We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Sing along to REM………..click the tune…..or don’t. Your choice. “I believe we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word and thought throughout our lifetime.” (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross….date unkown). So, again, your choice.
Look up, what do you see?
all of you and all of me
florescent and starry
some of them, they surprise
the bus ride, I went to write this, 4:00 a.m.
this letter
fields of poppies, little pearls
all the boys and all the girls sweet-toothed
each and every one a little scary
I said your name
I wore it like a badge of teenage film stars
hash bars, cherry mash and tinfoil tiaras
dreaming of Maria Callas
whoever she is
this fame thing, I don’t get it
I wrap my hand in plastic to try to look through it
Maybelline eyes and girl-as-boy moves
I can take you far
this star thing, I don’t get it
I’ll take you over, there
I’ll take you over, there
aluminum, tastes like fear
adrenaline, it pulls us near
I’ll take you over
it tastes like fear, there
I’ll take you over
will you live to 83?
will you ever welcome me?
will you show me something that nobody else has seen?
i smoke ……. i drink
here comes the flood
anything to thin the blood
these corrosives do their magic slowly and sweet
phone, eat it, drink
just another chink
cuts and dents, they catch the light
aluminum, the weakest link
I don’t want to disappoint you
I’m not here to anoint you
I would lick your feet
but is that the sickest move?
I wear my own crown and sadness and sorrow
and who’d have thought tomorrow could be so strange?
my loss, and here we go again
I’ll take you over, there
I’ll take you over, there
aluminum, tastes like fear
adrenaline, it pulls us near
I’ll take you over
it tastes like fear, there
I’ll take you over
look up, what do you see?
all of you and all of me
florescent and starry
some of them, they surprise
I can’t look it in the eyes
seconal, Spanish fly, absinthe, kerosene
cherry-flavored neck and collar
I can smell the sorrow on your breath
the sweat, the victory and sorrow
the smell of fear, I got it
I’ll take you over, there
I’ll take you over, there
aluminum, tastes like fear
adrenaline, it pulls us near
I’ll take you over
it tastes like fear, there
I’ll take you over
pulls us near
tastes like fear…
nearer, nearer
over, over, over, over
yeah, look over
I’ll take you there, oh, yeah
I’ll take you there
oh, over
I’ll take you there
over, let me
I’ll take you there…
there, there, baby, yeah
Phil Robertson, Hitler or Westboro Baptist Church?
The questions in each test are numbered, and the suggested answers for each question are lettered. On the answer document, the rows of ovals are numbered to match the questions, and the ovals in each row are lettered to correspond to the suggested answers. Calculators are forbidden.
For each question, first decide which answer is best. Next, locate on the answer document the row of ovals numbered the same as the question. Then, locate the oval in that row lettered the same as your answer. Finally, fill in the oval completely. Use a soft lead pencil and make your marks heavy and black. DO NOT USE INK OR A MECHANICAL PENCIL OR A GREAT BIG SHARPIE.
Mark only one answer to each question. If you change your mind about an answer, erase your first mark thoroughly before marking your new answer. For each question, make certain that you mark in the row of ovals with the same number as the question. You may not use a calculator.
You may work on each test ONLY when your test supervisor tells you to do so. If you finish a test before time is called for that test, you should use the time remaining to reconsider questions you are uncertain about in that test. You may NOT look back to a test on which time has already been called, and you may NOT go ahead to another test. To do so will disqualify you from the examination. Seriously…..you may NOT use a calculator. Quit asking.
For the first section of the test, please choose the author of each quotation: “Duck Dynasty”’s Phil Robertson, Germany’s Adolf Hitler, or the Westboro Baptist Church. You will have eight minutes to complete this portion of the test. When I ring the bell, please put your pencils down. No, no, no. No, you may NOT use a calculator. Quit screwing around. It is multiple choice and you don’t even NEED a calculator.
You may begin.
1. “Woman’s world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do not find it right when she presses into the world of men.”
2. “The more make up a woman wears the more she is trying to hide. Make up can hide a lot of evil”
3. “Women with women. Men with men. They committed indecent acts with one another, and they received in themselves the due penalty for their perversions. They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant God haters. They are heartless. They are faithless. They are senseless. They are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil. That’s what you have 235 years, roughly, after your forefathers founded the country. So what are you going to do, Pennsylvania? Just run with them? You’re going to die. Don’t forget that.”
4. “All gays & lesbians are liars and murderers at heart, like their father, Satan.”
5. “Our country must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.”
6. “Mohammed was a demon-possessed whoremonger and pedophile who contrived a 300-page work of Satanic fiction: The Quran! Like America’s own whoremonger and pedophile wangled his own hokey Book of Mormon!”
7. “All you have to do is look at any society where there is no Jesus. I’ll give you four: Nazis, no Jesus. Look at their record. Uh, Shintos? They started this thing in Pearl Harbor. Any Jesus among them? None. Communists? None. Islamists? Zero. That’s eighty years of ideologies that have popped up where no Jesus was allowed among those four groups. Just look at the records as far as murder goes among those four groups.”
8. “Today Christians stand at the head of [this country]. I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit … We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press – in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past few years.”
9. “In our experience, no modern country is more repressive of human rights than the U.S.A. The vaunted First Amendment is nothing but empty words on paper. We will journey to China at our expense, and tell our story of modern American repression of human rights, upon invitation.”
10. “It’s not OK to be gay. It will damn the soul, destroy the life, and doom any nation that tolerates such evil. God Hates Fags is a profound theological statement, which America needs more than it needs oxygen or bread.”
11. “In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.”
12. “A good woman is hard to find. Mainly because these boys are waiting until they get to be about 20 years old before they marry them. Look, you wait till they get to be about 20 years old, they only picking that’s going to take place is your pocket. You have to marry these girls when they’re 15 or 16, they’ll pick your ducks. You need to check with mom and dad about that, of course.”
13. “All the diseases that just so happened to follow sexual mischief…boy there are some microbes running around now. Sexual sins are numerous and many. So what is your safest course of action? If you’re a man, find yourself a woman, marry them and keep your sex right there.”
14. Ladies….if you are living like Mrs. Wrong please stop looking for Mr. Right to come into your life! There are many of you that are not ready for a good man. Being mouthy, attitude-is, self centered, spoiled, manipulative, immature, unsupportive, domineering, etc are all clear signs that you are not ‘wife material’. Focus on becoming a better you because some of you have experienced bad relationships because of your actions and not his!”
15. “We should allow and encourage women to act as stupid as imaginable and then denounce men as ‘faggots’ and ‘misogynists’ if they dare to criticize the women’s stupidity.”
16. “Mr. Rogers gave aid and comfort to homosexuals. He was a man who preached tolerance of all sorts of people in ways that directly contradicted the Bible. His syrupy teachings led millions astray. He was a wuss and he was an enabler of wusses.”
Best Experienced With: Danger Mouse & Jay Z; Encore
(this thing was written while listening to the Danger Mouse and Jay Z “White Album” and “Black Album”mash up…. “Encore” seventy-nine times. Always match the proper wine to the meal and the right music to the message. Please use your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to read this vignette: it is fact based. Save your limbic cortex and emotional reasoning for later vignettes)
I am not opposed to random drug testing and have been random drug tested throughout the years. The first time, with the Marine Corps, it was not exactly random. Everyone who showed up got a cup. Often. In later years, when part of an executive team at various companies and subject to the requests of our life insurance company’s policies on drugs and such, I would fly in for a meeting and get randomly tested. Were drug testing the SAT, I would have a lifetime aggregate score of 1800. I am a solid test taker. I have always been a solid test taker. I took the formal, six hour Mensa test when I lived in New Hampshire and showed up for the test at the Portsmouth library with eight sparkly pencils, a dozen dinosaur erasers, that huge box of Crayola crayons and a single pencil sharpener. Lined them all up in front of me on the tables and did a bunch of hamstring stretches while everyone got settled in. Almost got kicked out before the first hour test began. That is a story for another day. This story is about my plan for random drug testing four groups here in fine nation. One nation, under various gods.
I am oppose to random drug testing when
it is imposed with poor logic
it is imposed on the wrong group
the net is not cast widely enough
We have all known plenty of poor people through the years and they often do not have the means (in disposable income) or the extra time to purchase and consume drugs. I have also known plenty of rich people and trust fund people through the years. Trust fund people and rich people tend to have a ton of extra disposable income and lots and lots and lots and lots of extra time to do drugs. The trust fund people I have known probably had red bat phones in their bedrooms with a direct ring feature to Peru and/or Columbia. Trust fund people and rich people have a ton of money to spend on drugs.
I am offering my full support of random drug testing for all welfare recipients, not just food stamp recipients. The quid pro quo for this support is that we random drug test the three additional groups listed below. Of course, this will use the rationale that we do not want drugs purchased with tax dollars. Heck no.
The only logical rationale for using tax money to purchase drugs is to use the tax money to fund CIA and DEA oversight of an illegal operation where drugs and the profits from the sale of drugs are used to purchase weapons for rebels to use to beat back communism. Like we did under President Reagan with the Contras in Nicaragua. In a situation like that, we should always use tax money to fund drug stuff.
In addition to all those poor people and “takers”, we should immediately institute random drug tests on the following three groups once a quarter:
1: All fourteen members of the Walton family.
Wal-Mart has become a symbol, and a major cause, of the nation’s widening gap between the ultra wealthy and the rest of us. Wal-Mart’s controlling family, the Waltons, have a net worth of more than $144 billion. This is more than the total wealth of 40 percent of all Americans: over 125 million people. The United States has 300 million people, with 115 million receiving some sort of government aid. The only place where these 115 million Americans on government aid can afford to shop is………..wait for it……….Walmart!
Between the Waltons, the Lauries, the Kroenkes, and the McNabbs, there are fourteen living Waltons. These fourteen family members are worth $144 billion. Since a large proportion of the money that built that $144 billion came from taxpayer dollars, through the poor people, we’re going to test all the Waltons. And since they all have trust funds, I believe our hit rate will be 67% each quarter.
2: Halliburton farmers, and agribusiness.
