapy clinics? Tough decisions, indeed.

Meanwhile, back to helping a team of engineers get their invention to market, all while working on my NaNoWriMo novel. Life is fun on this warm fall day! Hope yours is, too.

A Match for the Ages

Some of us got to watch the match via the wonders of the Internet. For those who were there (and you know who you are), the match between Munster and the All Blacks (New Zealand), where Munster led 16-10 at the half and 16-13 until late in the game, cheering for the tired, courageous, injured and wornout players in red must have felt like the kind of fun and fable we long to tell our children about.

Although the Munster team lasted as long as they could, they lost 16-18 in a match we will tell our children about.

Thirty years after the famous 1978 match, Munster can still hold its head high:

To the brave and faithful, nothing is impossible.

Long live the 2008 Heineken Cup champions!

Dusting Off The Crystal Ball

A coworker named Joe once told me, "Saying I'm a millionaire is easy -- getting there was even easier...and fun, too!" He bought, lived in and sold homes back during the Internet bubble at the turn of the 21st Century. When the Internet bubble burst, he gave up his "easy" job as a day trader and returned to the workforce as a computer programmer. A few years ago, I heard from a friend who'd received Joe's resume and asked if I would hire him. I said sure, he was a good guy and seemed to know what he was talking about. I have no idea if my assessment of him was true but I was willing to back it up by stating that Joe's air of confidence stood for something.

In these unsure economic times, unconfident people hope for a simple solution to their woes.

In 2006, I joined an international group of folks who dedicate their time during the month of November to complete a 50,000-word novel in 30 days in an event called National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo). The winners simply have to tell a story in 50,000 words or so. I've successfully completed two novels during NaNoWriMo 2006 and 2007 by putting fingers to keyboard and telling a straightforward story, including a satisfactory ending.

Everyone likes a good story. I guess that's why we see and hear the concerns from citizens all over the world. Their local news media tell stories about the sluggish economy, including bankrupt companies, job redundancies, etc., that don't have a happy or satisfactory ending right now (unless you're a sadist or masochist).

I dug through our storage room at the house this week, looking for some old writing material that might spark a memory for a plot for this year's participation in NaNoWriMo. Not only did I find a great storyline (an idea for intertwining story about a couple of old flames, one from high school and one from college) but I also found an old crystal ball I'd forgotten I'd acquired in 1984 from a soothsayer who had "retired" to the life of a homeless alcoholic on the streets of Knoxville.

I saw the crystal ball in his Army surplus canvas bag while he was digging for aluminum cans in the dumpster in front of my house and offered him some beers and cash for the ball. When the fortune teller sold me the crystal ball, he told me that his mother had entrusted the oracle to him on her deathbed, telling him never to use it unless he found himself in dire straits. He had never used the sphere for fear he'd see his future, something he was not interested in. Instead, he preferred to tell other people's futures through Tarot cards.

So here I am, sitting here with the crystal ball in my lap. Last night, I bought some incense sticks to try to simulate the conditions you see when wise men and women peer into their crystal balls (okay, maybe it's just special effects smoke machines you see in the movies but go with me here).

I set the ball on a fleece blanket and polish it to remove my oily fingerprints. As I polish it, I see an image appearing in the ball, kind of like a portable LCD TV the day after the digital TV transition February 2009, or a shaken snowglobe -- white clouds spinning around, a virtual tornado. Wait, wait...I see something appearing. It's...it's...well, it's a stethoscope? No, no, it's a staff with a snake wrapped around it. Yes, that's it. The classic medical symbol, the rod of Asclepius. I shake globe and rub it and it still displays the snake and staff.

What does that mean? Hmm...well, I don't predict the future and certainly have no confidence that a crystal ball I traded for some fermented hops is going to tell me the future. However, I think I see what's going on. In the midst of a shakeup in the way people have chosen to pad or protect their portfolios, one thing is clear: we want our lives and the lives of our loved ones to contain good health. What better way to ensure we're healthy than to invest in the medical industry?

I'll play with the crystal ball and see if there are any specific medical companies that I should buy (and maybe Joe should, too). Meanwhile, I'll keep working on my NaNoWriMo story.

A Sporting Mood

While we grow up, we play with our mates. We behave like any other animal - pushing, shoving, biting, rolling around, hitting, hugging, poking...you name it, we do it.

Eventually, we capture the attention of our adult caretakers who direct us toward organized physical activities like ball tossing, block stacking and body tagging.

Those of us who display exemplary talents for throwing and chasing after balls often get promoted into organized team sports like soccer (i.e., futbol), baseball, basketball and football (with its American, Canadian and Australian versions).

The majority of us who play these organized sports do not progress to the next level of play, moving on to something else in which we excel. That is, a large population of youth may play football in secondary school but only a portion of those with superior football skills will continue playing football in primary school and even fewer will play the sport on college or semipro teams.

Therefore, the further the player progresses, the better we presume the player has become. Also, the player's value to society increases, giving the player the option to convert the combination of talent and skill into a usable trade in the open marketplace of job opportunities, including the amateur "job" of college scholarship-funded student-athlete.

For the past 19 years, my wife and I have watched American-style football from the same seats in Neyland Stadium on the campus of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. We have enjoyed the drama of the game as well as the increasing maturity of the players as they grow from boys to men in their three to five-year college stint. We continue to marvel at the ability of the players to take bruising hits week-in and week-out while still finding a way to attend college classes, study class material after or in-between classes and improve their ability to play football the next game through weight room training or team practices.

Most importantly, we appreciate the players who understand the team concept, putting egos and superior talent aside in the drive to win football games.

During this football season, we have observed the inability of the group of players to overcome talent shortcomings or poor individual efforts on the field in order to win each week's game. Many theories regarding this year's team have been touted by fans, boosters, former players, current players, former coaches, current coaches, news media and current athletic administrators. We watched as the most common consensus among this diverse group of people coalesced into the desire to get rid of the head football coach, the adult who has personal responsibility for attracting the players' attention in primary school to come play football for him in exchange for a college education. The coach was forced by the director of the athletic department to resign last week. No matter what people thought about the man himself, they now face a future without him coaching and leading the football team. The football players responded by proclaiming they would win the rest of the games to show their respect for the coach and prove the athletic director's decision was wrong. However, they lost their next game, 13-7, while hosting a typical "weak" homecoming team, an opponent favored to lose to the Tennessee football team by 27 points.

In business, we use group dynamics to make our company move forward toward a set of common goals. Every person in the company has a set of job duties that contribute in part to those goals. When the employees fail as a group to perform their duties in a way that makes the company successful, how long should we wait to place the blame for their failures on the company's CEO, president, or department VP? This question follows a CEO or president every day, whether employees, stockholders and the board of directors consciously think it.

Not every adult gets to play professional sports on a team but every one of us participates in team activities, no matter what we do.

