Court Jester?

I dusted off this old post where I was complaining about some other personal karmic slight, real or imagined, to complain today about an alarming paucity of book sales. It seems I just cannot decide to be happy about being poor. I can, however, be funny about it. Well, kind of.

When I was 21 or 22 I told my mother, who was busy at the time chiding me for what, according to her, were serious lapses in my attention to my future, that I had as yet no regrets—that everything I had done or failed to do to that point only added to the sum total of me, which sum, in my opinion, seemed to be tallying up just fine. It turns out though, 40 some years later, that I had many regrets at the time. I just didn't know it.

Now that I'm shipwrecked and washed up on the shores of an uncertain dotage, ill-provisioned and without prospects, all those early and unseen regrets are coming due like markers to a loan-shark. Now, I understood perfectly at the time all the places where I went wrong. I knew where I didn't apply myself as I ought, when I skated or took the path of least resistance or effort, where I caved in to idle self-indulgence, and where I wasted monumental effort on things that were bound never to pay dividends. I knew what I was doing when I did it...or wasn't when I didn't, and I understood the consequences.

Those things don't bother me so much. I made trade-offs that I valued one way at the time. That I have changed the valuation over time may make my decisions lamentable, but it does not make the consequences unfair. I got what I asked for...up to a point.

My problem is that now I think I'm well past that point. I'm past Karma, past just deserts, past what I bargained for, and well into the uncharted realm of cosmic retribution. Things are way worse than they ought to be, given what I did or failed to do in the past. I can say without irony, 'I don't know what I did to deserve this.'

Maybe it's that I made disparaging comments about the so-called law of attraction. Maybe it's that I sprinkle my prayers with profanity and vulgarisms. Maybe it's that I think Kim Kardashian, who seems to have replaced Paris Hilton on the altar of American celebrity worship, is a waste of otherwise useable oxygen. Maybe it's because I believe that professional wrestling is more entertaining and realistic than any episode in any city of the Real Housewives—ever. Maybe it's all these together. Maybe it's something else entirely. I don't know.

'Keying Up'
a court jester fortifies his wit
William Merritt Chase - 1875

Whatever is going on puts me in mind of the Book of Job. I must confess I don't get the Book of Job, but neither can I deny that it is a fascinating study in the fundamental unfairness of things. Job is a victim. He doesn't start out that way. Initially at least, he has the world by the tail. His God, however, who is also my God by the way, is a capricious bully who hangs his loyal servant up for sport and wagers with Satan that the poor slob won't eventually curse his Maker for his current sorry condition. What kind of bullshit is that? Even when Job passes the test, and God restores his former status and fortune, Job never really finds out what it was all about. It doesn't matter to him. God is God, he says in effect, and God can do whatever God pleases without having to answer to mere mortals.

I have to tell you that this is a completely unsatisfactory ending for me. I'd like it better if Job learned something useful from the exchange, even if he only learned that occasionally God will screw you up for for His own amusement.

Believe it or not, this would make more sense to me than what I have now in terms of either prospects or understanding. I mean if an angel were to appear to me as if in a dream, and say, in effect, the court of heaven needs a jester and that God would like it to be me, I would accept the position and even feel a little honored. Doing pratfalls in the Divine Comedy would be way more gratifying than whatever it is I'm doing now, which seems to count for nothing. Maybe I am the court jester. Maybe I'm providing entertainment for a fickle universe with a mean streak. Problem is, just like with Job, no one asked and, so far at least, no one's bothered to explain. Is it too much to ask that my fate ought to be salted with a little justice?

When You Think About It, a Hangover is Just Karma

...most of them anyway. If you mixed brown ale and gin last night, you kind of deserve to feel poorly today. On the other hand, if you had a chemotherapy infusion yesterday, you prolly deserve a little more sympathy from your'higher power'. The above image graces my latest Tee-Shirt creation on Zazzle. The Royalties, meager as they are, help with the costs of my treatments.

CLICK HERE FOR A LINK TO MY ZAZZLE STORE!

Hiatus Ends – Ass Not Saved

Our Arts & Crafts Show Tent. I shared a booth with my wife and sister-in-law. My stuff is in the right rear corner and on the back and right side walls. I spent a lot of time standing inside detracting from the general appearance and scaring potential customers away. 

So I am returned from my first arts and crafts show, Fiesta in the Park, at Lake Eola in Orlando, FL. My last post said I was going on hiatus to prepare for the show. I claimed that 'hiatus' was from the Latin for 'saving my ass' since that is what I hoped the show would do...from an economic viewpoint anyway. In other words, I hoped I would make some money selling photographs to the unsuspecting public. The unsuspecting public was not nearly as indiscriminate as I had hoped.

A close-up of my table. I thought the card assortments on the right side would sell like hotcakes. They did not. The hand cleaner and enormous cafe latte from Panera Bread Co. were not for sale. Neither did I include them in my expenses, although I probably should have.

Here is an accounting in round numbers and estimates. It is too depressing to report with any accuracy. I spent well over a thousand dollars on the show. This includes over $300 for a vendor tent with some optional side walls and sand bags, a little less than $200 for gasoline for two cars, $72 to kennel the dogs, $100 in fees, $136 in ink, $200 in paper and card stock, and an easy $100 in display paraphernalia. It adds up way faster after the fact than it seems to be when you are spending the money.

Admittedly, a lot of the total went into things that I will be able to use again like the tent, display items, and inventory of prints that I made. It's not like I didn't get some lasting utility for my money, but it is sunk cost that I'll have to get back out of future sales.

This is the disturbing part. Future sales are usually predicted from past sales. My grand total of sales of sales of all items from this show: $2.00. Yes you read that right. Two measly dollars return on a thousand dollar investment! In spite of this dismal fiscal failure, I don't count the show as a total loss. I had some fun, made new friends among the neighboring vendors, and saw a ton of pretty girls. All these reside comfortably in the plus column for someone who has only been outdoors in the past few months to walk the dogs and take out the trash.

Still, any fool in his right mind would cut his losses and try something else. Not me though. I want to try again - ever the optimist, in spite of years of evidence to the contrary. I feel like I learned a lot from this show about what to do to improve the results next time...and what not to do to avoid the seemingly inevitable downward spiral into living in a refrigerator box under a bridge somewhere. Fortunately I have plenty of inventory left over for repeated attempts. I'll run out of spirit way before I run out of inventory.