During the Iraq war, Halliburton Corporation, through its subsidiary and spin off KBR, inc received $39 billion of our tax dollars. At an average rate of $150 per eight ball of cocaine (delivered), that $39 billion could have theoretically purchased 260,000,000 eight balls of cocaine. Since we have not yet drug tested anyone at Halliburton, we’ll never know if those tax dollars made it into Iraq, or whether they ended up being snorted up someone’s nose in Houston. We should be especially suspicious of Halliburton given that one of their main people, Dick Cheney, had a heart transplant in March, 2012. Cocaine is the perfect heart attack drug, given that it stiffens arteries, raises blood pressure, and thickens heart muscles. Mr. Cheney’s company received billions of our tax dollars and Mr. Cheney needed a new heart. Coincidence? Perhaps. But why take on additional risk where tax dollars are concerned. We randomly drug test everyone at Halliburton, quarterly.
Much has been made of the “2,000 page Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare)” recently, as if the length of the law made it somehow more burdensome. It is actually 906 pages. One would have thought that anyone running for Congress would understand that a good part of their day would be spent reading things like words and paragraphs. The 2013 farm bill, passed a few months back was……wait for it…..1,139 pages. And of the $955 billion in farm bill tax dollars, roughly $120B will go to agribusiness and farmers, much of it through subsidies. That’s free money from our tax dollars…extra time…..the perfect atmosphere for potential drug abuse.
You know who can grow poppies for heroin, marijuana, and cocoa leaves for cocaine really, really, really, really well?
Farmers and agribusiness companies can grow poppies for heroin, marijuana and cocoa leaves for cocaine. That’s who. Which is why we will randomly drug test them each quarter beginning in January, 2014.
3. All members of Congress and the Supreme Court
The average food stamp recipient in the United States receives $3,000 per year from our tax dollars. The average Supreme Court justice receives $214,000 per year and the average member of Congress receives $172,000 per year: all from our tax dollars. This means that Justice Antonin Scalia, if he chose to spend all of those tax dollars on cocaine, could purchase 1,133 eight balls of cocaine at the “delivered” price listed above, while the average food stamp recipient could only purchase 20 eight balls of cocaine. Clearly, there is a substantial amount of risk and potential for abuse with Congress members and Supreme Court justices when we’re throwing around income numbers like these.
Using the example above, I for one do not want Justice Antonin Scalia up there writing the majority opinion on “Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas Surgical Health Services v. Abbott” all gakked out after spending seventy-two straight hours hoovering Bolivian marching powder whilst prancing around his condo in a British smoking jacket and ascot, peering out the windows and looking for DEA helicopters in a drug fueled paranoid haze. Heck no. When one of our Supreme Court justices pens a majority opinion restricting a woman’s access to an abortion clinic and violating the “1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey” decision, I want that Supreme Court justice stone sober. And I’d like confirmation via a random drug test.
Furthermore, given the large number of those in Congress who have trust funds, the risk is even more substantial. For example, freshman House of Representatives member, trust fund kid, and self proclaimed “hip hop conservative” Trey Radel (R-FL). As per his Twitter page, “sometimes he tweets policy and sometimes he doesn’t”
This week, Mr. Radel pled guilty to purchasing an eight ball of cocaine and will be taking a leave of absence to enter treatment. One hopes it will be a solid treatment program because an eight ball of cocaine is a large amount of cocaine for a single individual to consume in one sitting…….on a Tuesday. He was arrested on October 29. October 29 was a Tuesday. Tuesday is an odd day of the week to buy a relatively large amount of cocaine. You’ve been reading this paragraph wondering what non policy things does Mr. Radel, the hip hop conservative, write in his 144 spaces on Twitter. He is deep into Jigga….Lucky Lefty….the Young HOV. And who can blame him when that man has the hottest chick in the game wearing his chain?
Back to the drug testing. Odds are there were food stamp recipients across the street from Mr. Radel when he was arrested in DuPont Circle that Tuesday evening…..they were bussing tables at their second job of the day or working a double at McDonald’s. And they were not buying an eight ball when they got off work that Tuesday evening. Because they had to get up really, really, really early to go to their first job on Wednesday. Other than Congress peeps, who has time to get high on cocaine on a Tuesday?
This past September, roughly a month before he was arrested for buying his eight ball, Mr. Radel agreed with me on the issue at hand and voted in the affirmative on a measure that would drug test food stamp recipients. And he further proves my point that trust fund kids have plenty of spare time and spare money to buy cocaine. One day after Mr. Radel won his election in November, 2012 he re-filed his financial disclosure forms…..and disclosed the additional couple of million dollars that he neglected to disclose before the election. Money he received from his mommy. Details below:
Several web sites posted the meme below and it made its way onto Facebook pages for months:
This evening, I sent the web sites that posted the Kiara meme the Trey Radel meme (see below) I made in the hopes that they post it next to the “welfare mom” meme. We need to get the word out about these damn white, trust fund kids getting into Congress and wasting our tax money on over priced cocaine. He paid $260 for an eight ball and calls himself a fiscal conservative? A fiscal conservative would have haggled and gotten the same eight ball for $120. Not a trust fund Congressman…they always over pay for their drugs. And if a self proclaimed fiscal conservative, with a conservative radio show, will significantly over pay for an eight ball, just imagine what he is going to do with our tax dollars if he gets on the House Ways and Means committee.
Absent the drug testing that we should immediately impose on Congress and the Supreme Court justices, it is conceivable that Mr. Radel could spend the weekend at Justice Scalia’s condo…..getting all gakked out on cocaine and prancing around in their matching British smoking jackets and ascots….and then head to the Capitol building and approve a further expansion to the F-35 fighter project. Which has ballooned from $353B to $1.5T (that’s trillion…..) in the last few years. The only explanation for this ridiculous amount spent on a plane that will cost 300% more to operate?
Drugs.
We need to drug test Congress immediately. it will be far simpler to randomly test the 545 members of Congress and the 12 Supreme Court members than welfare recipients because all 557 of them congregate in the same square mile for work. This will cut down on the costs and make the return on investment positive in the first three days.
In conclusion, if you do not agree with me on this treatise, you hate America, you would probably burn the original Constitution, and you are not a patriot.
Best Experienced With: Puff Daddy & The Family; Victory
(this thing was written while listening to “Victory” precisely eighty times. P Diddy goes quite nicely with the prose. Always match the proper wine to the meal and the right music to the message)
Over the past three weeks, while listening to pundits and politicians praise and despise President Obama and his team on decisions, or lack thereof, in Syria, I’ve been rereadingLieutenant Colonel John McCrae’s World War I poem “In Flander’s Fields”. The poem combines my favorite poetic form, rondeau, with some of the finest emoting words written in recent history on war. You have a Canadian battlefield surgeon, standing on a 1915 Flemish battlefield in Ypres, writing some of the most powerful words on war in a thirteen-century French lyrical form. A brilliant and powerful poem.
Whenever we speak about war here in the United States, “In Flander’s Fields” rolls through my head. First, during “Operation Just Cause” in Panama in 1989. Again, in 1990 during the weeks before the first Gulf War in Kuwait and Iraq. Then, in 1992 before Somalia. They rolled through my head in October, 2001 before Afghanistan started, and again in March, 2003 before we started in Iraq.
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow Between the crosses row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
It’s not just the poetry or the death. It’s simple economics and analysis of historical data points. The chart below shows what has happened to the United States’ economy since 2000, the year we decided to become the world’s police force. Straight down the tubes.
I would submit that those who vociferously condemned our choice not to fight this week in Syria………those who have not committed “In Flander’s Fields” to memory or ever served in the military or had a son or daughter who served….have a very poor understanding of what military actions do to our economy. Military actions tend of have a chilling effect on the economy, as demonstrated by what many pundits and politicians have a surprisingly poor grasp of……math, statistics, and probability. And make no mistake about it, lobbing cruise missiles into country is choosing to fight.
Whether it’s poetry, simple economics, the desire to avoid death of our military personnel or sparing innocent civilians on the ground…there is seldom a good reason to go to war. And those who chose to spend the last week lambasting the compromise agreed upon last weekends are the weakest of the weak and the most ignorant of the ignorant. I don’t feel any safer from terrorism today than I did in 2001. Only the criminally insane and the ignorant who chant “’Merica” blindly can raise their hand and agree when asked if the last twelve years of two wars had a positive impact on our standing in the world, our economy, or our future.
Ironically, most who screamed about our Syrian compromise choice last week are those who scream for job creation while posing meager plans to create jobs and complain about the delay in the economic recovery. Shocking.
Clearly these screamers are neither scholars nor adept researchers. Great at screaming. Poor at facts and the fundamentals of applied probability. Might I suggest a quick read of Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise” along with some WWI poetry.
As Mr. Diddy so eloquently sings in the song above: “put your money on the table and get your math on…..yadda yadda…..my songs bump Houston, like Scarface produced them. You ain’t got like me…you’re just mad.”
“Because I tell it like it is……………..and you tell it how it might be.”
(this thing was written while listening to “Changes” one hundred forty-three times. Tupac goes quite nicely with everything. Always match the proper wine to the meal and the right music to the message. Please use your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to read this vignette: it is fact based. Save your limbic cortex and emotional reasoning for later vignettes)
I ate government cheese in grade school. Although my parents vehemently deny this as fact, claiming it is a false memory, I distinctly recall mom carving up a massive hunk of government cheese and coating every vegetable group she possibly could serve with melted government cheese to serve our six member family. The cheese looked like this:
Mom forgot, daily, that one of the four children (me) hated melted cheese on anything……the melted cheese having the consistency of pneumonia snot and the smell of poorly washed athletic shoes and flatulence. To this day, the only exception I will make to the melted cheese rule is nachos. Good nachos….not that crap they serve at 7-11 or the ballpark. I refuse to eat cheeseburgers. While at the drive up window at In and Out, when I order three single hamburgers (emphasis mine and said aloud into the In and Out box) with only ketchup and fresh onions, and inevitably get the clarifying “do you want cheese on those”, I scream “IF I WANTED CHEESE ON THEM, THERE IS A 99.99999 PERCENT CHANCE I WOULD HAVE REQUESTED THREE CHEESEBURGERS WITH ONLY KETCHUP AND FRESH ONIONS!” Then, they spit on my food inside, I pay at the first window and pull up to the second window to grab my In and Out bag. The long-term effects of a childhood with government cheese are debilitating.