So, when you work with others, observe the team's group dynamics and ask yourself these questions:

• Am I tuned in to the team and the individual efforts of the team's members?
• Can I put aside my ego to assist a member of the team I do not like personally but needs my help in order to get the team to succeed?
• In the depth of misery (i.e., the team is collapsing from loss of control or intense conflict), can I use humor to pull the team back together again?

HINT: You should respond, "Yes!," without hesitation. After all, the chances that your team is sitting on a field in front of 100,000 screaming fans are fairly slim. More than likely, you're sitting in a room with less than 10 people where team decision-making is easy. Therefore, no matter what your team struggles with, remember the sports teams that have to make decisions in front of thousands or even millions of people -- they practice team continuity on a daily basis in order to achieve their team-based goals -- like the successful sports teams, no matter how great your talent, you should always put the team first and be the one to show others how to achieve the team's goals by disregarding ego-driven or externally-initiated conflicts. Don't wait for a leader to get fired for you to be the one to make a difference.

Gesundheit!

Gesundheit! You just sneezed. If sneezing is contagious, does the simple act of saying, “Gesundheit!,” make one sneeze? There you go again – Gesundheit! – I guess it does.

We learn our behaviors through imitation and repetition. We learn our behaviors through imitation and repetition.

As the paragraph above demonstrated, we sometimes repeat a behavior without knowing why. In primary school, I discovered the works of the behaviorist, B. F. Skinner. [Before that, I read books by psychology and psychiatry “gurus” such as Freud, Adler and Jung but always felt their works about the animal mind (especially, the human mind) missed the vital aspect of animal behavior – after all, we do not respond to other persons’ thinking but to their behavior, either immediately in their presence or delayed by communications devices (notes, letters, telephones, televisions, computers, etc.). Thus, to me, the Freudian focus on what occurs at the thought level reflects more about the history of human culture and the expected behavior of specific humans in a given culture/subculture than it does the actual functioning of the whole human body, including the brain (and unfortunately, the almost universally accepted concept of a mind sitting somewhere in the area behind our eyes and between our ears).] I felt relieved that someone else agreed with me that a “mind” does not exist. Or, at least if we’re going to study humans, we should look only at their behaviors and not build elaborate schemes for second-guessing how a person’s brain (synapse-based storage and processing system) was arranging and rearranging sets of symbols in a higher-order, invisible mind.

Today, the people in the world who are tuned in to their local media outlet are responding to the news that Barack Hussein Obama will be the 44th President of the North American continent’s political organization called the United States of America. If we observe the people’s behavior, we see a range of facial expressions, vocal cord utterances and arm, torso and leg movements. We respond to their behaviors in various ways, including my typing this blog one-handed while holding a sleeping cat in the other arm.

But my responding to the outcome of the election does not concern me. Instead, my interest lies in our behavior in the days ahead. With a new U.S. Presidential administration moving into the White House in 2009, we can change our behavioral patterns of the past and establish new ones. We can stop repeating behaviors that have no purpose other than to show we still use our bodies to imitate, store, retrieve and repeat learned behaviors.

As you get a moment away from your daily set of normal routines, use this change in Presidential officeholder to look for new behaviors that will change and enhance your daily life:

· Turn off the television or step away from the computer to give an evening to greeting a neighbor you’ve never met before and learn about one of his/her unique behaviors/skills like fly fishing, flower arranging or painting; turn around and teach that behavior to someone else on your next “free” evening.

· Take an inventory of your work skills to see if there’s a skill such as file sorting, carpentry, or negotiation you could offer and teach to a volunteer / charitable organization; teach that skill to someone else and then get that person to teach it to another.

· Teach your child a behavior that he or she can use to make life better for anyone, including how to sew a button, change an automobile tire or cook a simple meal on a stove; then get your child to teach that behavior to someone else.

In other words, we can do a lot for each other when the contagious behavior we share is more than just sneezing. Hope we run into one another at a neighbor's house or local charity one day soon. And I know you'll recognize me when I hear you sneeze, because you know what I will say. No, it's not "Gesundheit!" – it's "Teach me more!"

The Number One Secret to Success and Happiness

When you find yourself on a planet whose most widespread inhabitants are bacteria, what action do you take to survive? Do you try communicating with the bacteria? When you deplete your food supply, do you avoid confrontation with the majority population (in case the bacteria have large-scale defense mechanisms) and eat some other species besides the bacteria?

How did you figure out the population count and distribution patterns to begin with? Quite possibly, you anticipated the types of organisms you'd encounter and brought surveying instruments with you to measure a sample population, from which you then extrapolated total population data.

No matter how much you analyzed and prepared your approach to the planet, you know you have made decisions that will limit your capabilities.

However, you maintain one important goal -- personal survival.

And so it is in business, also. When you entered a new market, you prepared a set of goals and objectives, made assumptions about the market conditions, including competitors and customers, but inevitably missed some important factor that you couldn't see until you stepped foot in the market.

Question is, if initial results are disappointing or a negative market condition looks too daunting to overcome in a reasonable timeframe, do you just step out of the market and start over later?

The answer is no. You must pretend that you've crash-landed on another planet, with some tools and food for immediate life sustenance. But to ensure long-term survival, you have to study, process and cultivate the surrounding resources. Setbacks will hit you at every moment as you learn about the inert and hostile aspects of an environment not tuned to your existence. You celebrate the smallest iota of success. If you've arrived with a team, then every member reassures the other when solid, thought-out efforts do not lead to success (even if the effort resulted from a hunch rather than analysis), because only through experimentation can we ever achieve success.

Friends, strangers, coworkers and family have expressed their concerns to me about the current economic conditions during this pending U.S. Presidential election. They all look forward to the exit of the current President as if the change in the U.S. political administration will cure the global economic headache, no matter whether they believe McCain or Obama will win the election.

The U.S. economy indeed faces many challenges ahead, tied as it is to the rest of the world and the competition for limited resources. However, we humans share this planet with other species that, though more abundant than us by many magnitudes, have no clue about the temporary ebb-and-flow of money. Their minute-by-minute survival does not directly change from the simple uptick or downtick of the price of a stock, mutual fund or barrel of oil. In fact, their species thrive with no regard to human existence, which points us to a simple secret.

So, what's the number one secret to success and happiness? Well, it's an easy secret to share, one that young wise people know and old wise people have learned:

All problems are insignificant and transitory.

We've crash-landed on this planet together. We depend on each other to survive. The current economic conditions dominate the mass media communications networks but don't forget these conditions, as dreadful as the news organizations play them up to be, are insignificant and transitory. We will survive. And better yet, we will thrive. If a mixed race man and a former prisoner of war can run against each other in a civil contest for U.S. President, then together, WE can accomplish anything. Let's put our minds and bodies to the task of making this planet a better place to live, work and play.