Divine Retribution and Karmic Comeuppance

 

Saturday I got two pretty good retribution stories from my brother-in-law. These are not tales of personal revenge, but rather of the kind of divine retribution that leads one to believe God is on one's side in a particular matter. These are instances where karma is visited in unmistakable fashion on someone who clearly has it coming.

In the first, my brother-in-law and his wife, who is my wife's sister, were towing their boat to Lake Cumberland in southern Kentucky. They were on a narrow, winding country pike that had more to offer in scenic vistas than it did in travel efficiency—especially in the case where one was towing a large boat. So while the view was pastoral, and the mood pleasant, the pace was leisurely at best.

All seemed right with the world until a fellow in a battered pick-up truck came up behind them and started trying to pass. The frequent bends and hills and the resulting profusion of double yellow lines on the tarmac made this a dicey proposition, and the inability to get around my brother-in-law's rig apparently worked havoc on the other driver's capacity for patience. When he was finally able to pass, he did so with more commotion and speed than was probably necessary. He also felt compelled for some reason to flip my in-laws the bird as he came by—final evidence that he was ripe for a comeuppance.

Now after this fellow passed, my brother-in-law noticed a brand new gas grill in the bed of the truck, tethered to one side by some twine and several bungee cords. We surmise now that the fellow was in a hurry to get the appliance home so he could begin cooking a Sunday repast. Perhaps he was having friends and family over for a barbecue. Perhaps he had stolen the grill, and thought he was being pursued by its rightful owners, or the local constabulary, or both. Whatever the reason for his haste, it continued unabated after he had passed...unabated that is until the truck hit a bump in the road. At this point things started to come apart, quite literally, in the pick-up truck.

The lid of the grill flew open and caught a great scoopful of air at something north of 60 miles per hour. The resulting pressure over-strained the twine and elastic bindings holding the grill to the side of the truck. At the same time bits and pieces from inside the grill started flying about, taking wing like so many celebratory doves released at an elaborate wedding. The grill itself slid backwards and crashed into the tailgate with such force as to cause it to unlatch and fall open. By this time the driver had realized what was happening and slammed on his brakes. The grill, now unfettered and free as the still flying bits and pieces, skidded forward in the bed and crashed headlong into the back of the cab, shattering the back window in the process.

The flying debris settled, some of it on the roadway, and my brother-in-law picked his way carefully through the mess, passed the now parked truck, and proceeded on his leisurely way to the lake. The driver of the pick-up truck did not flip him another bird as he passed. He was, it would seem, sufficiently chastened by the karma he had invited.

The second of my brother-in-law's tales also has to do with his boat. In this story he had arrived at the lake on another occasion and was backing the boat on its trailer down the incline to the ramp where he would launch the boat. He stopped some yards short of the water to prepare the boat for launching. He inserted the plug into the drain hole in the stern, and loosed the straps that secured the boat to the trailer.

While he was thus engaged another driver backed another boat and trailer down the incline next to him. Now, while there was more than sufficient room on the ramp to launch two boats at the same time, the other driver, owing either to lack of skill or a level of meanness that would be unusual in most week-end boaters, jackknifed his trailer behind my brother-in-law's rig in such a way as to take up twice as much room as he needed and thus deny my brother-in-law access to the ramp and the water.

My brother-in-law is not one to suffer fools lightly. He has no patience for incompetence. He has even less patience when that incompetence manifests itself in ways that are also inconsiderate. He was ready to launch his boat, and this fool was in his way. He was not about to give the guy a pass.

“Hey,” he protested as the guy got out of his SUV, “you're in my way. You need to pull your boat back up the ramp so I can launch.”

The guy, for reasons we can only guess at, was not agreeable at this point. “I'll only be a minute,” he said.

My brother-in-law did not like this answer very much, and so he suggested again,  this time with a righteous peppering of expletives, that the fellow needed to get the hell out of his way so he could launch his boat, that he had been there first, that any fool could see there was room for two boats to launch, but this particular fool had managed to botch a simple operation like backing a boat trailer down a ramp in such a fashion as to render the commodious facility useless to anyone but himself.

“I already told you,” the guy said, “I will be through in a minute.”

So my brother-in-law watched with mounting fury while the guy launched his boat, tied it up to the dock, and left his wife watching over it while he finally pulled his trailer out of the water and drove off to the parking area about a hundred yards up the bank. Able at last to launch his own boat, my brother-in-law left his wife in charge of their boat, which was tied to the opposite dock. As he was pulling his trailer up the incline toward the parking area, the other fellow's wife came frantically pounding on my brother-in-law's window. He rolled it down.

“Catch my husband,” she said, “and tell him he forgot to put the drain plug in our boat. It's filling up with water.”

My brother-in-law nodded as he processed this information. He probably didn't mean to convey to her that he would do what she asked. He was just doing what men do when they are confronted by hysterical women—nod while they search for the quickest way to extricate themselves from the immediate vicinity. The woman went back to watch her boat sink further into the lake along with any hope she might have held for a pleasant afternoon on the water.

Women who are married to callous and ignorant men cannot themselves be prideful. Pride will not suit their circumstances nearly so well as humility. These poor creatures spend a lot of time swallowing their pride and throwing themselves on the mercy of those whom their husbands have wronged. If they do not, nothing much good will ever happen for them. Even if they do, a good outcome is not a forgone conclusion.

My brother-in-law decided, on his way up the hill, that the fellow who's boat was filling up with water had already demonstrated a singular lack of willingness to take suggestions. He had already made my brother-in-law suffer consequences from this lack. My brother-in-law did not see any profit to be had in supposing that the fellow had somehow changed his stripes on the way from the boat ramp to the parking lot. He supposed, rather, that the fellow would still be loathe to take any direction from him, especially as it was likely, my brother-in-law not having changed his stripes either, that any further direction would also be laced with profanity.

By this time the other fellow was walking back down the hill to join his wife at their boat. My brother-in-law, having reasoned all the forgoing out to his satisfaction, passed him by, careful to ignore the scornful gaze the fellow cast his way, and careful as well not to assume any expression that might be construed as gloating. He had to continue this non-gloating demeanor as he walked back down the hill and passed the fellow once more, coming up the hill, this time with a great deal more panic than scorn in his expression.