Mom believed the melted cheese made the vegetable portions go further. During those 1970’s recessions, we also had more Bisquick pancake dinners than I care to remember….a story for a different day. This government cheese was not our family’s only entitlement. Heck no. We took full advantage of every entitlement program available.
My father received a weekly $19.00 disability check for breaking his neck and being a quadrapalegic for a while. We also took full advantage of the following entitlement programs: college student loans, Pell grants, earned income tax credits and home mortgage deductions. We Mulligans fully exploited as many entitlement programs as we could. We suckled at the government breast as often as possible.
Because of these entitlement programs, and because my parents were crafty and ridiculously hard working, we four kids never went hungry. Outside of the yacht I wanted as an eight year old, we never really wanted for anything, despite my parents’ combined salary, which I doubt ever rose north of $45,000. Thank God for those entitlement programs. Whew.
The recent discussions and Congressional vote on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan (SNAP) and the volume of rage building in the nation over all these damn entitlement programs has made my Irish Catholic genetic code extra guilty for the past forty days. A Robert Smith from The Cure level of shame and guilt. In return for my abuse of the entitlement programs in my youth, will champion the following program.
We must kill the poor. More on that later.
Oh, SNAP.
Hahahahahahaha. SNAP does three things. The first and most important is to increase the ability of the poor to purchase a nutritionally adequate, albeit low cost, diet. Most of these families have an annual income of less than $9,000 per year. Those who argue against SNAP spend $9,000 per month on single malt scotch, manicure/pedicures and private schools for their kids.
Second, and equally important, SNAP is also a stabilizer from the perspective of the American economy. Because the number of families getting benefits increases as unemployment and earnings fall during economic downturns, the program serves the Keynesian function of boosting spending during a recession, which in turn stimulates the American economy at a moment when stimulus is needed. The SNAP program fills both of these stabilizing functions automatically without the need for more legislation because of its open-ended entitlement funding.
Here’s what SNAP outlays looks like on a graph, for the Twitter readers and the illiterate. SNAP outlays dead on track the economy…hence the increase in spending since our GOP lead crew chose to get into two wars and repeal Glass–Steagall Act of 1933…thereby allowing the banks to despoil and pillage our economy. This is why the number has been going up.
If/when we kill the poor, we will also achieve significant opportunity costs. Our entire society will be able to toss aside this endless discourse on entitlement programs and spend our days on more important things. Like fantasy football and origami. Instead of making ignorant memes about those on these bloated entitlement programs using their food stamps to buy drugs and blindly posting/sharing these memes all over Facebook, we’ll have more time to prove the Riemann hypothesis. Then, we can time travel! Bottom line is if we kill the poor, we’ll have a lot more time on our hands to work on the things that truly matter.
And never mind about that social contract crap. It should not get in the way of us killing the poor. Social contract theory, nearly as old as philosophy itself, is the view that persons’ moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement among them to form the society in which they live. Socrates rapping with Crito…yadda, yadda. However, social contract theory is rightly associated with modern moral and political theory and is given its first full exposition and defense by Thomas Hobbes. After Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are the best-known proponents of this enormously influential theory, which has been one of the most dominant theories within moral and political theory throughout the history of the modern West.
And we will not allow Luke 6:38 “(give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you”) stand in the way of killing the poor, or at least starving some of them to death. Although there are many who attend church every Sunday who will say that giving to others is the most spiritual act you can do. They’re full of crap, as well. We should only use the Bible and the things we hear every Sunday to support our position on things like abortion and those pesky gay people wanting to get married. Not when it comes to sharing our money with those needy poor people.
Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich (made $4.4M last year, went to Harvard, also founded and ran Au Bon Pain is spending a week trying to feed himself on $4.50 a day. He took the challenge, as many other have, to find out what it’s like to live on food stamps. 26 Democrats in Congress are also taking the SNAP Challenge. No Republicans. You can read about Mr. Shaich’s experiences living on $30 per week here:
Mr. Shaich, the older of two children, grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, outside of Newark. His father was an accountant and his mother a homemaker. The family ethos held that, in order to have a good life, you needed to make the world a better place. That meant politics to Mr. Shaich, who majored in government and psychology at Clark University in Worcester, expecting he’d go to law school afterward. In 1974, toward the end of his sophomore year, he and a friend were tossed from a Store 24 near campus, which Shaich says was mostly the result of words exchanged with overzealous security. Shaich, who was treasurer of the student council, proposed that the students start their own convenience store, funding it with a $20 to $30 charge for each student. Clark officials were lukewarm to the idea, but the student body went for it. Shaich spent the summer between his sophomore and junior years getting the store up and running and it ended up being a solid success. Mr. Shaich paid for his own college, worked non-stop from the age of twelve on, and bought his own first car.
Not only is Mr. Shaich (again…he made $4.4M last year) learning what it is like to live on food stamps, he also started Panera Cares in 2010 to provide a dignified dining experience for those in need, in an uplifting environment…. regardless of their means. It is Panera’s way of “sharing in the responsibility and making a difference in the world we all share”. Again, more of that stupid John Locke, Hobbesian social contract nonsense. You can find out more about Panera Cares here:
Did your mommy or daddy bought you your first car?
Did you get your first job after 21?
Did your mommy or daddy pay for your college?
If you answered “yes” to any of those three questions above, you are no longer permitted to ignorantly scream about all those damn poor people getting fat and happy off of our entitlement programs. Primarily because you lived for the first 21 years in your own mommy and daddy sponsored entitlement program. If you would like to rejoin the gnashing of the teeth discussion on all these damn poor people getting fat and happy of our entitlement programs, you may rejoin by taking the SNAP Challenge and living on $4.50 per day for twenty-one consecutive days.
Back to killing the poor. Should we choose this route, we have a final benefit. We can take the Soylent Green route and repurpose all those deadbeats. And we won’t even have to worry about Charlton Heston ratting us out…..screaming “Soylent Green is people!”
Because Charlton Heston is dead. Laying there in his coffin, holding an AR-15 in his cold dead hands.
(this thing was written while listening to “Blue” two hundred twelve times. Fine Young Cannibals goes quite nicely with the prose. Always match the proper wine to the meal and the right music to the message)
Life and love are all about risk taking an probabilities. Everything has a probability. Creepy eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren and his band of merry algorithm writers sell probability to the masses, as well as the promise of love. I propose that if you have a passing familiarity with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s Prospect Theory, if you are over the age of thirty-five, and if you spent more than ninety percent of your life single, you’ll have a completely different perspective of on-line dating.
Three or four thousand times a month, Match.com sends this email:
“If you send an email to a Match member after ‘liking’ their photo or making them a favorite, they are seven trillion times more likely to go on a date with you!”
Really? Thanks, Match.com! I had no idea. Some months I get that email three or four thousand times a day. Match.com appears annoyed that I have not availed myself of their services, despite my prolific use of their site and the dozens of complaining emails I send them weekly to keep them on their toes. I’m not on Match.com to date. I’m on Match.com to see what type of women algorithms, written by nineteen year olds who will most likely not see their first date until well into their late thirties, will choose for me, based upon the vague, imperfect, and ridiculous data I feed to the machine.
Match.com is yet another means by which we can all rage against the machine.
I am not opposed to dating. I’ve dated a lot through the years. Not quite as much as Tiger Woods dated from 2006 to 2009; however, I have dated a lot. I began dating at twelve, and outside of the married years, I dated between three or four dozen people a year. Unlike Mark Sanford, I chose not to date while married. In the event you do not have a calculator handy, that equates to 1,987,406 dates since 1976. Give or take a few thousand. I can never do long multiplication in my head.
On line dating and meeting someone in person and going on a date are night and day different, despite what Neil Clark Warren may say in his creepy eHarmony commercial where he is sitting next to the woman in the bikini. That is one of the creepiest commercials ever. In the commercial, the camera pans from left to right. First, we see a very average looking, if not slightly dim looking man, with a goofy smile. Next, we see a ridiculously hot woman in a bikini that there is no way the average looking guy could every pull from a bar. Unless he was a billionaire. If the average looking man in the commerical were a billionaire, he would have no need for Match.com. He could just walk into a bar, throw a fistful of hundred dollar bills in the air, scream “I have a pound of cocaine in my limo outside!” and then just wait in the parking lot for the bikini clad hotties to come out and jump in the limo. Finally, the camera completes its pan and freezes on creepy eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren…smiling his creepy smile and apparently on this date with the impossible couple….. telling us that the reason this average looking gentleman was able to outkick his coverage and end up with the bikini hottie is eHarmony’s algorithms.
These dating sites take far too much time and energy. For example, if I meet a woman on Wednesday and we go out on Saturday, the odds of her looking precisely as she did the previous Wednesday are 97.6%. If I meet a woman in an online dating site, the odds of her looking precisely like her profile pictures when we go on a date Saturday is 19.4%. A large (and unacceptable) difference of 78.2%.
Moreover, the process with on line dating is convoluted and takes far too much time. Using the previous paragraph’s example, if I meet a woman on Wednesday, we may spend seven or eight minutes chatting, I’ll ask her if she wants to go out Saturday, and then I’ll leave……..knowing that we are at least mildly attracted to each other. Prior to that, I would have spent three to four minutes looking around the establishment to determine whom I would ask out on a date. Total time invested: twelve minutes. To accomplish that same Saturday evening date with an online dating site would involve the following:
Parsing profiles: forty-three minutes
Reaching out to top three: sixteen minutes
Email conversing with top three to choose one: thirty-one minutes
Two phone calls with top prospect to determine neither of us is an axe murder: sixty-four minutes
Total time invested: one hundred fifty four minutes. An additional one hundred forty six minute investment (18.25 x) is involved even before the date. And, outside of the perpetually unemployed and the criminally insane, who has that kind of time?