The Best Time to Start a New Business

When is the best time to start a new business?

Last year, a small group of engineers and other technical types saw a problem and invented a new gadget to fix the problem. They test-marketed a "proof of concept" unit, which excited the customer who used the gadget and gained interest from others who wanted to purchase the unit, even at the hand-built stage the unit was in. The inventors realized this high level of interest meant they could go to market with a set of prototypes. Instead, wanting the product to reflect their engineering expertise and professional approach to problem-solving, they hammered on the design details of this gadget for the past year and finally filed for a patent last month.

One of the engineers brought me on board about a month ago to run the business side of their venture. After examining their gadget and analyzing the gadget's potential market, I assembled a business plan to give the inventors information they needed in order to see if they really wanted to incorporate a business, finalize the product's design for manufacturability, work with a contract manufacturer (CM) to mass-produce a bunch of units, start selling the gadget by the dozens and build enough momentum in the marketplace to attract a buyer. At the same time, I established a budget so the inventors could see the investment dollars they needed to offset the cost of the startup, including consulting/contracting fees for accounting and engineering support, salary for a technical manager and payment to a CM for a set of preproduction units (and the first run or two of production units, depending on cash flow).

As is the case for many startups, the inventors want to maintain majority control of the company so they will benefit from their invention whenever profitability and/or buyout occur. They don't want their invention to make someone a gazillionaire while they end up getting pushed out the door without so much as a dollar for their efforts. They have seen this happen to friends of theirs and don't want to make the same mistake. Therefore, I set up the business plan to show their majority ownership position to potential investors.

The investors we've spoken with so far see the great potential for this product, which is somewhat recession-proof and opens up a completely new market. Well, as luck would have it, we started selling the business to investors during the recent downturn in the stock market. In addition, the U.S. Presidential election takes place in two weeks. Combine those two uncertainties and investors have shied away from putting money into a new company until at least after the election and perhaps until after the first of the year.

So what's a couple of months, right? Well, with this delay, we've already lost one of the key members of the group, who would have worked as the technical manager to coordinate all the development activities but can't wait until 2009 for investors to fund his salary. He left this week to work a regular, six-figure, salaried engineering job and he's taken his expertise and the investors who counted on his participation to make the product a success.

Meanwhile, the remaining members of the team have agreed to move forward with the product, albeit at a much slower pace.

Those who take risks know they don't fail. They just add to their list of lessons learned. Although this current business venture hasn't yet failed, it has faced a setback and reminded me of a valuable lesson:

There's no such thing as the best time to start a business but there sure are times when getting a business started would be much easier!

I'll keep you posted.

A Simple Thanks Will Do

Regardless of your position on the subject of religion, you understand the interconnectedness between creatures of the same species -- chemically attracted to one another, genetically predisposed to reproduce like offspring and amazingly sympathetic to each other's pains, joys and sorrows.

Therefore, if we're programmed at birth to help one another (discounting the ones whose genetic makeup drives them to non-procreative actions such as murder and self-isolation), should we feel grateful and thus express our gratitude to those who treat us kindly? In other words, what does the concept of "common courtesy" -- the give-and-take of a civil society -- mean to you?

A friend of mine once said, "Be kind to everyone because you don't know who's having a worse day than you are." Usually, this friend of mine lives her life in New York City as a loud, boisterous, happy person, with no care in the world other than gladly spending her husband's money and helping old people across the street.

Unfortunately, her husband was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which has spread to his liver. Medical science is full of unexpected, miraculous recoveries from devastating diseases that run counter to the normal outcome for people who've received radiation and chemotherapy to slow down the destructive nature of the diseases or even put the diseases into temporary remission. I don't know what will happen to my friend's husband but I know they will pray for miracles while the certified medical professionals follow their prescribed course of action.

About the same time as this, I found out my mother in-law has deteriorative vertebrae that will prevent her from living the active home life she was used to for the past 91 years. I took care of her for a few months last year, moving her from a hospital to a physical therapy unit at a nursing home, getting her much needed physical therapy to strengthen her leg and back muscles that eventually put her back in her house and her active life in the community. A few weeks ago, I returned to her house to get her medical attention for a kidney infection. After X-ray and CT scans of her body during an examination to determine the extent of the kidney infection and possible diverticulitis/colitis, a surgeon once again recommended she go to the nursing home for physical therapy. The physical therapists do not want to push her as hard as they did last year because they worry my mother in-law will literally break her back. Of course, she feels frustrated by the lack of progress.

This past weekend, good friends of mine suffered a heartbreaker when their son, who ran to the grocery store for his mother, seemingly lost control of his car. The emergency personnel who arrived at the scene watched the young man's brain shut down as he went into a coma. Examination at the hospital revealed broken ribs, broken femur, crushed ankle, collapsed lungs and head/brain trauma. He remains in a coma and now has pneumonia. He will stay in the hospital for weeks, at least.

Also this past weekend, my parent's next-door neighbor of 38 years died. His health had declined recently so he had talked with my father a couple of days before he died about setting up legal documents for his son so the transfer of property after his death would not cause any hardships. Unfortunately, his son found his father's cold, dead body before he was able to create the paperwork he'd talked about.

Meanwhile, everyday, all over the world, people get maimed in fights, receive brutal torture, die in political skirmishes and starve to death from malnutrition. Children are born with birth defects directly attributable to negative environmental conditions (whether through the mother's negligent behavior and/or exposure to toxic chemicals), creating hardships at birth they will carry with them the rest of their lives.

Despite all of these people's stories, despite their tragedies and suffering, most of them maintain a positive view of life. They thank God or their lucky stars that there is hope. They ask for miracles but do not expect them. They will accept whatever happens, even if they suffer mental strain and stress in the process.

From this, I have learned not to take anything for granted. With relatively good health, I have what I need. With loving family and caring friends, I have more than what I need. I don't ask for anything else. I do hope that people around me see the appreciation I feel for their presence in my life when I smile at them with a ridiculously big grin, say "Thank you" for no reason, or slightly nod in passing. We may not agree about our political beliefs, religious beliefs, or favorite football team, but we share this planet together. Instead of labeling others and wishing them out of existence, let's reach out to others and see them for who they are: fellow members of our species. If you can't think of anything to say to one another, a simple thanks will do.

FWIW, AYWTP Revealed

More than one reader has asked about the organization and meanings behind the novel, “Are You With The Program?” [AYWTP]

I have procrastinated, putting off any thoughts I have held about considering answering that question. After all, the humor disappears when one has to explain a joke.