Eventually the fellow was able to rescue his boat before it went to the bottom, although getting it back onto his trailer and getting it out of the water so that it could drain provided my brother-in-law a lot more entertainment than he had expected when he had hitched the boat up to his SUV earlier that morning. Presumably the fellow and his wife did not enjoy their karma nearly so much.

Proverbs 24:17 says, "Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice." Whether you take this as a commandment or merely as sound advice, this may be the hardest proscription in the Bible to follow faithfully. I know I can't do it. I can try to love my enemies, and I pray for them regularly, but if I ever see them come to what I think are their just deserts, I will be hard pressed not to let my heart rejoice.

And when I think of all the misery I've suffered at the hands of the fools I've worked for, the bastards who took my job, and the thieves who've robbed me of the possibility of getting another one anytime soon, I'm equally hard pressed not to pray Psalm 35 that they may become “like chaff before the wind,” or Psalm 58, that my God might “break the teeth in their mouths.” All retribution ought to be biblical in proportion, don't you think?

Day 241 – Bankruptcy

           My wife has convinced me that we need to file bankruptcy. I’ve been resisting that route for some time. I want to avoid the associated stigma, although I have to admit that it’s already a little late for pride. The fact is, although we have disposed of a lot of stuff—including our good car—and cut or eliminated a lot of our expenses, we still have $65,000 in credit card debt and our monthly payments to service that debt are over $2,000. The highest interest rate we pay is over 30%. The lowest is 23%. These rates are in spite of the fact that in 20 years we have never missed or been late with a payment.

          While that much credit card debt is astronomical and suggests a profligate lifestyle, unfettered by temperance or good sense, such is not the case. I’ve been overextended on my credit cards for over 20 years. I got that way when a business that I got into failed back in the late eighties. I elected at the time to pay all my business creditors off by using the generous facilities offered by a handful of bank cards. I should have filed bankruptcy back then, but I didn’t.

Since that time, I’ve been at the mercy of the credit card companies. Most of the cards I had back then were subsequently bought up by either Bank of America or Citibank. In 20 years time I’ve used the cards, but I would not characterize my usage as extravagant.

My wife and I lead fairly staid lives. We don’t drive fancy automobiles. We don’t take vacations. We don’t throw lavish parties. Neither one of us wears jewelry. We don’t own a boat or a timeshare or expensive clothes. We have however, by my estimate, paid the credit card companies about $240,000 in interest in that time.

That’s money I’d like to have back. That’s a burden I’ve been trying to get out from under for approximately forever. I couldn’t make it happen, though. I was in too deep, and the banks knew it. They were more than happy to have me paying all that interest. They thought up ways to get me to pay more.

More than once they offered me credit card consolidation loans. Sweep everything under one debt umbrella at a reasonable rate, make one payment, and watch my principal balance fade away. That was the pitch in the mailer they sent me. When I actually called them to take them up on their offer, however, it was a completely different story. Then it was more like, gee you’ve got an awful lot of debt, what kind of collateral can you offer us? This was Bank of America. Most of what I owed was to them. Didn’t they already know I had too much debt? Wasn’t that why they were offering me a consolidation loan? Apparently it was not.

They ended up telling me I was a high risk candidate and offering me a loan at a significantly higher interest rate than I was paying on average at the time. I declined their kind offer. I’ve continued to make timely payments on all the cards. I always make more than the minimum payment when possible.

Sometimes it’s not possible. When I was facing high out-of-pocket medical costs because of the cancer surgery I had in 2007 for instance and when I was getting multiple lithotripsies for my kidney stones in 2008, making more than the minimum payments due was not a viable option. Now I’m jobless for an extended period of time. Things don’t look like they’re going to improve anytime soon. Continuing to make the minimum payments isn’t just a burden under my current circumstances. It’s nearly impossible. It will be absolutely impossible when my unemployment benefits run out or when my COBRA insurance subsidy runs out.

Better to file bankruptcy now than to wait until I’m in arrears and truly underwater. I still don’t want to do it, but I’m warming up to the idea. The more I think about it, the more attractive it becomes. The more I learn about the current economic crisis and how it came about, the less concerned I am about the poor banks to which I owe money. They may be my good faith creditors, but they are also the proximal cause of my inability to pay as well as my considerable misery.

The banks have not been doing their job. According to economist specializing in monetary policy, Warren Mosler, in a January 2010 article on banking reform in Huffington Post, “the public purpose of banking is to provide for a payments system and to fund loans based on credit analysis.” What we have instead, for the last 10 to 15 years, is a banking system increasingly involved in the creation and trading of arcane financial instruments such as securitized mortgages and derivatives.

Even while they have been reaping huge profits and paying huge bonuses, the banks have fallen down on their basic public utility, which is providing financing for business innovation. So while the bankers have been buying big houses on Long Island, vacation homes and boats in the Caribbean, and filling their wives’ closets with Jimmy Choo and Christian Louboutin shoes, American business innovation has been left to decay to the point where it is unlikely to recover anytime soon. Until it does, we will not see a return to full employment.

I’m not very sympathetic to the losses that Bank of America and Citibank are going to suffer when I file bankruptcy. They’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars of my money already, and they used it to tank the economy and my future along with it. You won’t see me weeping if Ken Lewis’ wife has to settle for 600 thread count sheets because I get discharged in bankruptcy and effectively default on the credit card loans I owe to Bank of America.

I’ve imagined what it would be like for a representative from Bank of America to show up at my bankruptcy hearing to give me a lecture on not borrowing beyond my means to repay, or honoring my good faith obligations, or some such drivel, when it is clear from the news that the banks themselves have been guilty of a ridiculous overextension of their own ability to make good on their obligations. In fact, if it weren’t for the errant risk taking and unmitigated greed of the banks, it would currently be much easier for me to find a job and to continue to remit their usurious loan payments. Up to now the banks have left me holding the bag for their greed and excess. Now it occurs to me that it may be my moral responsibility to hand the bag back to them.