Take, for example, the wasted two-hour conversation I had last month with a woman from Match.com who made it through the sequential “parsing”, “reaching out” and “emailing” phases. I allowed it to go two hours for three primary reasons. First, I had just received four cases of red wine and had three of the bottles open for sampling. Second, it was late and I was pretty well whacked out on my post spine surgery pain meds. Third, and most important, I had both computers open in front of me…..the land line was on speaker….with two very exciting (and very challenging) Angry Bird games going on, bilaterally. If you have not played Angry Birds, bilaterally, all whacked out on Carmenere and pain pills, you need to try it this weekend. I can suffer through any two-hour phone conversation properly medicated and sufficiently distracted. The only thing that would have made the two-hour phone call better is if there had been some sort of puppet show going on in the other side of the room. Everyone likes a good puppet show.
Phone calls should last, maximum, seven minutes. The average phone call should last two minutes. This applies to both business and personal phone calls. All phone calls. Always. I do not return phone calls to people who keep me on the phone more than fifteen minutes on a regular basis. If you have called me in the last year and I have not returned your call, odds are it is because you like to have reaaaaaaaally long phone calls. Phone calls should last, maximum, seven minutes.
Back to last month’s wasted two hours. Once we got through the typical questions I get (“why do you have your age listed as ‘100 minus an integer….you choose the integer!’”, “why are all your profile pictures photographs of stickmen drawings?”, and “did you really design and build the large hadron collider all by yourself over a weekend trip to France?”), she threw out the chiller question: “why don’t you ever want to have kids?” Then, as oft is the case, she drew the parallel between my affinity for bottle feeding foster kittens and raising children, rolling right past the fact that if I chose to procreate at this advanced age, I would be ninety-seven at the kid’s seventh grade play. To this question, I gave her my standard, truthful answer.
This answer.
“I can teach a kitten to crap in a box and cover that crap in less than ten days. I’ve not yet met a parent that was able to match that track record with a human baby. My three sisters are excellent parents and none of them were able to train their children to crap in a box within seven days. You give me a litter of kittens and I’ll have them crapping in a box in seven days. Guaranteed.” That is precisely how I answered her question. Chiller questions deserve appropriate answers.
The conversation inevitably turns to how many dates I have chosen to attend and why that number is so low.
After we waste two hours on the phone, Match.com people want to meet for coffee. I have turned down three thousand coffee date offers and have offended countless of potential dates by flat out refusing to have a date before 7:00 p.m. Why? Because I have never had an afternoon first date in my life that ended in making out. Neither have you. And that is what we all want to do after a date. We want to make out. The purpose of a date is not conversation. The purpose of a date is the appetizer to making out. My dream girl, Natalie Imbruglia, could call right now and ask if I’d like to have coffee tomorrow afternoon. My answer would be the same. “No thank you…I do not do daytime dates. I can pick you up at 7:01 p.m. And bring a robe.” Periodically, if I really do not want them to ever call me again, I modify the answer and say; “No thank you…I do not do daytime dates because I am a vampire and when we go out into the sun, we melt.”
Dating sites are quite strict on the profile titles their editorial boards allow. For example, here is a random sampling of rejected Match.com and eHarmony profile titles. There have been over four hundred rejected profile titles in the past year. One per day.
I have four hundred thirty seven extra toothbrushes in the guest bathroom
Do not freak when you see the shovels, quick lime and duct tape in the trunk. I do a lot of handyman work for friends
Bro’s before ho’s
I’d be quite to happy to have a sleepover party on the first date
Don’t mind my purity ring…it has sentimental value
My work release program allows me to stay out until 10 p.m. on both Tuesday AND Thursday.
If you “favorite” me I will block your profile. No exceptions. I don’t want to be anyone’s favorite. Ever. That’s too much pressure.
I was with the same woman from age 5 to 41. I won’t expect you to fill her shoes. No one can
I married an Asian woman, so I’ve already checked that box.
May I borrow forty-three dollars, please?
When we Rochambeau for something, I will always choose “knife”. With an actual knife.
If you talk more than 30 seconds about your ex, I’m going to cover my ears and sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb”
Most people grow accustomed to my pronounced lisp by date six or seven.
“Yo……what these bitches want from a nigga? Street bitches, slash, Cocoa Puff sweet bitches.” (DMX)
Chien qui aboie ne mord pas.
Match.com was kind enough to allow this profile title last month.
I tend to translate the Match.com descriptors, mentally, into my own descriptors. Most of the time, I say the translations out loud, To the cats.
For example:
Hair do with bangs in photo translates into “this woman looks like Jodie Arias and will cut off my head at some point after stalking me”
“has kids but they live away” translates into “I am unfit to house or parent my kids”
“have not dated in a while” translates into “I am on a work release program”
“Love to cook” translates into “I’m pushing morbidly obese”
“I’m a low maintenance woman” translates into “I’m going to text you nine hundred forty-four times a day”.
“I need intellectual stimulation” translates into “I have read all three Christian Grey books”
“I’m funny” translates into “I do not understand Monty Python and have no appreciation for David Sedaris”
“I’d like to be taken care of” translates into “I’m lazy”
“Curvy” translates into “I’d take up all of my seat and parts of your, unintentionally, on a Southwest flight to Vegas”.
Any platitude or hyperbole quote translates into “I have no original thoughts”.
“agnostic” translates into “I have no moral compass”. (That one is actually in my sweet spot and I award bonus points for “agnostic”)
Multiple, close up photos of fake breasts clearly indicate that she will refer to her boobs, in a very annoying fashion, as “the girls”…..often. Every hour, on the hour.
“I’m hard working” translates into “my last boyfriend said I slept too late”
“I’m intelligent” translates into “my last boyfriend said I was stupid”
“I’m successful” translates into “my last boyfriend said my job was stupid”
“I’m giving” translates into “my last boyfriend thought I was stifling in my affection and I hope you do not mind when I call 48 times per day.”
“I’m sassy” translates into “all my photos will be slightly out of focus”.
“Just got out of a long relationship” translates into “I am never, ever going to shut up about my last relationship.”
“Great career” translates into “my daddy does not give me props for my job”
“I’m sarcastic” translates into “78% of the people I meet refer to me as a ‘bitch’ behind my back…yet I miss this because I have a poor global perception.”
“I don’t have time to read books” translates into “I type ‘LOL’ all the time”
“LOL” translates into “my IQ is less than 93”
“LOL” and “LMAO” in the same profile translates into “my IQ is less than 93 and I did not graduate high school”
Dating site profile photos have their own set of rules and translations.
More than five photos means either a case of incurable vanity or the inability to choose between a wide assortment of options. Neither of these is attractive. And if you have eight profile photos, all taken by you with your iPhone in a mirror, you clearly have no friends and are most likely not terribly interesting. If all of your photos are from the shoulders up, you are most certainly going to take up all of my seat and parts of your, unintentionally, on a Southwest flight to Vegas. Digital photos of non-digital photos means that these photos are from 1994 and you no longer resemble that photo. Any photo of your dog or cat….alone, just the dog or cat…… means, again, that you have no friends. If all the photos are of you and a group of people, you are trying to distract the viewer’s eye from you. If, in the majority of your photos, you have on a hat, a costume, or you are posing ironically, you will always introduce yourself to my friends as “the quirky one” within three minutes of meeting them. Which means that my friends will hate you. If you are fat in several photos and thin in some photos, with a ridiculously beautiful face, you are saying “I’m fat now, but pretty……look at what you could have had if you met me eight years ago.”
Regardless of beauty, I will never respond to a dating site profiles where the woman writes “I believe everything happens for a reason.” Because that’s just plain stupid. Everything does not “happen for a reason”. Next week I will begin writing the following email to those who choose to write “everything happens for a reason” in their profile.
“Hi! I was drawn to your profile and compelled to email you because of your beautiful proclamation that ‘everything happens for a reason’. What a bold, powerful and utterly unique sentence to write in your profile! Did you write that yourself? If so, bravo to you. Bravo, indeed! In any event, I was wondering if you could send me a note or give me a call and explain why the following happened? Cancer. Princess Diana dying in a fiery car crash, trapped in her seat and burning to death. Children with leukemia and glioblastoma. The Holocaust. Again…..cancer. People dying of AIDS and malnutrition in the sub Sahara desert. T-Rex going extinct. Justin Beiber getting his/her songs on the radio. Deadly plane crashes. If you could please get back to me on why those nine things happen, given that everything happens for a reason, I’d really appreciate it. I look forward to meeting you. Clearly there is much that you can teach me. Hugs, Dan”
For those who have never been on Match or eHarmony, the photos below are excerpts from actual profiles. No need to translate anything mentally in these profile excerpts. Nope. What creepy eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren fails to share in his commercials, while sitting there next to the unusually attractive bikini clad actress, is this. 84% of the profiles are written (I am certain) with the best of intentions; however, they leave no question as to why this person is single. Like this one:
Or this one. Please note the “actually I don’t like DOGS…I like MY dog…there is a difference” in the upper left in the photo. Fascinating, and dead sexy. Dead. Sexy. And brave….it takes some courage to proclaim that you dislike man’s best friend on a web site dedicated to getting a man. Unless, of course, this is some sort of “play hard to get” reverse psychology ploy. Dead. Sexy.
Then, there are the 7% that are poorly written and Charles Manson crazy:
Match.com is a giant faux bar where anyone can be anything they want to be and new people come and go every minute of the day. And anyone, from anywhere in the world, can be at this bar 24/7. One of the first viral comics on the Internet back in 1993 was Peter Steiner’s wonderful New Yorker cartoon….this one
My fifth Match.com date in six months, my final Match.com date, was the epitome of this cartoon. This is precisely what went down on date five. None of the bullet points are exaggerated. Seriously. This all happened. And given that she claimed to be an actress when we spoke (for an hour….fifty-three more minutes more than a phone call should last) the evening before, I was able to Google her and see video of an attractive woman with all of her white teeth. This all happened. Precisely like this. Last Saturday.
Asked at 10:00 a.m. if I wanted to come over and help her move a big desk from upstairs to the downstairs (I declined the offer)
Asked at 11:00 a.m. if I wanted to pick her up, take her to Target and then the AT&T store before we had lunch (I declined the offer)
Showed up for a noon date at 2:00 p.m.
Showed up all gakked out on coke
Offered me coke when I asked “are you all gakked out on coke?”