In any case, while driving from my parents’ upper east Tennessee house to the domicile of my mother in-law late Thursday evening, I played around with the idea that maybe the world hasn’t come to an end after major U.S. financial institutions collapsed like stick-and-stilt houses in Galveston, Texas, during Hurricane Ike (e.g., Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG, to name a few of the stalwart companies finding themselves shorted out of existence by bigger players in the international market – has NYC completely lost its financial center luster and/or has the U.S. seen history repeated in that military strength means little in protecting the virtual world (intrinsic stock value, debt, etc.)? Thank goodness the U.S. still has value as a major consumerist society.). If so, then my desire for mystery surrounding my writing will survive even if I give away some of the secrets of my last published novel. I drove past “photo enforced” speed limit zones in Mt. Carmel, and porpoised across the peaks and troughs of the road through Church Hill, with a rhythmic chant of “Three, one, two, four” rattling in my mind, keeping me awake at midnight.

Why the sequence, 3-1-2-4? Well, AYWTP has four sections but the chronology, such as it is, twists a little. The novel opens with section three of the superficial, chronological order of the story, then goes back to the first section, progresses to the second, jumps to the fourth and final section, and finally leads to the epilogue.

On the surface, AYWTP reveals the “Walter Mitty” escapist mindset of the main character, Bruce Colline. Unlike Thurber’s tale relating the fantasies of Mitty, however, Bruce’s takes place in a Jorge Luis Borges’ labyrinthine world with Swiftian-style parables right out of Gulliver’s Travels. Literally and figuratively, Bruce finds himself trapped in a labyrinth. The reader follows Bruce as he slips and slides down dead-end allies, backtracks to what seems like the main path, steps in and out of time, and finally uses his sense of smell to seek out the monetary reward of retirement at the other end of the rat race maze in which he’d wandered for years. Along the way, he encounters mini-societies, subcultures and individuals whose rules for living seem preposterous to general readers because of their absurdities but represent a distorted sense of reality that only (AND truly) makes sense to those who’ve lived it (and those who’ve lived it have told me they know exactly which scenes in AYWTP are nearly word-for-word retellings of their peculiar lives).

One easy example of the parallel to Gulliver’s Travels: while Gulliver found himself tied down by Lilliputians, Bruce found himself bound by a mechanical spider.

In an unintended “art imitates art” moment (ars imitatia artis?), I seem to have copied the style of Cervantes with the opening pages of reviews, both real and imagined, in AYWTP. I suppose all novelists owe their existence to the works of Cervantes, even if they don’t know it.

So, too, I owe a debt of gratitude to Gabriel García Márquez, whose novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” told me that the ghost stories, urban legends and tall tales of my youth about folks in the southeastern United States varied little from similar fables in other parts of the world, including Ireland and Columbia.

AYWTP also satirizes business books such as “The 4-Hour Workweek.” In fact, the working title for AYWTP was “The Four-Tablet Workweek,” but I decided the working title limited the scope of the story.

More could be said. I hope that this blog entry answers the main questions my readers have posed concerning AYWTP. If not, I’ll consider expanding the explanation at some future date, maybe even in this lifetime. Otherwise, my body is tired and I feel scatterbrained at 2:00 a.m. – with no current Internet access, I’ll have to fact-check and post this blog entry sometime later today. Good night and good morning to you, my faithful readers.

Another writer/thinker takes his leave

I never read any of his work but heard about him through the years. Sadly, David Foster Wallace, a writer of popular "thinker's fare," bid farewell to the waking world by hanging it up, so to speak, committing suicide over the weekend. He joins a long list of literati who chose their own ending, including Spalding Gray and Sylvia Plath.

His reason for leaving has escaped the news so far. Any reason for suicide seems a sad one, including those for whom physical pain has overwhelmed their senses.

May his literary legacy last and he rest in peace.

Living By Translation

What makes you "you"? Some say that to know ourselves we must get to know people not like us, in order to see our true selves through others. Yet, as we meet new people, our personalities change ever so slightly, through either the new knowledge we've gained or the quirks and quips we've taken on from those we've met. Therefore, we have no one shape or personality, unless we decide to live in a subculture of homophily, a good subject rather timely for the type of propaganda (i.e., advertising) that groups put out to appeal to their kind:

• Theory of Advertising

I promised myself not to get drawn in to the rants and raves, the rhetoric, and the preposterous pontifications of those involved in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. Yet, I can't resist because I don't have a vested interest in the outcome of the election, or as my father would say, I don't have a dog in the fight.

Thus, I can research subjects, read books and discuss ideas that are incongruous, go off-topic, and genuinely clash.

Of course, we've all heard about the Presidential candidates -- Barr, Keyes, McCain, McKinney, Nader, Obama, Paul, etc. -- are they Presidential? Really? Honestly, I can't say that any of them particularly appeal to me. However, one of them will become the U.S. President, a figurehead overseeing the world's largest economy, the "leader of the free world," if you will, and serve as a focus for many who want certain ideals to guide the direction the United States will take over the next four years.

In my travels, I have heard international opinions about the role the U.S. has played in the past 10 or 12 years and the role others would like the country to take. Some praise the U.S. for taking a role in rooting out terrorist groups, a role being celebrated today, 9/11, in honor of the thousands who died on 11th Sept 2001. Others blame the country for creating an environment of fear, directly feeding into the mood that terrorists want people living in peaceful countries to feel.

I attended publicly-funded schools from age 6 to 18. During that time, I encountered a variety of personality types. Some people treated classmates in a passive-aggressive manner, some acted as "school yard bullies," some naturally gravitated to leadership roles, some sought no specific group or clique and lived independent lives and some meshed with all social groups, acting neither as leaders nor followers. Needless to say, the world culture reflects the same mix of personality types.

So the easiest way to look at the future of the U.S. is to look at the adult roles people play today with whom I attended public school. In other words, the U.S. just turned 232 years old this year, a mere child in the ways of the world. What will it act like when it grows up?

While the airwaves fill with chitchat, I have decided to investigate the possible futures this country may take by thumbing through a few books I picked up at Unclaimed Baggage recently:

• Living to Tell The Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli
• The Last Days of Socrates by Plato
• Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Power of Mindful Learning by Ellen J. Langer
• The Great Books Reading and Discussion Program - Fourth Series, Volume One

I had put aside Don Quixote, the last book I got at Unclaimed Baggage, after getting halfway into the second book. I will finish the novel one day, I'm sure, just not today. Cervantes makes me put down pen and paper and stare at the wonders of the world with no desire to write anything.

As I delved into Living to Tell The Tale, I saw reflections of myself and better understood the makings of an imaginative writer like Marquez, who saw the world around him wrapped in mystery. His tales fit with those of Cervantes like two pieces of a Spanish jigsaw puzzle, with just a small section missing. That missing piece of the puzzle hides in the pages of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston's tale of life in Florida, once a bastion of Spanish culture, tells the story of a child of American culture raised in the shadows and heat of the Spanish Caribbean just like Marquez and probably in the same way Cervantes would have, seeing mischievous creatures rising out of the swamps and rivers like gators out of drainage ditches today, dragons of old basking in the sun and rattling human minds.