Day 220 - Big Karma

Everything I’ve written so far happened to me pretty much as I’ve described it. I’ve had to change the order of a few things, and of course the names of some of the people involved, but in terms of the events and circumstances it’s all too true. When I tell this to people that I’ve had the occasion to discuss some of these things with, they are usually incredulous in one way or another. Some of them can’t believe that people in business, people who make a lot of money and are for the most part respected and looked up to in their communities are capable of behaving in the ways I’ve described. People don’t want to believe that anyone who has, or appears to have, a lot of money could possibly be as stupid as I have portrayed.


Others are perfectly capable of believing the bad behavior of the people I’ve worked for, but they can’t accept that I would stand for it very long. They think that I should have walked away to find a better place to labor. These people are harder for me to dismiss, because I think they’re right. I can scarcely believe it myself.


What highly compensated executive in his right mind would stand for being denigrated and cursed by a boss like Henry or Ivan or Richard? What honest professional trying to make a business succeed would tolerate the philandering and self-serving machinations of an Alicia or a Fische? What sensible manager, witness to one bone-headed decision after another eroding all hope of profitability in a company where thousands of workers depend on sound practice and good decision making, could not cry out in alarm, and try at least slow down the madness?


In each case the answer would be me. I would do just that because like most everyone I know I will avoid confrontation at all costs and constantly strive to take the easy way out. It is almost always easier to put up with the devil you know than to learn, the hard way, the tricks and deceits of the devil you’ve yet to meet.


If I weren’t unemployed and despairing of ever finding another job I wouldn’t be writing this and hoping that I can turn it into a book. I would be working late, and getting home too exhausted to wax very creative.


That in itself is a sad state of affairs. I should have written a book a long time ago. If I had, I would be a lot happier, have a lot fewer regrets (saved and realized), and have put up with a lot less crap at this point in my life. Had I struck out to do what I enjoy early on rather than waiting to be forced into it by circumstances, both I and (I like to think) the world would be better off for it.


I should be writing this and making a book of it now because it is time for a lot of this stuff to be said. Fifteen million people are out of work, most of them through no fault of their own. Most of them have no idea what happened to them. They were blindsided by economic events way beyond their control. Many, many of them have been without work for a long time—eighteen months is not unheard of. They have lost their health insurance, their homes, their cars, their self respect, and their dignity. They suffer from depression, feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness.


They suffer from a host of other maladies that are the radioactive fallout of poverty, stress and depression. They’ve stopped taking or cut down on their medications because they can’t afford to buy both prescriptions and food. They don’t go to the doctor when they need to because they must use what little money they have to eat, shelter their families, and fund their search for another job. Priorities are shuffled and re-shuffled based on the exigency of the day. They are suffering mightily, and for the most part they do not understand that this is something that was done to them and for which they ought to be indignant.


Even the folks who realize that this economic turmoil we find ourselves in was avoidable are blaming the wrong causes. George W. Busch is a favorite target. Everyone loves to hate George. His stupid grin invites blame and ridicule. George borrowed us into a hole to finance his military adventuring in Iraq and Afghanistan. George is the very embodiment of goofy evil.


Big oil is another culprit, squeezing us dry of money while they pollute our planet and exhaust our resources for their own profit. Who else to blame: welfare recipients, the unemployed slackers who won’t get off their backsides and get a job so long as unemployment benefits are available for the effort of not working, deadbeats who got mortgages they couldn’t afford by lying through their teeth and now refuse to pay what they owe, middle-aged, white, Republican men because, let’s face it, they are to blame for nearly everything else, Namby-pamby liberal socialists determined to spend us into oblivion with a host of ridiculous social entitlement programs calculated to take money away from hard-working Americans and transfer it wholesale to lazy, shiftless scam artists whose only skill is gaming the system, and illegal aliens of every stripe and color who are stealing a living from natural born American citizens by working at jobs no one else wants for wages no one else will take.


You only need to spend five minutes reading the comments on any blog or website article that discusses economic issues to see that somebody somewhere thinks you personally are responsible for their misery, and would like nothing better than to see you tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail. Chances are pretty good that you feel the same way about them.


Assessing blame is counterproductive at best. Any rudimentary lesson in management will tell you not to do it. When something goes wrong, as it always will, you take corrective action, you modify your processes to prevent whatever went wrong from happening again, and you get on with business. I’m not an organization though, and I’m not in business. I’m just me, and while I’ve taken steps to ensure that all the bad stuff that’s happened to me in the past doesn’t happen to me again, I can hardly resist the temptation to blame someone for every bad thing that’s happened as a result of losing my job. As a self-employed writer it’s doubtful I’ll ever have to tick and foot for fools and charlatans again. That’s an excellent outcome as far as I’m concerned, and since I was forced into this course in the main by losing my job, there’s some force to the argument that I owe Bill and Fritz a big thank you for heaving me out onto the street.


My mind doesn’t work that way though. I’m not nearly so gracious and mature. Deep in the vilest recesses of my heart I hold those bastards accountable for every hardship I’ve had to endure over the past year because none of it would have happened had they not decided to fire me. They assessed blame in the worst possible way. They undertook to do me injury to save their own sorry hides. Being ignorant and venal they were incapable of looking into the foreseeable future to see the kind of damage they were doing to me personally, and, if they did, they chose to do what they did anyway and without remorse or shame. This is the conduct of men who have never had to suffer fools in the workplace because they are the fools that everyone else suffers. They are insensitive to the realities of the predicaments they create for the people who work for them and the people who no longer work for them because they have never been thrown into those predicaments themselves.