Was offended when I turned down her offer of free coke
Ordered a full lunch, all gakked out on coke
Did not eat the meal….most likely because she was all gakked out on coke
Asked for a box for the meal
Said she had left her wallet in the car. With her coke. Allowed me to pay for her take home meal
Had gray teeth…..and is only 36 years old
Had a missing incisor…and is only 36 years old
Had a car with three packs of cigarettes and a car that stunk to high heaven of smoke…and her profile claimed she did not smoke
Wore a sun dress with army boots
Referred to the army boots as “heels”, when she said “I am glad you are taller than me so that I can wear heels.
Argued with me when I explained that army boots did not really fall into the “heels” category.
Texted me a photo of her child the morning of the date….the child is eleven months old. I did not request a photo
Had her long, beautiful hair pulled up into what looked like a combo of Princess Leia and Mickey Mouse ears.
Several times during lunch, took the hair down, put it into a single pony tail, then back into the Mickey Mouse look, while saying “I know it looks awful like this, but I like it this way.”
Asked during lunch if I wanted to come over after lunch to meet her baby and help her move a bunch of books from the upstairs to the downstairs
Told me I could take as many of the books as I liked, as long as she had read them
When she dropped me off at home, asked if she could come up to change
Started changing in the middle of the living room by pulling her sundress up to her neck
Got somewhat offended when I asked her to please change in the bathroom
Asked again if I wanted to help her move books, when I walked her to her car
In my seven months on Match.com, I have “favorited” 387,414 profiles and gone on five dates. That’s somewhere less than one percent. More precisely, it is 0.001290609%. The primary reason I choose not to date at the feverish rate many choose to date when they join Match.com, or at any rate at all at this advanced age is Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s Prospect Theory, loosely defined, is:
“The theory describes the decision processes in two stages: editing and evaluation. During editing, outcomes of a decision are ordered according to certain heuristic. In particular, people decide which outcomes they consider equivalent, set a reference point and then consider less outcomes as losses and greater ones as gains. The editing phase aims to alleviate any framing effects. It also aims to resolve isolation effects stemming from individuals’ propensity to often isolate consecutive probabilities instead of treating them together. In the subsequent evaluation phase, people behave as if they would compute a value based on the potential outcomes and their respective probabilities, and then choose the alternative having a higher utility.”
The most important aspect of Kahneman and Tversky’s research, with regard to dating, is risk aversion and risk seeking choices.
“Kahneman and Tversky started their research investigating apparent anomalies and contradictions in human behavior. Subjects when offered a choice formulated in one way might display risk-aversion but when offered essentially the same choice formulated in a different way might display risk-seeking behavior. For example, as Kahneman says, people may drive across town to save $5 on a $15 calculator but not drive across town to save $5 on a $125 coat.”
“One very important result of Kahneman and Tversky work is demonstrating that people’s attitudes toward risks concerning gains may be quite different from their attitudes toward risks concerning losses. For example, when given a choice between getting $1000 with certainty or having a 50% chance of getting $2500 they may well choose the certain $1000 in preference to the uncertain chance of getting $2500 even though the mathematical expectation of the uncertain option is $1250. This is a perfectly reasonable attitude that is described as risk-aversion. But Kahneman and Tversky found that the same people when confronted with a certain loss of $1000 versus a 50% chance of no loss or a $2500 loss do often choose the risky alternative. This is called risk-seeking behavior. This is not necessarily irrational but it is important for analysts to recognize the asymmetry of human choices.”
Some of the problems of interpreting human behavior in the face of risk have to do with the problem of people making decisions on the basis of subjective assessments of probabilities which may be quite different from the objective or true probabilities. Events of small probability that have never occurred before may be assessed as having a probability of zero in decision-making. Small probabilities add up when chances are taken repeatedly. 1,987,406 dates, give or take a few thousand, counts as repeatedly.
A notable phenomenon is what happens to the probability of avoiding a small risk event when the probability is increased. Doubling it. For example, suppose the probability of being involved in an automobile accident on any one trip is 0.0001. In 2000 trips the probability of not being involved in an accident is about 0.82. If the probability of being involved in an accident is doubled to 0.0002, perhaps as a result of driving behavior, the probability not being involved in a accident in 2000 trips falls to 0.67. If the probability of being involved in an accident on one trip were tripled to 0.0003 the probability of avoiding an accident in 2000 trips falls from 0.82 to 0.55. The point is that while probabilities of 0.0001 and 0.0003 seems so small as to be insignificant there are not really zero and there is a lot of difference between 0.0001 and 0.0003.
Back to the 1,987,406 dates since 1976, Match.com and Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory.
When you have had 1,987,406 dates, the data set is large enough to know every single potential outcome of the first, the third, the fiftieth, and the hundredth date, by person. I know that in the first 90 days, we will have 3 arguments and 1 fight while having sex 3 times per day….during the second 90 days, we will have 7 arguments and 3 fights while having sex 3 times per day on weekends and once per day on weekends….and that in the third 90 days we will have 129 arguments, 57 fights, while having sex once on the weekend and every other day Monday through Friday. The probabilities and predictability, based on the ultra large data set removes all surprise. Which makes it far easier at an advanced age to skip the dating altogether and stay home.
Best Experienced With: Stephen Kellogg; Milwaukee/Roots and Wings
(To properly appreciate my return letter, Lauren From Australia, you may want to cue up this song. It’s the one I listened to while composing our letter and it is a damn fine song. All nine minutes of it.)
Two weeks ago, I received the following email in my WordPress account that has housed “Mind of Mully (Classic)”, “Mind of Mully Biz Haus Shoppe”, and “Vote Mully” for many years.
“Dear Mully. You piss me off. I read you every week for four years and then nothing. Nothing! And the old stuff is gone. I want to buy you a beer! Come to Australia for one of your adventures! Where is your writing? Where did you go? I miss you. Lauren From Australia.”
This is your reply, Lauren. From Australia.
Dear Lauren:
Hi! Thanks for writing. Quit whining. God hates whiners and Steelers fans. Sweep the leg, jump the shark, and buy the ticket….take the ride. Apologies for the writing trailing off. My intent was never to anger you. Heck no. I love you Aussies. You did not attach a photo so I will picture you as a morphed being, using Olivia Newton John, Natalie Imbruglia, and Nicole Kidman as the morphees. You asked why the writing trailed off. The writing trailing off has a backstory. A Tolstoyesque backstory, Lauren, so grab yourself a few of those Fosters oil cans and settle in for a reply letter. Light a candle for the proper background scent. May I suggest cinnamon? Not vanilla, though. Vanilla candles are pedestrian.
Life is all about learnings, Lauren. As ridiculously indestructible as The Lord made the Irish, I have learned that the three to four months post surgery has a tiring effect on the body and mind. When you stack six surgeries together over a twenty-six month timeline as I have done, there is an additive effect. Sometimes, I sleep through entire months, waking with a full beard and an incomplete understanding of both the election and the ever-evolving situation in the Middle East. The end result here has been really, really, really, really bad writing over the last two years. I would write what I would consider to be three amazingly hilarious paragraphs and then fall asleep, only to awake and realize the train of thought was gone or that the first three paragraphs were really, really, really, really bad. Apparently, the body needs time alone to regenerate tissue. Unless, of course, you are a vampire. Which I am not. I despise Goth stuff, en toto.
There are 4,932 three-paragraph missives on a jump drive and they will never see the light of day. Perhaps when we have that beer, I’ll bring them along….printed…along with the big ninety-six color box of Crayolas and we can finish them up with drawings. Then, we can publish them as a coffee table book and make millions.
Several weeks back, on a visit to The Land of Cleve, mom sat me down at the dining room table and quietly said “we need to have a serious discussion”. At first I thought she knew the pharmaceutical companies were after me because they learned that the cancer and psoriasis cures I created over the summer with recombinant DNA would be out by Thanksgiving. That’s our Thanksgiving, Lauren. The one where we celebrate conquering the Indians. With kindness and smallpox. Then, I looked deeper and saw “the mom look”. The look from when I blew up my right leg lighting a coffee can full of gasoline back in sixth grade. The look from when she found unmentionable items in my closet each and every weekend from sixth grade through just last week. “The mom look”. The look that generally led to a grounding.
I flat out don’t have time to be grounded right now, Lauren. Too much to do, you know? I’m right in the middle of repurposing the Space Shuttle program for NASA. And developing an Iron Manesque exoskeleton for President Obama for his January, 2013 visit to Damascus where he will dig the first shovel full of dirt for Disneyland Syria. While praising Mr. Assad for his choice to live as a deposed expatriate tyrannical despot in Fargo, North Dakota. In that downtown Holiday near the Zandbroz Variety book store on North Broadway. Room 411 at the Holiday Inn. That is where Mr. Assad will be for the next few years.
I inherited my father’s eyes, appreciation for mischief, and room filling laugh. I inherited my mother’s love of medicine, work ethic, and appreciation for the disenfranchised and dispossessed. I also inherited my mom’s side of the family’s bad colons and dad’s side of the family’s bad bones. Mom’s side of the DNA double helix has colon tissue as strong as Don Knott’s deputying skills in “The Andy Griffith” show. Dad’s side of double helix gave me bones that break down faster than the Cleveland Indians after Independence Day. That’s our Independence Day, Lauren. The one where we celebrate conquering the limey Brits. With muskets and wiliness. No smallpox, though. We used up all the smallpox on the Indians. My DNA has allowed me to acquire as much free Versed and pain pumps at Scripps Green over the past two years as I could handle….six surgeries worth. First a left hemicolectomy in July, 2010, then a left wrist fusion in August, 2011…followed up rapidly by a second colon resection in September, 2011 and then the right wrist fusion in April, 2012. All the healing slowed down the writing. And the dating.
Back in 2009, my rheumatologist took a set of films and said “we’re going to either map out a plan for surgery or a plan for different medications.” Ever the fan of scars, I chose the surgery mapping option and we mapped out a thirty year joint replacement and fusion plan beginning with the items that most hinder my poor guitar playing (the wrists) and even more poor surfing (the back). Then we will move onto the joints that have kept me slow my entire adult life (the hips and knees), ending with brand new feet in 2027, more bouncy than the bounciest of inflatable jumpy houses. The end result of the orthopedic surgeries through 2027 will be a septuagenarian Irish American competing in the summer Olympics in 2028. And that will be pretty cool.