I don't read books all day. But for the most part, I read. Sometimes I surf the 'Net, looking at news headlines or checking my investment portfolio. I ponder the purposes of every news item -- seeing the journalist, the news editor, the publisher, the headline maker (from politicians to pontiffs to pickpockets), the popup ad, the popup ad designer, the popup ad company's owners, the popup ad product maker/owner, the Web designer, the intended audience for both news item and popup ad -- and see the general storyline that my culture wants to tell.

How easily do we get steered toward entertainment, whether through general news or advertising, that we believe enhances the life we think we lead? A rhetorical question, I know.

That's why I rarely watch television. I find very little on all the local or cable stations that helps me in my daily life. It's as if everything on television is humming a tune to a beat I can't hear with words in a language I can't understand. But somehow I think that the Internet gets around this because I can choose my own channels, so to speak, even though the majority of the Web sites I visit post text in English. Shame on me. I should know better than to let my favorite form of mass communication, text, fool me into thinking I'm thinking for myself with an open mind. I may search for random phrases using general predictive search engines provided by Google or Yahoo but I should know that I'm still looking at a limited world of ideas, specifically those posted onto the World Wide Web in English. How many people out there have found the solutions to problems but I don't have access to them because they speak a non-English language and choose not to use the Internet?

I'm living most of my life by translation, in other words. A friend of mine, Ann P., told me she much rather prefers to read poems and stories in their original language because translations lose the alliteration and true meaning of words and phrases. She likes meeting homeless people on the street because they have a world view unlike hers. I know what she means.

The next U.S. President, no matter where he or she grew up, no matter how much money he or she has, had, or will have, does not live an everyday life close to mine. The candidates seek public office, the highest one in this country, with the sole intention of saying whatever it takes to get votes. I do not. I have no convictions strong enough that I want to live the rest of my days behind the shelter of the Secret Service. However, I thank the candidates for their devotion to this task. They have helped me know what makes me "me":

• I am a leader of men and women who can move about the world making business and personal decisions without an entourage.
• I am a writer, an observer, a satirist, a thinker.

The candidates' public lives help me live my private one. If all of our lives aren't a definition of the dedication to the idea of freedom, then tell me what is.

Seven years ago, 2,993 people died because of their beliefs. Some were dedicated to business, some were dedicated to military service and some were knowingly or unknowingly dedicated to martyrdom. I have learned who I am from all of them, no matter which of the 90 countries they came from. I hope and pray that the next U.S. President will learn from them, too, and work with other countries to make this world more peaceful and prosperous for everyone. The world won't end because of one country's president but the administrators and workers of one U.S. Presidential term can inspire the world to work together. Let's support the next U.S. President, regardless of who he or she is, and not get trapped into believing or feeding each other empty rhetoric.

Don't Blame It On Rio

After enjoying the feats of Olympic proportions in and around Beijing, after watching the ripple effect of a little fist fight between Russia and Georgia, and after giving my wandering eyes a moment to look over the financial futures, I decided to give my investment portfolio a vacation down in Brazil to see what's heating up south of the equator.

A lot, it turns out. For instance, it doesn't take a science whiz to figure out that lifting the veil on the mining and construction business reveals COMPANHIA VALE DO RIO DOCE (RIO), a mining company scratching around in the dirt at the moment, is ready to raise a little ore for those looking to diversify. Even better, Vale counterbalances my high tech and domestic acquisitions. I missed Vale's recent stock price peak, but again I'm not always looking for a quick buck. I want to strengthen my holdings for the future. Besides, who wouldn't enjoy a train trip to the Amazon basin and who better to supply the track then the local miner/engineer?

Some of you will tell me that the Amazon forest, a big carbon dioxide sink, continues to diminish in size thanks to the expansion plans of energy and mining companies like Vale, thus putting our families' futures at risk due to uncertain environmental impacts. I agree that the future is uncertain, risk is inevitable and human progress means more roads, housing estates and industrial parks will sprout up in so-called pristine or virgin wilderness. I'm an optimist and believe our destiny is to completely transform the planet, including the creation of no-development zones called national parks. In the process, some species will go extinct through human actions. However, keep in mind that ultimately all species on this planet will go extinct.

So, for all the whale and spotted owl preservers out there, I commend you for showing concern for some species not essential to survival of the human species. I hope you'd pay more attention to the contribution of bacteria to the human food chain, especially ones that feed our sources of protein like fish or soybean. The planet we live on constantly changes and if we really care about ourselves, we'll provide a living space for the generations to come by paving roads, plowing fields, digging mines and building schools up to the fence lines surrounding national parks built to protect buffer zones like forests, coral reefs, arctic tundra, open prairie and the headwaters of major rivers and creeks, which in turn create the feeding beds for bacteria.

In other words, chaining yourself to trees or crashing into whaling vessels does not solve world hunger. Far better to invest in or work for companies where you can make a direct impact on their effects. I feel completely comfortable investing in Vale knowing that their sustainability efforts mesh with my own.

Windmills and windfalls

I fight, or at least if fighting's too strong an action, struggle to get inspiration from my Muse to continue quality writing on my novel. My novel sits in an incomplete, incompetent state. Forthwith, I survey the state of the world economy, instead, and ponder placing a worthy investment in the information traders residing in the land of the Upanishads. Infosys, anyone? How 'bout an amateur like me investing in Wipro, also? After all, an increase in one's wealth often turns the head of an inattentive Muse.

A Remembrance of Things Past

After watching the movie, "Seed," today, I thought I'd repeat a journal entry about the day my brother in-law died two years ago that led me to seek the meaning of personal freedom...

3 July 2006. The fact that I’m sitting here is a positive thing. My command of the English language, slightly better than average on the best of days, is less than that today. Although my wife’s brother was not a close friend, we still shared the desire to do well, to give our families what they needed to survive into the future. Unfortunately, my brother in-law is no longer here, no longer living, that is. He died on the 28th of June at 2:14 p.m., after what appeared to be cardiac arrest. Blood clots in his lungs that had traveled from other parts of his body prevented him from being able to pump enough oxygen-carrying blood through him. When I saw him Tuesday night, he was taking very shallow breaths. His wife, Pat, thought he was doing better on Wednesday morning, having been able to sit up. Then sometime after lunch he started coughing, couldn’t catch his breath, and then his eyes rolled back in his head. Pat screamed for a nurse. The staff came in and revived him. They rushed him from the regular hospital room to CCU. On the way, Allan squeezed Pat’s arm and told her he was okay.

Pat called Janeil at some point during this time, probably after Allan was placed in CCU. According to my cell phone log, Janeil called me at 13:37. I was just finishing up a late lunch at a Sonic drive-in. She told me that Allan had been placed in CCU, that Pat was very upset, and Janeil was on her way to the hospital. I asked if I should join her and she told she’d let me know if I needed to come.