So it’s left to me to wish them the karma they deserve, the fate they’ve asked for. It shouldn’t be any worse than the fate that befell me; nor should it be any better. Here’s the list:

• Lost job
• Lost home in excellent, sociable neighborhood
• Lost car
• Lost self-respect
• Lost good credit standing—filed bankruptcy
• Lost access to doctors and medical service providers that I knew and trusted
• Have passed on or delayed essential medical services because I can’t afford the deductibles
• Have suspended or cut back on essential medications because I can’t afford the co-pays
• Lost almost half my stuff in two garage sales from hell
• Had to drive all over Florida spending three and a half days behind the wheel of a U-Haul rental truck
• Had to move into cramped quarters in a fire ant preserve
• Suffered innumerable ant bites because of where I am forced to live—this would be my personal favorite misfortune to wish upon those I know in need of some bad karma
• Have to listen to a constant barrage of helpful and well-meant advice from a variety of friends and family
• Lost any semblance of privacy, autonomy, and self-sufficiency
• Have worn the same pair of shorts every day for the last 5 months

Day 213 - My Wife Kills a Guy

          Periodically, when my despair of ever finding another job is highest, I begin to fume about the unfairness of my current situation. I think about the people who did this to me. In fitful wakefulness, late at night and early in the morning, I concoct elaborate and fanciful schemes of revenge. Some of these are more violent than others. Most of them are beyond my ability to execute. None of them is particularly satisfying in the imagining, but this does not deter me very much.

          I have envisioned an explosion in the Albatross parking lot that sends Quentin’s Mercedes hurtling skyward, end-over-end in a ball of flames. I have watched Rod’s pick-up being loaded onto a flatbed truck and delivered to an auto recycler where it is compacted and shredded. I hope that his laptop is inside, full up with color coded spreadsheets. I have witnessed Ringcomme, stalking wild boar on a grassy hillside, split in two by a jagged flash of lightning. When the smoke clears, his favorite rifle lies atop his smoldering ashes. I have thrilled to see Fritz sent sprawling down a marble staircase, limbs akimbo, cracking his skill on every other step, to land lifeless and disjointed next to his shattered glasses.

These visions may not be satisfying, but they are entertaining to me—so much so that I felt compelled to confess them to a priest. There must be something sinful in taking perverse pleasure contemplating vengeful mayhem on the authors of my unhappiness.

            The priest seemed to agree, at least insofar as he thought that these musings would eventually poison my spiritual life and dim the inner light that I ought to be tending. He recommended that whenever I felt compelled to daydream the visitation of bad karma on my enemies I ought instead to recite the Prayer of Saint Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon:

where there is doubt, faith ;

where there is despair, hope

where there is darkness, light

where there is sadness, joy

O divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

          This is a lovely prayer, encapsulating as it does the essence of the proper Christian response to life’s troubles. It is also a beautiful sentiment in its own right, possessing an elegance of humility in the heart of its contrariness. It is that contrariness that appeals to me—its call to a flinty perfection that upends our every natural inclination. It is a hard thing to do, to sow love and pardon and faith and joy, when the only place to get those seeds is from the depleted stores of your own sorry heart. I know. I can say the prayer, but like most Christians, I fall on my face when it comes time to put it into practice.

          It is doubly hard for me, I think, because I have a resource that most people do not. I can visit destruction upon my enemies without retribution. I can heap karmic retribution on Rod and Quentin and Bill and Fritz without fear of getting arrested, standing trial, or going to jail. I might roast in hell for it, but that would include the satisfaction of standing next to them and watching their torment. Well, to be honest, I can’t actually do it, but my wife can. My wife can kill a guy by wishing it so. She already did it once.

          My wife has been in the real estate business for most of her adult life. When we lived on the other coast she managed several commercial properties including a large office complex. One of her tenants was an unctuous self-employed businessman of indeterminate occupation. It turned out that he was a con-man, but of course there was no way to know that until he was no longer conning anyone because he was dead.

          On the fateful day of this fellow’s untimely demise, he tried to engage my wife in an unseemly and too familiar embrace. In her words, “he went for side boob.” My wife was wary because he had tried on numerous previous occasions to invade her space to the point of inappropriate contact, and so she was able to avoid having her goodies actually fondled. She was however incensed by the constant effort required to fend off his advances. She’d had it ‘up to here’ with the guy, which occasioned her to remark to the maintenance man that she “wanted him dead.” Her ire for the moment vented, she went on about her business.

          That very afternoon the smarmy con artist went down to the local office of the DMV to renew his driver’s license—one of a half-dozen he had in his possession as it turned out, all issued under different names. Unfortunately for him he picked a day to do this when my wife had wished him dead, for when he reached the window and announced the name on the license he wanted to renew, he was recognized by an off-duty lady police officer who was standing in line behind him. She had in fact been looking for him to execute a warrant for his arrest. She decided there was no time like the present to do just that. There he was, within her grasp. She wouldn’t have to continue looking all over town for him. She announced her intention.

          Smarmy con-man panicked. He snapped open his brief case, spilling most of its contents all over the waiting area of the DMV office, but coming up with the one item he wanted most desperately to retrieve—a .45 caliber revolver. The lady police officer had not anticipated this development. What for her had started out as a simple serendipitous opportunity to arrest a guy in a suit and tie on a misdemeanor bogus check charge had turned suddenly into a potentially lethal hostage situation. She drew her piece, and a stalemate of sorts was established.

          One of the DMV clerks called the police, and in a short period of time the place was surrounded by a lot of regular police and a tactical response team complete with helmets, flak vests, and assault rifles. Among the first to arrive, coincidentally adding further to smarmy con-man’s extreme misfortune, was the husband of the off-duty lady police officer. Presumably the two had vowed not only to love, honor and cherish one another all the days of their lives, but also to have one another’s backs in the event of any tense armed conflict. It would also seem that they had rehearsed between them a number of scenarios in which they would be called upon to take out a bad guy while insuring one another’s relative safety.

          The husband leapt to the fore, signaled for his wife’s attention, called an audible, and in short order the con-man was laying dead on the floor of the DMV waiting area in a pool of his own smarmy blood.

          My wife learned of all these events the next day when the FBI showed up at her office to gather information about the con-man and as much detail about his activities as anyone there might be able to recall. She was visibly shaken when she came home that night.

          “I killed a guy,” she said. “I wished him dead, and he died…the same day. I killed him.”

          I tried to comfort her. “No you didn’t. It was just a coincidence. He’d have been killed anyway. He made bad choices.”

          “No, it was me,” she said, and with finality.

          If true, this is more than a little scary, but in a totally awesome kind of way. On the one hand it has helped me to stay faithful for years no matter how many nurses I wake up to in various recovery rooms. On the other it is a power that ought to be used for good. I continue to tell my wife that she shouldn’t worry about it, that it was just one of those things. Secretly, though I hope that it’s true. After all she loves me. Maybe I can prevail upon her to use her powers on my behalf. Not that I am particularly vengeful or inclined to violence, but I have started a list. There are people who need killing, and I think you know who they are.