I now have a frequent visitor card at Scripps Green, more valuable than my Delta diamond and multi-million miler card. Because my Scripps green card virtually guarantees me views like this one below of Torrey Pines golf course when I visit again tomorrow to get my L-4/L-5/S-1 anterior lumbar interbody fusion. Four west has one hell of a view. For five days, I’ll be able to heckle golfers and see the glider port as I punch that pain pump button button for all it’s worth.
Back to mom. She said two things. First, she said “you need to take this spine surgery seriously and understand that you’re going to most likely have more of your colon taken out down the road.” We quickly disposed of that topic when I reminded her that I seldom take anything seriously and we have roughly twenty-six feet of colon, leaving me with at least twenty-two left to play with. That left the second statement that accompanied “the mom look”. It was this. “You need to find a partner…I don’t want to see you going through life alone.” I was able to dispose of that comment by showing her your email, explaining that I have had well over three hundred partners through the years, and arguing that Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins virtually guaranteed that we misanthropes would not have to go through life alone back when they were Harvard students.
Enough about me, Lauren. Let’s talk about you. I have questions. Do you own any kangaroos or wallabies? Can you ride the kangaroos? Do they have a special saddle and can you keep your snacks in their pouches when you take them our riding? If you pull those long ears, will they go in that direction? Are the wallabies jealous of the kangaroos? Your national anthem is “Advance Australia Fair”. Is that a national fair? Does everyone go, like they do to the Ohio State Fair? Are there rides and odd, deep-fried foods? Do you have any friends at the Sydney Opera House? If so, can you hook a brother up when I come visit and drink beer with you? I’d like to bring my guitar and sing my acoustic version of TLC’s “Waterfalls” on the stage at the Sydney Opera House. That video would seriously light up YouTube. We’d probably make it onto Tosh.0. You can play the tambourine. But, please, hold it down when I do the rapping part in “Waterfalls”…I like to do that part a capella.
And what of aborigines? Do you know any aboriginal people? Have you ever been to an aborigine formal dance and, if so, did you have to paint your face like I saw the aborigine face painting in my grandmother Mulligan’s “National Geographic” magazines when I was a child? If you did have to paint your face, was it easy to remove the face paint afterwards with a common face cleanser, such as Noxzema?
And some final questions about you and Australia, Lauren Have you seen the movie “Papillion”? How do you feel about your country starting out as a penal colony? Are there any vestigial penal colonies where Great Britain still sends prisoners? Did you like Steve McQueen in that movie? Even when he lost his teeth and had scurvy? Me, too! I liked him in “Bullet” as well. Steve was a man’s man. Can you speak French? When I come visit my friend Rob I. next year, we’re going to drink Fosters in the shade, you and me.
Enough about you, let’s get back to me and your questions. Mostly me, though, because this is the longest I have typed in two years and I’m on a roll. Never stop momentum….that’s a solid rule. And never, ever date people who have more problems than you do. That rule is also solid.
Like most things in life, hospital stays are what you make of them. Four or five days in the hospital can be a great time, with the proper planning and the correct offense. Take slippers, for example. Here are the slippers I bought three weeks ago for this week’s Scripps vacation. They are the bunny from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” slippers and by Christmas, they will tell tales of these slippers around campfires throughout the Scripps health system. They may even put bronze statue of me in the bunny slippers in the lobby at Scripps Green. Next to the fountain.
Here are the slippers from 2010
Here are the slippers from the 2011….I brought two pair. Because everyone likes choices.
The slippers are pretty critical to set yourself on the laps through the hallway. The laps that show you’re healing and ready to get home. The laps are the hospital’s version of our country’s sixth grade Presidential Physical Fitness test. And I set the damn standard for four west lap walking at Scripps Green. The highest of all high bars and it all begins with the slippers.
I have made quite a name for myself in these laps, Lauren. I am nothing if not competitive and I treat the lap sessions much like Steve Prefontaine treated his preparation for the 1972 Montreal Olympics. I stand outside my door before beginning laps, stretching vigorously and doing a Ray Lewis-like psyche up speech to anyone who will listen…and as much as my IV lines and catheter will allow. Some of the other patients sob, silently, knowing they will have no chance once I hit the floor. Post warm up, I’ll tape my iPod to the IV pole, pull on the pink Skull Candy headphones, crank up Metallica, and start lapping four west. I generally begin at a ridiculously high rate of speed, holding my pee bag above my head and shouting “who’s getting discharged first, you slackers?” and “PASSING on the left!”. I put the emphasis and volume on “PASSING” each and every time. So they know I am passing them.
Then, after lap three, I change it up and do the next two laps in slow motion. Because everything looks cooler in slow motion. Write that down. Everything. Looks. Cooler. In. Slow. Motion. The beginning of “Reservoir Dogs” would just have been some guys walking in front of a brick wall, until they slowed it down and made it ten times cooler. Everything looks cooler in slow motion. A game of jacks. Sneezing. This hummingbird outside my window right now. Pretty mundane activities until we put them in slow motion. These five laps, in aggregate, tend to freak out the charge nurse and that makes me quite popular with the staff nurses. Because no one likes The Man. Damn the Man. In the past, these five laps have gotten me foot rubs. And my insurance plan doesn’t even cover foot rubs. See?
This year, because of the holiday season, I am adding piñata night to my stay. Here’s the piñata. I filled it with mini bottles of booze, Tootsie Roll snacks, and other sundry items. We’ll be having a nice holiday party on Halloween.
I also bought eighteen of these little Halloween flying parachute men and, if all goes according to Hoyle, four hours after the piñata party, I will be standing on the roof of Scripps Green with three of my favorite nurses….empty mini bottle at our feet…..chucking these little Halloween parachute men onto the ninth green at Torrey Pines. And, fortunately, everything always goes according to Hoyle in my world. I will send you photos from the roof, Lauren From Australia. You are welcome.
Three hours ago, I unlocked all 243 “Mind of Mully Biz Haus Shoppe” entries because I could not sleep knowing that I could not have coffee in the morning, given the pre-surgery rules. You know what I miss most during my hospital stays? Coffee! Not beer. I have that pain pump thing in my hand at all times and I do not miss the beer. God, but I miss the coffee when in the hospital for five days. I unlocked them for you, Lauren From Australia. Feel free to read and look at the nonsense to your heart’s content. And in 2039, when I have retired, I will unlock the 107 entries in ‘Mind of Mully (Classic)”. Because of all the swear words. And, again, yes. Yes, I will have a beer with you when I visit my friend Rob Izzard in Australia one day. Until then, thank you for reading my nonsense and thank you for writing.
XXXXXXOOOOOOOYYYYYYY
Mully
Bring on the Versed, the three a.m. wake up catheter checks and the disparaging looks at my bunny slippers.
Because as Shane Falco so eloquently put it in “The Replacements”:
Pain heals.
Chicks dig scars…..and….most important
Glory is forever.
Amen.
Speaking of scars, I have a plan for all of mine. Here are the wrist fusion scars. In ten years, I will turn each of them into the cover of the Rolling Stones album, “Sticky Fingers”, with the help of my tattoo artist, Mike Sirot in Pacific Beach. Go ahead and Google that album cover. I’ll wait right here for you to return, Lauren From Australia. See?
The scar tattoo that will be the most fantastic will be on my stomach. There’s a three-year plan. Here is what I have today from the colon resections:
The ALIF incision on Tuesday will be like this:
Last Friday, when I had my vascular surgeon consult, I brought in the following drawings and asked Dr. F. if he would pleas make certain he made his incision precisely forty-five degrees up from the colon resection scars….like this:
Because in 2015, Mike Sirot will be connecting the scars and making this tattoo…..with the square root of 2 equaling 1.414 and everything. And that, Lauren, will be the coolest tattoo in the galaxy. Plan your work.
Work your plan.
Good night. Thanks for writing. Thanks for reading.
“Don’t go chasing waterfalls….please stick to the rivers and lakes you’re used to. I know that you’re gonna have it your way, yadda yadda.”
Eulogy….. (and then, of course, there were the unicorn farms)
Suggested Background Music: Avett Brothers; Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise
Growing up in Cleveland, there were few career options available. There was the forced labor in the salt mines that some west side parents sell their children into when they are ten or eleven. There was also manning that demilitarized zone stretching between Toledo, Ohio and just outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana with an AK 47. Many Cleveland parents romanticized the manning of the DMZ to their children, explaining the “domino theory of farming” and how if Ohio fell to Indiana, then PA would fall, followed swiftly by NY and then none of us would have MTV. Some parents also sold children to the Akron/Canton scientific experiment labs, although that fad had passed by the time my sisters and I reached grade school.
And then, of course, there were the unicorn farms…
What child growing up in Cleveland didn’t dream of being selected as a unicorn wrangler at one of the many farms in Parma, Strongsville, Huron and Garfield Heights? Decked out in leathers, astride a dancing Lipizzaner Stallion….holding a pure gold lasso…wrangling unicorns. If you’re never been to Cleveland, that’s what you’ll see. Many go to Austria to see the Lipizzaners. Few go to Cleveland to see the Lipizzaners working with the unicorns. And this is a mistake.
Only the King of Cleveland could choose the unicorn wranglers and he chose a limited number, forty-two, annually. To unicorn wrangle, you had to be a pure blood Clevelandite. And they did DNA and blood tests. No mixed blood allowed. No Buffalo blood. No Detroit blood. God forbid no Pittsburgh blood or Browns/Steelers half breeds. Pureblood Clevelandians only.
My three sisters (Melinda, Patti, and Moira) and I were blessed throughout life. Our parents neither sold us into white slavery nor filled our little heads with empty dreams of being chosen for the unicorn farms. They allowed us to be who we were and encouraged us to follow our dreams. I am certain that if, at age eight, I had exclaimed “I want to own and manage the Dairy Queen at 2505 Lamar Avenue in Paris, Texas when I am a grown up, while maintaining a nighttime spelunking business in the caves in nearby Sulphur Springs”, my parent would have gotten me the soft serve ice cream version of my sisters Easy-Bake Oven. And cramp-ons. They would have given me cramp-ons to climb the oak trees in the back yard and little flashlights to hold in my teeth. For preparation. My mom and dad encouraged us to decide what to be. And then go be it.