At 14:24, Janeil called me to tell me that Allan hadn’t made it. I told her I was on my way to the hospital. She asked me to call David Hale, Mom Berry’s minister in Rogersville, to get his assistance in telling Mrs. Berry about the death of her son. I finished up a couple of tasks at work that would allow me to take the rest of the week off. I then tried calling Dr. Hale’s house and got the answering machine. On the way to the hospital, I called the Rogersville Presbyterian Church office and reached Mrs. Hale (Sarah), telling her that Allan had died and that we wanted Dr. Hale’s assistance to help. I gave Sarah my cell phone number and asked him to call me back after he’d finished a consultation with someone in his office.

I can think of a lot of little details right now, and as usual, do not feel like writing them down, knowing that I’ll forget them in the future; despite their insignificance (like driving with one hand, changing gears with the other that was holding a cell phone and hoping I didn't miss what the caller was saying as I changed gears, especially while driving through the Governor's Drive/Memorial Parkway underpass; telling Sarah that my cell phone battery was running out), they would contribute to my remembrance and full understanding of the day’s events. The only important thing that matters is that Allan died. All else truly pales in comparison.

At the hospital, I wasn't sure where to find my wife -- luckily, Janeil was in the lobby talking with a couple of women from Pat’s church. We went back up to the “Consultation Room” where Pat and her son (my nephew) Jonathan were. I still recall lots of WBC (Whitesburg Baptist Church) folks hanging around, all of them part of Pat’s church family, but giving myself a feeling of being crowded in. Neither Janeil nor I are used to being around a lot of people, especially strangers, when we need time to soak in the emotions of loss.

I wasn’t at the hospital when Pat, Jonathan and Janeil got the news of Allan’s death so I did not see their first reactions. So what I remember most is when my niece, Jana, came to the hospital, looked at her mother asking, “What’s the matter?” and then bursting out loud, crying, "No!," when she found out about her father’s death. Since I’m writing this for myself, I can selfishly tell myself that I didn’t feel like I deserved to be in the room with them. They are such a loving family and I am such a cynical, sarcastic clownish guy, I realized just how little a comforting person I am. I couldn’t look any of them in the eye during that time. I was frozen in place, looking down at a piece of paper with Dr. Hale’s and Ben Cunningham’s (a Rogersville friend of the family) home phone numbers.

“Brother Dick” and “Brother Jimmy” (senior ministers at WBC) came into the room at some point to comfort them and have prayers. So did other folks, Jerry Spain, a close friend of Pat, being the one I remember the most.

The whole afternoon at the hospital was beyond surreal. In fact, I don’t even know what surreal means anymore. I’m sure that it includes the adjective “unfair”. Eventually, we went back up to the CCU room where Allan’s body still lay dead in bed. His 51-year old face was amazingly smooth, devoid of wrinkles. His jaw lay askew, off to one side. He had a several-day old beard. Just as I had noticed the day before when he was alive, he had much less hair on his head than I had seen a few months before (I am more aware of men losing hair, now that it has been shown that hair loss is attributable to heart and blood circulation problems). I thought about touching him but decided I didn’t deserve to.

Later, after Pat had signed release forms (including an organ donor form), I stood in the hallway with the nurse while the rest of the family – Janeil, Pat, Jonathan and Jana – saw Allan’s body in the room one more time. The nurse explained to me that even though Pat had signed an organ donor form, about the only thing they could take were the bones and maybe some ligaments or tendons.

I sit here writing about the day Allan died when I had hoped to be able to sit down and write about the day I spent in Munich with Ann and Jonas – a wonderful memory of walking through the streets the day of the 2006 World Cup match between Germany and Sweden. Alas, death has overshadowed that warm, summer day in Bavaria. I’ll always have dim memories of Swedish wood creatures, American coffee shops (Starbucks and San Francisco Coffee Company), Johannes berries, funny costumes, a phone conversation between Ann and my father in broken German, chasing down a couple of bicyclists in the English Garden in an attempt to return a dropped overshirt, watching surfers in the middle of the city, looking out over the city from the towers of the Frauerenkirche (sp?) by myself while waiting for Ann and Jonas (with an elderly lady telling me her memories of the city, all in German, with me only being able to say “Ja, ja”, and wishing I could say something more comforting), eating ice cream next to polizei cyclists, then cracking a joke in bad taste, seeing the look of alarm/disgust on Ann’s face, sensing something wrong and then hours later having a conversation at the end of the day in the courtyard outside a San Fran ‘Offee House where Ann laid it on the line about integrity, flirting, sex and everything else that that dirty joke seemed to embody (certainly including some of my writing, no doubt).

The rest of this week has been a blur, more so for Pat I’m sure. We spent time on Thursday and early Friday planning for the funeral, visiting Maple Hill Cemetery to pick out plots, going to the funeral home to pick out a coffin and plan the memorial service, visiting Dr. Jackson (Brother Jimmy) at WBC to plan the funeral service and have a “heart to heart” talk about the days/weeks/months ahead. Friday evening, family gathered at the Laughlin Funeral Home to receive friends and family (including Janeil and my favorite couple from Covenant Presbyterian Church, Leon and Flora Trotter; some of Janeil’s coworkers; my former employee, Donald Gaither and his wife Jenny; others who I should remember but can’t). Saturday was the funeral service at WBC and subsequent burial at the cemetery. Saturday night, Janeil and I took my parents and sister on a tour of Big Cove and then had a late snack at Nikko Restaurant – Robert and Anna were such gracious hosts to spend time with us, feeding the fish in the atrium.

Yesterday, Janeil and I sat with her mother at Pat’s house while Pat and the kids went to church. We also visited with Pat’s family. Last night, Janeil and I went to see the movie, “The Devil Wears Prada”. Today, Janeil has been resting in bed watching TV while I have been doing very little else. Watched the movie, “Before Sunset”, which triggered this writing session out in the warm sunroom with the cats sleeping in the sofa across the room from me, all of us listening to the gurgle of the waterfall outside and the music playing from a nearby wireless speaker.

After listening to the accolades that Allan received for his dedication to what he loved – God, family, work – I have pondered my life’s record and what I would be remembered for. I’m not a big participant in any part of north Alabama society so I expect low participation in my funeral, and thus, little public record to go over.

Right now, a small hawk sits in the branches of the fig tree that grows over the waterfall next to our house. The hawk was here yesterday, also. Does it sit waiting to pounce on a bird sipping water from the base of the waterfall? There was a turtle that lived in the upper part of the waterfall – I wonder if it has fallen prey to the hawk. I hope not but if it has, such is the way of life.

Oh wait, there are at least two hawks in the tree. They’re both small so it’s possible they are juveniles. I take it back. There are three. The third one is bigger – brown with a white chest, while the other two are mottled brown and white birds.