Day 147 - Bringing Grace and Serenity to the Oppressed

          I picked up the moving truck from U-Haul first thing this morning. The loading crew showed up at 10:00 a.m. to load the boxes and heavy furniture that we are putting in storage. Our two sons showed up with a trailer for the stuff they are taking—a bedroom suite, refrigerator, grill, table saw, pressure washer, and the big TV I have already complained about having to give up.

The plan was for me to cart all this stuff across the state in the afternoon where the boys and their friends would help unload it into the storage unit. We did this, but there was a problem that has upset the rest of the plan. The truck wouldn’t hold all the stuff we’re putting in storage. So much for a 26’ U-Haul moving a 4 bedroom house—not my 4 bedroom house—not even after I unburdened myself of a drive-way full of things at the garage sale and donated another truckload to AmVets and Goodwill.

          Tomorrow we were supposed to load the things we are taking to my father-in-law’s place and clean the house. We’ve scheduled a steamer crew to come in and do the carpets in the afternoon. Saturday we say goodbye to the neighbors, and head off to our new life. Now we’ve added about 6 hours to our Saturday itinerary because we need to make another trip across the state to the storage unit.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get all the rest of our things in one load. We’ll load the storage stuff last since it’s coming off the truck first. I think it will all fit, but if I’m wrong we’ll have to go to my father-in-law’s place, offload, and come back for the storage stuff. This will add another day—a relative disaster in my newly foreshortened perspective.

Even if it all goes in one load, averting a disaster, it’s still not going to be any fun. There’s another element to how hard all this is going to be, and that is that I am also towing my car behind the truck on a U-Haul car hauler. That means when we stop to offload at the storage unit I will have to unhitch and re-hitch the trailer—not a big issue really, but another in a long list of irritants in this whole sorry process. I need to stop dwelling on the negatives, and just assume for the sake of my sanity that everything will go on the truck tomorrow morning. Tomorrow night we’ll be sleeping on the floor. I don’t need an unresolved problem added into the mix of things keeping me sleepless.

* * * * *

          I kept in daily contact with Dennis and Eddie in the weeks after I was fired. We also met a couple of times a week for happy hour and dinner to update one another on our respective job searches. Conditions continued to deteriorate at Albatross in spite of the hopeful future that was supposed to result from the bankruptcy and reorganization.

          I had actually had a conversation with Rod about this eventuality before he let me go. He was sharing his expansive outlook on things immediately after the bankruptcy. He told me that we should be able to get the production lines back up to speed, at least on one shift, within a matter of days. As soon as the additional capital infusion that had been agreed to by the stockholder banks came through, he reasoned, the vendors would release their holds on our materials and we would be back in business.

          I told him that was folly. He didn’t like it much, but I couldn’t let him erect a set of unreasonable expectations for which, eventually, he was going to hold me accountable. First of all, the promised capital infusion had not been funded. It was already late, and there was mounting evidence that, even though they had agreed to the deal in court before a federal judge, the banks were having second thoughts about doing what surely looked to their directors like sending good money after bad.

          Secondly, even when the funds did arrive, the vendors weren’t going to start shipping us materials overnight. We had forced some of the vendors into circumstances not unlike our own. They had reduced their work forces, stretched their suppliers, cancelled orders, shut down production lines, and generally adjusted their business to accommodate our failures. Many of them—not all, but a number sufficient to impact our resurrection—were going to take weeks and months to ramp back up and get our orders back into their production queues. Even in the best case scenario it was going to take months for us to get back to the production levels we were at before our fall from grace.

          There was also going to be the problem of trust. Vendors that had us on COD weren’t going to go back to extending us credit just because we had reorganized. We’d reorganized before. They had heard our song and seen our dance already. They would not be impressed easily with a new routine that featured the same old soft-shoe.

This would be especially true when you considered that the promised but lagging capital infusion would only address 75 percent of our past due payables. We were not, in my estimation, going to get our lines up to speed until we had our vendor obligations current, and we were not likely to get our vendor obligations current until we had our lines up to speed along with sufficient customer orders to absorb that level of production. We were, in other words, between the proverbial rock and hard place, and our lives were not going to get any easier just because we had given tens of millions of dollars to our lawyers and consultants.

This was reality as I saw it, and I saw it clearly because I had been dealing with the toxic fallout of our meltdown and its effects on our vendors for months. I knew first hand what we had put them through and how they felt about it. Rod and the executive management team, because they had been too important or too pre-occupied to deal with those issues when we were spiraling into the dirt, now had no clue what kind of trouble we faced as we tried to dig ourselves out of the hole we had augered.

It was not going to be easy, it was not going to be pretty, and I’ll be damned if Rod didn’t look at me like I was an idiot for saying so. Oh well, now that he’d fired me, he’d just have to figure out how to deal with it himself. I often wonder if it ever occurred to him how much he’d screwed himself by screwing me. Probably not. I don’t think he was that familiar with the concepts of cause and effect.

The day after I was fired, I had my wife take my picture in my best suit. I had decided to insert this picture in my résumé. I thought it would help the résumé stand out from the rest of the pile on the desk of a potential employer. I also thought it would help overcome any initial reservations an employer might have about hiring an old codger like me.

I was 57 at the time. Owing to a fortuitous dip in the gene pool I looked a good bit younger. This is principally because I inherited a lush head of hair from my mother, one that has resisted the thinning and graying that so often accompany a man’s survival into his fifties.

I thought a good picture might at least prevent someone reviewing my many years of experience and seeing the dates of my credentials from doing the math and conjuring up the vision of an ashen and stooped old man in absorbent underwear hobbling around on a walker. I needed a picture of a vigorous, dynamic, and accomplished man ready to climb over a stack of vanquished competitors and claim the prize of the job being offered. Somehow my wife delivered this picture in spite of the more obvious shortcomings of her subject. It became and remains the best picture ever taken of me, and its destiny was to drive Rod out of his mind.