Certain mirrors make your face look better and certain colors make your eyes pop. I special ordered the mirror in the bathroom near the door through which I leave each day and chose the blue to make my eyes pop. I am nothing if not vain and like to line up the mental odds in my favor as often as possible. When I stop by this room for the final look before heading out the door, I walk out feeling sassy. Here’s the room color. Makes my baby blues go POP. It is a good color Under the “live, laugh, love” sign in the upstairs bathroom is a photo of one of my best college friends (and cheerleading partner) in college Jen, my father and me. On a bad hair day. This photo is one of my favorite photos. Jen died suddenly in January, 2008 leaving behind a husband and several wonderful children. Dad died eleven days ago.
Dad was a two to three pack a day smoker, depending upon the day. Given that he was shackled to a wheelchair and unable to run either marathons or compete at an international level in triathlons for the last twenty years, none of us begrudged him his one vice. He was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in November, 2011 and took the diagnosis in the fashion with he raised the four of us. He laughed. When I was alone with him in the ICU he said: “Daniel…..when I get out of here, I think I’m going to finally quit smoking. But don’t hold me to that.” Then, he asked me for a dip. That evening, he also asked me to write him a fitting eulogy. One that was full of laughter, not evoking too many tears. One that explained how much he loved his wife, children and grandchildren without sounding too prideful or boastful. Most of all, he wanted everyone to walk out of the service smiling. The way my father went through life. I wrote the eulogy long hand on twenty plane flights for the next month and the eulogy was never read aloud. And it turned out pretty crappy, other than the swear words.
I read the following words to dad in January, the two of sitting alone in the kitchen. We laughed a lot and I made jokes about when he told me about the birds and the bees by telling me the “old bull and the young bull sitting at the top of the hill looking down at a herd of cows” joke. That was the story I would have told if I got choked up. Dad, telling me a joke for three minutes and then releasing me back out into the Fielding’s front yard to play football as the dissuading speech to young pregnancy. At the end, dad said: “Daniel, that’s wonderful and I have two rules. First, get rid of all the swear words. Second, don’t make your sisters cry”
Here is what was not read at Saint Ladislas last week. I took out all the swear words. There were three thousand four hundred seventeen swear words, making this read like Tolstoy in January.
“On behalf of Moira, Patti. Mom, Melinda, and Aunt Sheila, thanks for joining us here to celebrate dad’s life. He had one hell of a life. First, the rules. Dad gave me these rules and they will also apply to each of you during the eulogy. First rule, we don’t swear…..especially the F word. This is church, so please make sure you act “churchy” Second, no one is allowed to make Patti cry. If you make Patti cry, I will find out and you don’t need that sort of hassle on a funeral day. And I don’t want to have to put the smack down on anyone on funeral day.
I remember watching Ted Kennedy’s 1980 convention speech with my father at the Clague Road home where we spent our formative years. The part that sticks with me all these years later was sitting there with the strongest man any of us every knew and hearing Teddy Kennedy read these lines from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:
“Though much is taken, much
Abides and though
We are not now that strength…
To seek, to strive
To find, and not to yield.”
The “made weak by time and fate” portion may have applied to dad through the years, yet it did not. Dad did not allow it to apply to him and the ending…….”not to yield” was the line most applicable to dad. When we were alone in his hospital room back in November, right after he told me he was choosing to finally quit smoking, dad told me that regardless what his pulmonologist said, he would make it through the end of May to celebrate his anniversary with mom. And, he did.
Our father was, without a doubt, the strongest man to ever walk on this Earth. And in January he asked me to skip the rest of this paragraph because he thought it too boastful.
Patti got dad’s eyes. Man, but I wanted dad’s eyes. I got a Target, K-Mart knock off approximation of dad’s eyes, while Patti got dad’s eye color. Dad had the most wonderful, expressive eyes. Patti and I both got dad’s laugh, thank God (sorry Father Whateveryournamewas). A laugh that is as loud as a thousand armies, more infectious than Ebola, and as startling as snow in July. It was a damn fine laugh. Clearly, Melinda got dad’s brains and was able to retire her senior year in college with a comfortable next egg of just under three billion dollars. Moira got the empathy, the stern voice (when needed) and the “face light up completely” at the end of a joke. You can see it from top to bottom when Moira gets a joke and is about to cackle. IT is dad, through and through.
Everyone got the love lessons. The four of us were fortunate enough to watch out mom and dad love each other for a full forty-nine years….through good and bad. We watched them fight and make up rapidly. We watched them each allow the other to be who they are and to grow together and individually. I see mom and dad’s relationship in my sisters’ relationships with their families daily and it is a beautiful and rare thing. Of everything dad taught to us and left behind when he chose to leave last week, that “love” thing is the most valuable. And the most wonderful.
My Aunt Sheila once described our father as “the most successful man she ever knew”. This is true. He and mom showed all of us how to correctly love, argue, make up, and move on. Moira, Patti, and Melinda’s marriages, their wonderful children, and the relationships we all see there are evidence of dad’s success. None of us ever wanted for anything and, most important, dad made us laugh every day. And each of us…..Mulligan and non Mulligan……will think of dad in the future and we’ll smile. Then we’ll laugh. That is a most fitting party favor and leave behind.
Dad liked this poem and wanted you all to hear it today. Henry Scott Holland wrote the poem. Someone please sit next to Patti and make sure she does not cry. We do not want to violate Rule #2. Thank you. “Death is Nothing at All”, by Henry Scott Holland.
“Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.
Call me by my old familiar name.
Speak to me in the easy way
which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect.
Without the trace of a shadow on it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just around the corner.
All is well”
(end eulogy)
Midway through the church service, I looked two seats down and saw Patti sitting there, smiling and dry eyed. I nudged mom and said “tell the priest I’m not reading the eulogy when we get communion.” Mom held up the communion line (she was first) six minutes later, giving a very lengthy explanation on the 86’ing of the eulogy. Priest looked back at me: I winked, said “yep…what she says goes….no eulogy” and then made the “let’s get this show going” sign with my purple, casted arm. Believe I also pointed at a nonexistent watch while shrugging. Communion finished up without a hitch and we went and buried dad with a bagpiper man playing “Amazing Grace” on a beautiful seventy-three degree day in the Land of Cleve. It was a beautiful, Irish funeral.
Mom rented the same place where Melinda and Moira had their wedding reception for the post-funeral, Irish gathering. They had to bus in alcohol from throughout Ohio and parts of West Virginia; however, by the end, everyone was satiated. Eventually. Then, mom, Melinda, Patti, Moira and I went back to mom and dad’s for what we thought would be a single cocktail before saying goodbye for another three to six months. No kids…..just the adults and our friends Mikki, Joan, and Chad. And Melinda and Patti’s husbands Mike and Ron. And we gave our nieces Brenna and Erin special “adult” passes for the evening after they promised to do “ear muffs” whenever we screamed “ear muffs”. Erin and Brenna also had to swear an oath of secrecy and sign it in lamb’s blood. Moira’s husband Steve will certainly receive the Nobel Peace Prize for 2012 for taking the kids with him and allowing us our special time with Moira.
We sat there on mom and dad’s screened porch from 3:30 p.m. until just before midnight….laughing and drinking…..drinking and laughing. Throughout those eight hours, we laughed as a team more than we have laughed as team in the last twenty years combined. No children. None of my ex-girlfriends. Laser focus on Mulligans. And that is the most fitting eulogy ever for dad, a world champion laugher in his day. We laughed. And Patti did not cry.
We miss you, dad. You were the finest unicorn ever raised or wrangled in The Land of Cleve.
“If you’re loved my someone, you’re never rejected. Decide what to be and go be it.” (Avett Brothers & Daniel C Mulligan Sr.)
Suggested Background Music: Government Mule; Soulshine
(Click the link to hear the suggested background tune. Or don’t. Your choice. People like choices.)
My eldest niece Erin graduates from University of North Carolina (somewhere) this weekend. University of North Carolina has, literally, thousands, of campuses. I remain convinced UNC has campuses on other planets and in galaxies far, far away. When asked “where does your niece go to college”, for four years I have replied “University of North Carolina (sneezecough).”. Then, I rapidly change the subject and ask them a question that is hard to answer. For example, “what do you think is the best way to bring peace in the Middle East?” or “bet you cannot count to one thousand in three minutes using only prime numbers”. Because who has time to memorize the exact UNC campus?
Remaining childless and relatively unencumbered is an excellent way to fully live a Puff the Magic Dragon lifestyle. Am fortunate to have seven wonderful nieces and nephews to share when I feel like setting aside the painted wings and giant rings for a bit. Erin was the first of the seven. My sister Melinda, Erin’s mother, is my polar opposite and remains convinced to this day that The Lord cursed her with a reincarnated version of me as a daughter. Erin and I use the word “blessed”. Thanks for sharing your blessing with me, Mel. Told you she would never need a bail bondsman and she never did. Quod erat demonstrandum
Over the years, Erin and I have had many conversations….fewer as we aged and I become more reclusive and aspbergian. These conversations started with Erin speaking some sort of rambling. child Ancient Sumerian and evolved, when she was twoish, to her dubbing me Uncle Dopey by pointing at me and loudly proclaiming “YOU’RE DOPEY!” That was fun. My favorite Erin conversation took place three years and eight months ago when she was in the middle of her first week away at college and I was driving from Chicago to Minneapolis, with stops in between for the Harley Davidson 105th birthday bash, the Bruce Springsteen concert at the Harley bash, and a Rage Against the Machine concert in Minneapolis the same evening Sarah Palin was accepting the Veep nomination at the 2008 Republican National Convention across the river in Saint Paul. And teasing the hippies at their war protests. Hippies are fun to tease. That was a most excellent week.
