minervasoracle

What Would You Say You Do Here?

2010-01-22T19:32:00.004-05:00

I will probably have an opportunity in the next few weeks to go to Haiti or, at least, to contribute in some direct way to the relief effort, whether that be in Guantanamo, on a ship, in Haiti, or in Miami. I have been on cloud nine since I found out. Not because I'm glad this happened, not on any level. Not because I regret my decision to get out of the active Navy and have been pining away for a chance to go back. Certainly not because I want to leave my family and friends and go hang in a third world country for up to a year. This possibility excites me because it gives me hope of being relevant again.

I have never been one of those people who can go to work every day just for sake of a paycheck. This is the essence of why I hung up my Navy boots in the first place, and it's why I took a job in emergency management after the book store went south. Well, let me back up. At least ostensibly, my current job is in emergency management. What it actually is, is an administrative position. It's herding cats, it's separating salt from water by hand. In other words, it's customer service. My job brings to mind that quote from Office Space. "What would you say you do here?" To which I say, "I take the specifications from the customers and bring them to the instructors." And the efficiency experts go on to grill me until I flip out and scream that I deal with the goddamn customers so the instructors don't have to! Not that there's anything wrong with that. I work with some outstanding people. I have a good, meaningful job. I know that what I do is important. I coordinate Emergency Management training for the state of Virginia and I work very hard to make the program better, with the idea that the next time disaster inevitably strikes, the collective "we" might just be a little better prepared. I try to think of and implement ways to make the training more relevant, more real-world, more immediate. But admin is admin is admin, and at the end of the day, I'm hard pressed to tell anyone the tangible results that were purchased by my exhausted state. I may have enrolled five people in a class, fixed six administrative errors, flawlessly accounted for 47 course completions, written a better checklist. But when it comes down to what I'd say I do here? I don't have much to say.

I have a friend who sells valves for a living: ball valves, butterfly valves, big industrial gate valves. And that is so incongruent with the thoughtful, well-read, intellectually brilliant person she is that I periodically can't stop myself from asking her whether she gets tired of doing it. She invariably replies that her job doesn't define her and that she's happy in this economy to have a job. That resets my cognitive dissonance until the next time I can't reconcile it in my mind and we repeat the cycle.

But as for me, I want to apply my efforts somewhere where the results are immediately apparent. Where I KNOW beyond the shadow of a doubt that I'm helping someone. So I say to the Navy, send me. Send me somewhere where I can do some good. I'm hoping to be gone by this time three weeks from now.

Tebow's Theatrics

2009-12-06T02:17:00.006-05:00

I don't normally blog about sports, but I have a few things I need to say about the media darling that is Tim Tebow. I'm fully aware that doing so may get me excommunicated from both the church AND the South. I'm only half kidding. There are many in the South who equate any hint of criticism of Tebow with heresy. How can you say anything bad about a guy who wears biblical eyeblack? I must have forgotten how I was raised, because here it is.

I have a hard time buying Tim Tebow. I want to like him, I want to believe he is all he seems to be. No one can dispute that he puts his faith out for public consumption unashamedly, and an athlete of his age who will make that kind of public stand is both rare and commendable. But the cynic in me finds him just a little too studiously polished. Take, for instance, his crying jag at the end of the SEC championship game. I found it unnecessarily dramatic and self-consciously showy, like much of the rest of what he does, especially since the outcome of the game wasn't really in doubt for most of the fourth quarter. I don't begrudge the man some tears--it's a tough way to end an exceptional college career. I have an issue with the public spectacle of it. He's played on national television enough times to know what grabs the cameras. It looked to me to be one more opportunity for him to draw attention to himself. Look at me, ESPN, I'm man enough to cry on national television! Thank ya, Jeezus.

And since I'm on a tear, I'm also not quite sure why the media raves about Tebow's leadership. If leadership consists of screaming, double fist pumping and head butting, then yes, he's the second coming of Nelson Mandela. But forgive me if I'm less than impressed by the theatrics. I've seen televangelists who were calmer. Maybe it's a personal preference, but I've always been drawn to leaders who exude a quiet confidence. There's no disputing that Tebow has picked his team up and put them on his back more than a few times. His improvisation, his tough running, his clutch plays--all very impressive. But let's not confuse performance with leadership. If I'm an NFL coach, do I really want my quarterback bursting a vein in his neck screaming at his teammates on the sidelines? Or giving himself a concussion when he head butts a helmeted player? Or would I rather have the calm, confident field general who lets those around him jump around and do the flashy stuff while he directs the winning drive? I think I'd rather have the latter, and I think Tebow's Sundays in the future will probably be best spent in church.