Once she had a good shot, my wife loaded the digital image into her computer and made some improvements. Principal among these was to eliminate the optical aberration around my eyes caused by the thick lenses of my glasses. This was always a problem for me that vanity would not let me get past. I no longer have this problem, not since I had cataract surgery that gave me 20/20 vision, but before that my usual solution to the problem was to avoid having my picture taken. As this picture was my idea, that wasn’t a workable solution. Fortunately my wife by this time had developed a facility for photo-manipulation, and she made short work of the parallax distortion.

Satisfied, and maybe even a little smug about the improvement to my visage, she decided to add a golden halo above my head. “Just to leave no doubt about what a good man you are,” she told me. Have I mentioned how much I love this woman?

Naturally I thought this was great fun and well worth sharing so I told Dennis and Eddie about it at the first opportunity. They wanted to see it. My wife sent Dennis a copy via e-mail. He shared it with Eddie. Eddie was so inspired by the picture that he blew it up to an 11 by 17 inch print, which he then taped, surreptitiously of course, to the window of my old office with the caption “The Legend Lives On.”

Evidently it created quite a stir in the office for the hour or so it remained until Rod arrived on the scene and ripped it down in a rage. Honestly I don’t know what upset him so about it. I like to think that, had I been him, I would have thought it was pretty funny to see a picture of me with a halo taped to the door of my office like I had passed on. I would have thought it was something to lighten the tension occasioned by letting me go, and help those who were upset about my leaving to get past it. Rod’s not wired like me though, so he pitched a fit.

He called another meeting to get to the bottom of the blatant affront to office propriety. I guess he thought the guilty party would come forward and take whatever punishment he thought appropriate. No one did, of course, and I still chuckle when I imagine Dennis and Eddie sitting in that room biting their lips to keep from laughing out loud at Rod’s ineffectual little tirade.

Rod’s next step was to launch an investigation into the event. He enlisted the IT department to scan the incoming e-mails looking for any direction or files that might have come from me. There were some of course, but the offending missive, the one Rod was most interested in, had got to Dennis by a circuitous route.

I suspect that IT was fully aware of this and whatever other communication may have passed between Dennis, Eddie, and me, but they never gave it up to Rod so the investigation fizzled out like a damp fuse. This is when I got the bright idea that Rod needed some more exposure to my still considerable influence over his department. I became like the saint my wife had pictured—larger, more powerful, and better loved after my passing than I had been in life.

I printed scores of pictures onto 4 by 6 inch sheets of magnetic photo stock and delivered them to selected friends and admirers at Albatross for further distribution. I explained what had happened to those who did not already know. Not one soul was reluctant to oblige. In a matter of days my picture was plastered on filing cabinets in offices and cubicles all over the company.

Since these were items of personal décor allowed to Albatross employees under guidelines established in the employee manual, there was nothing Rod could do about it. I took immense pleasure imagining his blood pressure soar and anger throbbing in his temple every time he went into someone’s office to assert his authority only to be confronted by my picture beaming beatifically across the room, conferring grace and serenity on everyone but him.

Some of those pictures still hang I’m told, although Rod is long gone. Sometimes when I’m depressed or frustrated by my circumstances and need a lift in spirits, I think how wonderful it would be to find out where Rod is now and send some magnetic placards with my picture on them for his ill-used and hard oppressed subjects to display. Hell, unless Rod’s management style has mellowed by a considerable degree, I could probably sell them based on the apoplexy they would be likely to inspire in Rod. I wouldn’t though. Grace and serenity are best bestowed free of charge.

Day 81 - Golden Boy

          I got a call from Henry’s son this morning. He and Henry are currently operating another yacht business in Clearwater, Florida. Henry’s daughter has been doing their accounting, but she is leaving to take another job in North Carolina. Henry wants me to come over and take her place. This is almost attractive at the moment, although I’ve had enough experience with Henry to know I’ll have to be very careful how I proceed from here in order not to get on the short end of the ‘bidness’ yet again. Still, they know me and I know them, and if they can make the money right this could be just what I’m looking for. I’m driving over there tomorrow to see exactly what they’ve got in mind.

*****

          When I left Quilnutz, I gave 6 weeks notice. I was teaching a class of high school students at my church in preparation for their receiving the sacrament of confirmation. I didn’t want to leave them until we were through, and confirmation wasn’t scheduled until the end of April. Albatross was okay with this, and Quilnutz was happy to have sufficient time to find a suitable replacement although they wasted several weeks of that time trying to convince me to stay.

A Fine End to Arkansas

          After two years of almost constant grief at Quilnutz, I was suddenly a lustrous resource they couldn’t afford to lose. They promised to match the salary that Albatross had offered. They offered to move me to Florida. They treated me with an enormous amount of respect and deference. Finally they put me on the company jet and flew me to Florida to pick my brains in a week long conference about systems and accounting issues facing the whole company. They even let me interview some of the candidates who’d applied to replace me.

I talked to three applicants and recommended the one I thought would be the best fit. They picked another candidate, one I hadn’t even talked to. They felt they wanted someone younger with higher class credentials. They were looking for a guy on a faster career track. I had recommended a more desperate guy, one who was more likely to put up with their crap. Their last act of second guessing my considered opinion worked out way better for me than it did for them.

Their new guy couldn’t start until my absolute last day. That meant I only had one day to train him. I did the best I could. He was a bright and personable young man, and he had good experience although not in our business. Things were going pretty well until we got into the financial statements early in the afternoon. He was surprised—no shocked—to find that we had been losing money. It seems that no one he’d talked to thus far had bothered to tell him that things weren’t going so swimmingly for us. He seemed pretty distracted by this new and unsettling bit of information for the rest of the day, but still managed to make some sense of what he was going to have to do. Corporate finance was going to send my favorite analyst down to help him with closing so I didn’t worry about it too much.

I had a big party that week-end. All my friends came from work, from church, from my writers’ group. It was a big deal. I had a grand time. I drank too many martinis, swapped funny stories, got slapped on the back by a lot of well-wishers. It couldn’t have been any better. Monday I packed up two weeks worth of clothes and set out for Alabama. My wife was going to join me when we sold our house. I stopped by Quilnutz on my way out of town to say my final good byes. Two things of note happened.