The wooded hill behind our house is slowly being divided up into housing areas for humans. We live on the northeast end, in a subdivision built in the early 1960s along the edge of a farm (basically, in unplowable land). A subdivision at the southern end of the hill was built a year ago and now roads from the subdivision are being extended into the woods. Perhaps the construction/destruction is pushing the animals this way.

So what do I want to remember of my life in the days/weeks/years ahead? I have spent the majority of my life since high school performing functions that were not my desires. In other words, my adulthood has been more compromise than personal promise. When Ann spoke to Jonas and me about integrity, she knew very little about my life. In my brother in-law (and in many of my fellow Eagle Scouts), I have seen the example of a person who led a life full of integrity. In the newspapers and TV news channels, in my worklife, and in most other places, I have seen more than my share of people who have exhibited a central guiding set of moral values or desire for integrity different than my own. What I have figured out is that we are born with an internal set of rules that changes very little. I am the same person I remember being when I was four or five years old. I remember looking at kids beside me in kindergarten and Sunday school, being able to pick out those who cared for and enhanced a personal belief system tied to the church. I have no way of knowing how much was nurture or nature. A mixture of both, to be sure. At an early age and even to this day, I fascinate myself with the ability to think thoughts incongruous with a way of life that ensures the best path for a lengthy, safe passage to the end of a long life.

Speeding fines doubled when workers present

As some of you know, I have written many words over the past few months toward the makings of a novel that I call, "The Mind's Aye." Over 98 thousand words at current count. I have wandered through a few plots while building up the novel and figured out that I needed to write an outline to keep me focused on the main plots, leaving subplots to make themselves known as I write. Here 'tis:

Plots of “The Mind’s Aye” [Overall, a satire about horror / murder mysteries]:

· The novel opens with the description of a 62-year old woman, Semina, holding a poem in her dead hand.

· Two murderers, Bruce and Lee, seek victims based on the hated stereotypes they project through body language (their first victims we see are two preppy, retired yuppies idiotically playing golf in the midst of a bad thunderstorm). Later in the novel, some of their dead victims unexpectedly get revenge on Bruce and Lee.

· Two email friends, Archie and Belle, carry on an extended email conversation. One of the email friends, Archie, will be killed by the murderers.

· A blogger posts entries every so often. No connection to any other plots or subplots until near the end of the novel. The blog entries just show evidence of the blogging world.

· Ghosts appear in the novel first to habitually tell their stories to the reader and then to gather at a summer festival on the border between Russian and Mongolia (near the trans-Mongolian rail line) on the night of a new moon in order to figure out how to end their days wandering among the memories of the living. The story of the summer festival gathering of the dead is told by Anne – daughter of Belle’s husband, Colin – who has an uncanny way of seeing the world in ways others cannot, e.g.:

Colin's oldest daughter, Anne, just returned from the Trans Siberian Rail "experience". She and her Mother, (Colin’s ex) were on a 6-day trip through Russia and to China when they were taken off the train in Mongolia because her Mother (who is a world traveler and has lived as an expatriate in Berlin for 18 years) failed to get a visa for 14 days (instead she got one for 4 days).

They were taken off the train! Nobody spoke the language and I would have had a nervous breakdown; Anne is very smart and somehow managed to get them out of there, sooner than later, in a few days, and on the way to China.

Anne lives by Murphy's Law (if anything can go wrong it will go wrong). She took Colin to see an opera in NYC, the opening act a guy dropped dead, had a heart attack and fell off a ladder (opera canceled to say the least). At La Scala in Italy, the lead singer lost his voice so a man in the audience volunteered to sing (under the stage) and the lead singer mouthed the performance. There is always something with her...

· Vague references are made to characters from my novels, “Helen of Kosciusko,” “Milk Chocolate,” “Sticks to Lying,” and “Are You With The Program?” The characters, after their vague re-introductions, interact with characters in this novel, including the living and the dead. Turns out that Bruce and Lee come from the other novels.

· The author is both a living and dead character in the novel (revealed why during the course of the novel). The author tells the full story of the crazy woman attack mentioned in the epilogue of “Are You With The Program?” The crazy woman’s husband is one of the two murderers (Lee), a former Army sniper/scout [based on a real person] who married the crazy woman [a cross between two real people] when they were both in high school; he received several years of special training but flipped out after he was deployed overseas to kill alleged enemy combatants (we, along with Lee, find out the “enemy combatants” were low-level civic leaders opposed to expansion of U.S. business interests in their parts of the world); his mother in-law is named Semina. Lee kills Semina because she keeps blaming him for ruining her daughter’s life years after her divorce from Lee. After escaping from Bruce and stalking the author for weeks, Lee kills the author in a fit of jealousy, seeing that the author still has strong feelings for both Semina and her daughter (i.e., his ex-wife).

· After the author dies, he becomes acquainted with Belle's email friend, Archie. Both of them know the plots of this novel and meet up with the dead people at the summer festival, including some of the people that Bruce and Lee killed, as well as a few recently dead famous people (Aldous Huxley, Michael Jordan’s father, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, …), who aren't ready to be forgotten but attend the festival out of curiosity. Most of the dead find release from the world of the living during the summer festival (using tricks from the book, “Consciousness Explained”*). Turns out some of the American dead, because they never learned how to connect with their past (their ancestors from Europe and Asia), with no real sense of history or geography, have to return to the United States in the fall and attend an American-style football game at a secondary school in a suburban community called Colonial Heights. As a reward, the winners get to have their memories taken away from the living so those dead ones can live in forgotten peace. The losers will continue on as fond, almost heroic, memories to the living – fathers, mothers, football players, cheerleaders, etc. – roles the dead played but did not believe in when they were alive. A young woman, Ellen, who passes by the football field on the cool night of the full moon will stop and sit in the metal bleachers to record the ghosts’ football game as a fictional short story she’s writing, not realizing that she’s telling an actual story.

· The two murderers, Bruce and Lee, reconnect with each other at the end of the ghosts’ football game. They had separately been tracking Ellen and each planned to individually kill her because she is a niece of the author. They greet and agree to kill Ellen together. Some of the dead see the pending attack of the murderers on Ellen. Through the force of their will, through the energy they possess as memories recorded in Ellen’s Livescribe Pulse pen, they trip the two murderers and cause them to kill each other instead of Ellen, thus becoming entries in a policeman’s logbook and a reporter’s notebook, then a lead story in the local newspaper, a wire story for “News of the Weird” and spreading out to international blogs commenting about the strange, mysterious story of two people accidentally killing each other in the middle of the night instead of their intended victim. Bruce and Lee end up wandering the memories of the living for decades as they go from blog entries to ghost story anthologies to storylines for multiplayer games to 3D characters in an immersive mental illness reenactment training suit/mind implant for police psychiatrists. Although they had acted the part of killers during their lives, they had unfulfilled dreams that now haunt them every time their killer stories are relived. Bruce wanted to be a famous author who traveled on speaking circuits and met a lot of interesting people. Lee wanted to spend his days mountain biking around the world and working for the preservation of wild spaces where bikers and hikers could see untamed plants and animals in their native environments.