It began as many of my weeks do. Running from a relationship. I was working in Texas the week before Labor Day and instead of going home and ending the current relationship with the woman with whom I was living, I looked at a concert calendar. Found the Springsteen/Harley gig Friday and Saturday and the Rage Against the Machine. Called my ticket broker back in San Diego and promptly flew Austin to Chicago, beginning the road trip to the RNC and the RATM five days later. Always carry two weeks’ worth of clothes when travelling….in case you have to run away. Bored, somewhere outside the Wisconsin Dells, I called Erin and we chatted from The Dells, through Winona, and on into Red Wing, where I spent a very quiet Labor Day Eve. We spent the majority of our phone time discussing what most uncles and nieces discuss when the niece begins college. We discussed tattoos.
Having a full back piece and several other stamps, I was the correct Mulligan/Drury person to advise Erin on the subject of tattoos. Her friends were thinking of going out and getting some ink and Erin needed advice. The advice was, of course, that no permanent decisions (ink, kids, marriage, and voluntary amputation of a limb) should be made prior to 30. It is challenging to comprehend “forever” before 30. Or even 40. Ink is quite permanent and entirely limiting when it comes to evening gown and shoe choices well into the future. We discussed this for one hundred forty-six miles, Wisconsin to Minnesota, and in the end Erin chose to not get that tattoo. This places her in the 1% of college students. Erin makes wise choices.
Rage Against the Machine was magnificent
As was teasing the hippies.
Yet what stands out most from that weekend was the one hundred forty-six mile tattoo, life, and college convo with Erin.
Dear Erin,
Hi!
Congratulations on your matriculation. I remain confident that you will one day soon have the Global Vice President of Marketing career adventure that you’ve wanted for four years. You are ridiculously bright, bilingual, and you make people laugh out loud. Those are the three legs of the stool that is Global Vice President of Marketing. Should that hat trick not be enough, here is my eleven cents. Many of your friends will get a Cross pen set as a gift this weekend. Your really, really, really rich friends may receive a Visconti “Forbidden City” H.R.H. Fountain Pen. If one of your friends gets a Visconti “Forbidden City” H.R.H. Fountain Pen for graduation this weekend, get them piss eye drunk and steal that pen. You can get $40,000 for that pen on EBay.
Most of you will receive three or four copies of Dr. Seuss’s “Oh the Places You Will Go” and you’ll all get money. I will send money. Please spend it one something stupid or on a bail bondsman. Mel hates to be wrong. Here’s the eleven cents.
If you want to be great at marketing, invest some time selling things. The best marketers have carried the sales bag, asked a million questions, dealt with hundreds of thousands of objections, dealt with rejection hourly, and learned what it truly means to get to know a customer and their unmet needs. The best marketers have read all of Kotler’s works. The best marketers understand that it’s not about the company or the product….it is 100% about the customer and their specific, unique needs. The best marketers ask questions and actively listen.
If you choose to get an MBA, wait until you have worked for a minimum of ten years. The skills you acquire in an MBA program need context and the best way to add this contextual framework is to work for a decade. If you do not choose to get an MBA, take the time to learn finance, statistics, manufacturing processes, accounting, research and development and organizational behavior. Marketing pulls all of these disciplines together, wraps them around customer needs and kicks out unique products into the market space. Respect your colleagues by understanding what they do. Always, always always pull manufacturing into the product development process early. Really early. They know how to make the stuff and will provide you valuable counsel.
If you find yourself short of cash, do not rob banks. Check kiting is far safer and less dangerous. Kidnapping is also a poor choice. Because the exchange is always tricky and seldom successful.
At some point in your career, you’ll be in a meeting and your CEO will ask “what are our low cost country manufacturing options?” The only correct answers to this question are West Virginia, Arkansas, or Northern Ohio. Have the courage to keep jobs in the United States and the temerity to hold your ground when this conversation comes up. That topic will come up. Explain to your colleagues that you can invest in new capital that will lower your manufactured costs here in the United States. Better yet, you can lead a marketing team that creates unique and profitable solutions and products that command a premium because of their differentiation. Anyone can find a cost advantage in India or China. It takes a true marketer to develop a differentiated product that commands a premium, regardless of where it is manufactured. Manufacture here at home.
Avoid commodities. Commodities suck. Commodities are all about price and winning a deal based upon price is an empty, hollow victory.
Embrace change and become an agent of change. Find activities and roles in your career adventures that make you uncomfortable…these are how you will grow. Never be afraid to say, proudly and aloud, “I am uncomfy”. That’s how people know to reach out to help you. They will help you.
Make friends at work and play who are your 180 degree opposites and hold completely different beliefs than you hold. What a boring place it would be if we all agreed. Much like the entire cast of “Idiocracy”. Learn to truly respect differing opinions, not with a smirk, but with a deep understanding of the background, ethics and moral compass that created that contrary opinion. Learn to argue coherently and intelligently. Not Tosh.0’s “nah, nah, boo, boo” or “BECAUSE” arguments. Do the research and make your arguments from a strong position of knowledge, not emotion or lemmingness.
Speed Round: Keep a journal. Write in it every day. Give to charity. Volunteer. Always buy extra toilet paper and beer when you are at the store. Even if you do not need toilet paper or beer. You will need toilet paper and beer at 3:00 a.m. one evening and thank me for that advice. Save something from every paycheck, even if it is $5.00. The power is within you to make every day an adventure. Make every day an adventure. Know everyone’s name at work. And if they have children. And the name of the person they say “I love you” to when they leave for work in the morning. Spend all the money in your change jar once a year on something silly. Be silly. Don’t wear brown shoes with a black belt. Never turn left across four lanes of traffic without a light or a stop sign. Be yourself all the time. Ask your boss, your peers, and your customers “how am I doing?” on a weekly basis. Thank them for their input….good or bad. Hug people. Hugging is good stuff. Let your soul shine. Be third: God is first, your friends and family second, and you are third. Be third.
When you feel like stabbing yourself in the eyes with knitting needles, go take a walk. Preferably near a body of water, like an ocean or a lake. So that you can skip stones on the body of water. Skipping stones is an excellent way to both remove the desire to stick knitting needles in your eyes and to think. You are being paid to think. You cannot think in a meeting. You can think while skipping stones. Most meetings are a waste of time. Skipping stones is never a waste of time.
Read a book every month for the next fifty years. Real books. Bound books. Take notes in the margins, underline, and look up the words you don’t know. Read at least one newspaper every day and, when time permits, three. Make one of those newspapers the Wall Street Journal. Make another the New York Times. Reading stimulates your brain’s neural network, continually opening new paths in your noggin to learn new things and master new skills. If you keep those neural networks growing for the next seventy years, the odds of you ending up in a home with senile dementia will diminish. The odds of you advancing in your career grow with each periodical and book you read. Except People magazine. Read People for fun. And for the pictures with witty captions.
There are six books you should have in either your car, your office, or close to your bed at all times. No need to have all five in all three places. That would be overkill. These five books are your FEB’s…your fire extinguisher books. When the world appears to be on fire or when you are having a particularly significant Saint Elmo ’s fire day, just chill. Grab one of these six books and read a chapter or two. Take the day off, blow off the rest of the world, and read the whole book. You’ll find that each extinguishes fires in it’s own unique fashion.
The Little Prince: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Illusions: Richard Bach
Harold and the Purple Crayon: Crockett Johnson
The Perks of Being a Wallflower: Stephen Chbosky
The Last Lecture: Randy Pausch
Love: Leo Buscaglia
Avoid absolutes. Except these absolutes.
Hydrate properly. There is a good deal of hydration in beer, wine, and umbrella cocktails. There is also a good deal of hydrating value in water. On road trips, in airports, on planes, and in meetings, have a bottle of water handy….use it to hydrate. If you hydrate properly, you will seldom have bags under your eyes and you’ll get far fewer “laugh lines” as you age. On road trips, in airports, on planes, and in meetings, do not hydrate with beer, wine, and umbrella cocktails. People will talk if you do that.
Laugh as much as you can every single day. Laugh harder when you appear to be on the edge of an abyss. Laughter echoes far better at the edge of the abyss than screams of terror. Laugh like a hyena. It works.
When you wrong someone, in business or in love, there’s only one correct offense. This is the correct offense:
“I am sorry”
“What I did was wrong”
“I’m going to do my best to not do that again”
Then, shut up. If a hug is proffered, accept it and hug back while maintaining your silence.
And then, of course, there is gravity. Gravity is an absolute. What goes up must come down. Newton. Bright man, that Newton. His law of universal gravitation states that every point mass in the universe attracts every other point mass with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Jupiter has a higher gravitational pull than Mercury and Carnie Wilson has a higher gravitational pull than Chynna Phillips. The more risk you take…..in business, love, and life……the farther the potential fall can be. The more successful you become, the larger the gravitational pull. All great leaders and agents of change (Einstein, Mikey Dell, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, ad infinitum) felt gravity’s pull and fell hard. Then got back up and did what they did. Always get back up. Then, laugh and do what you do.
Don’t date people with whom you work: there is very little upside and plenty of peril. There are roughly three and a half billion men in the world. Excluding the Chinese (because I cannot support you dating a heathen Commie), there are three billion men in the world. You’ll probably work with a few hundred men. Exclude them from your dating potential pond and focus on the 2,999,999,800 others with whom you do not work. When you find the “right” man one day, I hope he gives you a speech like Melvin Udall in the movie “As Good as it Gets”. The speech at the end. This one.
“I might be the only person on the face of the earth that knows you’re the greatest woman on earth. I might be the only one who appreciates how amazing you are in every single thing that you do, and how you are with Spencer, “Spence,” and in every single thought that you have, and how you say what you mean, and how you almost always mean something that’s all about being straight and good. I think most people miss that about you, and I watch them, wondering how they can watch you bring their food, and clear their tables and never get that they just met the greatest woman alive. And the fact that I get it makes me feel good, about me.”
Just make sure a guy at work does not give you that speech. There’s no upside. Plenty of peril. And when your relationships fail, as they often do, keep in mind that there are still another 2,999,999,799 with whom you do not work.
We are Irish. Keats is our favorite writer poet person. Mr. Keats wrote the following: “Don’t be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.”
And that, Erin, is what I hope for you from today forward. Discovery, fresh experiences, and a wide, long highway of success…..you, laughing like a hyena at what some may label “failures”. Don’t be afraid of the mistakes. Embrace them. I am very proud of you.
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