First, and perhaps most surprising under the circumstances, Alicia gave me a hug and a card. I opened the card. She had signed it with ‘love.’ I don’t know if she meant it or not, or to what extent. If she had any affection for me at all, she had a strange way of showing it—not unlike Henry who regularly professed his love for me, often at the very moment he was trying to fleece me. I would love to have been able to give Alicia the benefit of the doubt, but the fact is that she had enlisted with Fische to make the previous two years of my life, years that should have been exciting and fruitful, become instead rife with frustration and disappointment.

The second surprise of the day was that my replacement had not shown up. Apparently he spent the week-end stewing over the accumulated losses and decided that it was not quite the opportunity that he’d been led to believe. It was too late for me to do anything other than gloat. I tried to do it in a nice, mature, and unassuming way. There was no one there from corporate to see it anyway.

Day 68 - Betrayal

          I fired off another eight résumés today complete with tailored cover letters. I think it’s cool how the job boards make the process easy once you’re properly set up. On the flip side, they make it easy for everyone so it’s harder and harder to stand out, especially in the midst of the huge crowd of folks now looking for work.

*****

          Things weren’t nearly so easy for a job seeker when I began to feel that I’d reached the end of my rope at Quilnutz. Back then everything was still intensely manual and cumbersome, and I was working so hard and under such duress that I just didn’t have the energy to look for a better situation. I was pretty much on my own. Ivan had fired Henry over an alleged breach of fiscal rectitude that was both smaller and less obvious than Ivan’s own trespasses. With Henry gone, Ivan shipped Mike off to Florida, and I suddenly found myself fighting battles on multiple fronts without allies. It was a bleak time.

          Henry’s undoing was interesting in a way. He was sucker punched by the one person who should have had his back. That was his supposed mistress, let’s call her Penny. I don’t know if Henry and Penny were engaged in an affair or not. Most everyone thought they were, including Henry’s daughter and probably, eventually at least, his wife. Penny certainly acted as if they were because she took every opportunity to throw her weight around as if it were Henry’s own—so much so that everyone came to take her excesses at face value. I confronted Henry about it once. I told him it didn’t matter to me one way or the other, but it sure was creating problems among the troops and he ought to consider cooling his jets. “When would I ever find time to screw that broad?” is what he said to me. I never brought it up again.

          Penny had been a payroll clerk in the company that Henry bought out of bankruptcy. When they shut their doors, she found herself relegated back to housewife status in rural Arkansas—not a happy circumstance for a woman with Penny’s aspirations. When Henry sent me out to Arkansas to get the plant ready to open again she was one of the first in line to get her job back. I made her an offer that I thought was fair based on the prevailing rates for clerical help, and Henry promptly cut it in half. She was happy to get that. I thought she must be just that desperate to get out of the house. I didn’t know that she was an expert practitioner of the dark arts, and that just getting her foot in the door was the moral equivalent to her of securing a fingernail paring or a lock of hair.

          We weren’t even open before Penny was promoted out of the payroll clerk position to become Henry’s personal assistant. The rest of her days with us, and subsequently with Quilnutz, were spent solidifying and fortifying her position. With Henry’s company that meant hanging onto Henry’s coattails, whatever that took. All her considerable power was derived from Henry and wielded in his name. At first Henry’s wife was a champion of Penny’s ascendancy. They were great chums. They went everywhere and did everything together—when Penny wasn’t busy ministering to Henry’s needs that is. As Penny’s hold on Henry increased, his wife began to fade into the background. Some of the newer customers even thought that Penny was the wife.

          Henry’s wife, let’s call her Pam, took most of this in stride. She’d been with Henry a long time and weathered all his storms and put up with all his shenanigans. She was content it seemed to let Penny play on center stage because she knew that whatever else may happen Henry owed her for her past loyalty and even a witch like Penny wasn’t going to upset that dynamic. She did have a breaking point though, and I was there to witness when she reached it.

          A crowd of us were out to dinner one night—Henry holding court in his usual flamboyant style. His wife was there, Penny, me, my wife, several other couples, most of them customers. When desert was served Penny began loading bites of chocolate cake from her plate onto her fork and feeding them into Henry’s mouth. It was a shockingly personal and intimate display—completely inappropriate in that or any other context. Jaws dropped all around the table. Glances were exchanged.

Henry’s wife’s usually placid and softly smiling face turned to granite. Her eyes glowed like mica fire-screens. You could see the flames licking up the inside of her skull. She was never the same after. Two years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She’s had a mastectomy and been through three courses of radiation and chemotherapy already with another to come. I’m sure that she is dying, although no one will say that. I think it was that chocolate cake that killed her.

After Quilnutz bought us out and Henry’s star began to fade, Penny suddenly needed to hitch her wagon someplace else. With Ivan showing no interest in women at all and Fische rooting around in Alicia’s garden, Penny had to get creative. The first thing she had to do was disassociate herself from Henry. At least she’d have a chance on her own. Still attached to his hip she would be consumed in the flameout. At some point it must have occurred to her that if she could be the author of Henry’s undoing she would not only disassociate from Henry but demonstrate her loyalty to Quilnutz and to Ivan in the bargain. Once she’d figured that out she dipped Henry directly into the grease and danced around the sizzle.

It was as thorough and awesome a betrayal as I have ever seen. It eclipses anything that’s ever been done to me and I’ve been the victim of some doozies. What was alleged was that Henry was getting some money directly from customers on deals he was booking for Quilnutz at shows—knocking down cash, always one of his favorite tricks. Trouble was he’d already been warned about it and he knew Ivan was watching him like a hawk. I would have thought that he’d be more careful, but then Henry was always happiest when he was cheating someone. The more Ivan pressed him the more likely Henry was to cave in to his instincts. Cheating Ivan under Ivan’s nose would have been an altogether irresistible proposition to Henry. The mere suggestion that he try it would have been entrapment to his greedy soul.

I don’t know what part Penny had to play in all this. I know that she bore witness against him, and that was enough to undo Henry and cement her position at Quilnutz. Whether she urged Henry to do it, whether she made the whole thing up and Henry was actually innocent, I couldn’t say. Either is possible, but in all probability neither would have been necessary. In the grand scheme of things what happened to Henry was just Karma. For the rest of us life went on. The difference for me was that I was out of players who shared my interests and my fortunes. I was alone in a dark and scary place.