· As the author wraps up the novel, posthumously, so to speak, he meets Semina at a party for the winners of the ghosts’ football game. Even though they’re dead and have no emotional capabilities (just the desire for new experiences), they decide they don’t mind being held to this planet by memories of the living because they led the lives they wanted to live – she because she talked the talk and walked the walk of the life of a loving Christian woman (having no enemies because she loved and embraced all races, genders, and religious practitioners), and he because he fulfilled all his dreams, not the dreams and wishes of others – and thus will wander the world of the living with gladness as long as the living want to keep memories of them alive. After all, isn’t that the true meaning of reaching heaven or nirvana? Being remembered for what we did for ourselves, and by extension for others, not for what we didn’t do, could have done or should have done.
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* It's an interesting book. I like the fact that the book sets the stage for the understanding that the classic "stream of consciousness" does not exist. A brain is constantly sorting through inputs from parts of the body and sending signals back to various body parts (muscles, glands, organs, etc.) to be ready to respond to anticipated external stimuli. Consciousness is our way of thinking that the back-and-forth signal-sending is one deliberate act after another, an ordered pattern, when in fact the brain often goes through multiple, simultaneous arbitrary decisions and automatic responses, tossing aside a lot of meaningless and/or important body part responses before our "consciousness" becomes aware of it. Thus the so-called "Eureka!" moment, the joining together of seemingly incoherent patterns into one meaningful one all of a sudden. If a ballerina has to coordinate many muscle movements at once in order to perform an effortless "pas de deux" with someone else, then a thought is similar, the coordination of many brain synapse firings to perform an effortless calculation and subsequent conclusion. Therefore, "consciousness" or "thinking" is only a concept for the practice and exercise of our brain muscles (i.e., synapse firings). When you let go of the concept and tell yourself that you have neither consciousness nor unconsciousness nor subconsciousness, then you open yourself up to a whole other level of brain usage. You can give your brain the opportunity to solve many problems at once, multitasking, as they say in today's jargon. The dead people in the novel fully understand this because they no longer have body parts. They only exist as synapse firings (stored and recalled memories) in people's brains.

A Trail of Two Cities

With a large portion of the world's population focused on the Olympic events in the political entity called China, I have remembered a bit of research I performed, comparing two companies named SAIC and their respective headquarters, one near San Diego, California, USA, (a little jewel called La Jolla) and one in Shanghai [上海市], China.

When one looks to invest in companies, what is the interest? Personal? Economic? Strategic? When I examined the two SAICs, Science Applications International Corporation and Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, I wanted to see what these Pacific Coast bodies did to promote a stronger, more prosperous, conscientious society.

Stock price history...well, you can get that just about anywhere. In any case, if you look, you'll see the two companies have quite a different stock history over the past two years. The one in America has maintained a rather steady price, giving one the impression this is a company that can survive a recession well but won't create instant millionaires in times of economic booms -- very easily a company I'd consider should these recessionary times carry on. The one based near the Yangtze River Delta has demonstrated that good economic times mean a good ride on a Chinese automotive manufacturer -- now that the fun two-year ride has coasted to the bottom of a hill, one can wonder, "Should I jump back on and follow the trail back to the thrill hill of higher stock prices as the economy kicks into gear in the near future?"

Can you predict the future? I shy away from predictions, myself. Instead, I close my eyes (putting on imaginary blinders, if you will), hold out my two hands, with a record of the recent past in one hand (going back only to the late 1950s because the major world wars and their causes/aftermath are irregular, misleading economic indicators in my assessment) and a semi-scientific projection of the next 50 years in the other hand. If the two feel balanced, then I can comfortably agree with the saying, "Those who study history know that the price of eggs in China does have something to do with it." [Whatever "it" is is up to interpretation, as any student of American presidential testimony about two-letter words can attest.]

Therefore, my reenactment of blind justice in determining the fate of my investment in stocks can only tell me what the future price of stocks will hold. In other words, if I was a bear, I'd sell some worthless stock, buy SAI and hold it for a year or so to shelter myself from the turbulent market of the coming months. If I was bullish, I'd buy 600104.SS and hold it for two years, when the economy will have boomed a bit again.

But I have my wits about me. I have the future of my extended family to consider. These companies, although both involved in the design and manufacture of goods and services, have more going on than just bolts, screws and sheet metal.

On a personal note, last year I interviewed for a job with Microsoft to run their Microsoft Home Server test lab in Shanghai (thank you, thank you -- okay, that's enough applause; oh, that was the toilet flushing, my dear, not applause? Sorry, my mistake). As I made my way through the various interviews, violence in China was rising. Bad snow storms were blocking millions of Chinese from taking a holiday and hostilities toward foreigners rose up in Shanghai. I had worked with many expats who spent half the year working in Shanghai and they agreed that Shanghai's status as one of the world's largest cities, if not the largest, did mean that crowded conditions forced one to spend time in the parts of the city where you worked. But hey, don't most of us spend the majority of our waking hours near our workplace? My Shanghai worker friends also noted that hostility could be an issue, if you made too big of a deal about your foreigner status. Then again, have you ever attended a rugby or football game wearing the opponent's jersey? As a character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail noted, "Now we see the violence inherent in the system." Mob mentality has not changed -- you can get the same reading of large groups of people in Gustave Le Bon's 1896 treatise, "The Crowd." Also, many years ago I interviewed for a job with the U.S.-based SAIC and have visited its headquarters. I tell you all this so you understand my interest in comparing the two SAICs.

Bottom line: what can I tell you to help you decide which stock is worth making your life better in the long run? Look at the smog in Beijing during the Olympian broadcasts for the next couple of weeks. Shanghai Automotive, a member of the Fortune Global 500, helped create that smog putting a lot of cars and trucks on the road while giving gainful employment to bright, enthusiastic workers. Meanwhile, Science Applications, a Fortune 500 company, serves the interest of a lot of government agencies while giving gainful employment to bright, enthusiastic workers. Which do you think is better (or worse)? There is no right answer. Admittedly, it's a tough decision. As some wikipedia author stated, this is an antilogy. Now you can see why I prefer to make my decisions in the dark. My nieces and nephews will have to decide if the world is a better place as they divide up my stacks of money amongst themselves. I'm guessing they won't really care where the money came from, even if I leave these crumbs of blog entries that mark the trail. But for those of you who I bump into on this trail, you may like to know where I found the bags of gold slung over the back of my mule. Good luck prospecting!