Happy Birthday Mr. Snuffleupagus

2009-11-11T10:55:00.002-05:00

The older I get, the more I realize I'm turning into my mother, a woman who has been known throughout my life to launch into a full waterworks display faster than you can say emotionally manipulative Internet chain letter. Case in point, the drive to Midlothian yesterday. I was listening to NPR and Renee Montagne mentioned that it was the fortieth birthday of the seminal children's show Sesame Street, and I got a little emotional.

I got to thinking what a groundbreaking show it was and how, for generations of poor rural kids in pre-Internet days, it was our first exposure to multiculturalism. I thought about how brave the producers had been to push the envelope and insist on a representative cast and crew. I thought about how the program had shown kids like me regular Hispanic and African-American people interacting in perfectly normal ways with those around them at a time when television characters were overwhelmingly WASP. In fact, the show was banned for a brief time in Mississippi because the state thought its audiences weren't ready for the integrated crew and the presence of so many strong, single women.

The show has addressed ethics; emotions; and real-life situations of love, marriage, birth and death. It discussed the 9/11 attacks and featured an HIV-positive character. It found a way to talk about child abuse and disabilities. It adapted and stayed relevant even with the technology boom of the 1990's. Oscar the Grouch may have gotten a cell phone, but he keeps on teaching millions of kids not only ABCs and spelling and basic math, but how to grow up to be better adults. So happy birthday, Mr. Snuffleupagus, and many more returns.

HelLMS

2009-11-06T13:20:00.002-05:00

The more I've come to understand my new job and all it entails, the more I've come to realize that there is little, if anything, new under the sun. Case in point: the Commonwealth of Virginia's LMS or HelLMS, as I've come to think of it. LMS stands for the Learning Management System, and it is at once the bane of my existence; the source of all budget shortfalls in the great state of Virginia; the weapon of mass destruction smoking gun from Iraq and the underlying reason for the Republican sweep into office last week. Its connection with global warming has not yet been proven.

About a year before I arrived at the Virginia Department of Emergency Management to begin my new job as a training resource coordinator, the HelLMS train started making preps to pull out of the Richmond station, bound for all points Virginia. By the time I arrived, it was at a full chug, belching and bellowing and picking up speed, and I was left with little choice except to get on board, or get run over. Or, in some cases, a little of both. Now, HelLMS is not unique to Virginia, nor is the concept even new. Virtually every training entity of any scale has it or a system like it: to manage course and facility information, track student enrollments, generate course-associated documents and provide a single repository for training records. Because my office manages, schedules and tracks all Emergency Management training for the state, the title of LMS content administrator was written into my job description and my fate was sealed.

Here's the rub: until October 1, people were accustomed to a certain low-tech ease in signing up for courses and receiving documentation of their completion. What used to happen was this: people would find a course they wanted to take in a location that was convenient for them, get a form from Frank or Bubba or the office file, fill it out and fax or mail it to my office. Alternately, they would fill the form out online and an automated system would email it to an address in my office. The office schmucks before me would then take each form and force feed it (manually re-type all the information) to the doddering and barely functional old Training Management System, which was the predecessor to HelLMS. At the end of the course, some poor schmoe would have to manually print out single certificates of completion for each student and mail them to the location where the training was held. Lather, rinse and repeat...about 4,000 times over the course of a year.

To further complicate matters, the old TMS system was designed to work with Windows 95 and was never upgraded past the point of a few software patches. The system is almost 15 years old and tech support for it had long since run out, so there are all of two computers remaining that will actually still RUN the program (and those only if you're holding your mouth just right). Divide the number of hours in the day by the number of vacant positions by the amount of manhours it takes to nurse the old system along. Throw in a 30% budget cut this year alone. And all that added up to: past time for a change.

I came in right in the middle of all this and inherited the job of, for example, selling the concept to the good ole boy volunteer firefighter out in Buchanan County, whose chief told him he has to take an Incident Command System course next weekend so the County can keep getting its federal money. Firefighter Jones probably has only a vague idea that the Commonwealth of Virginia is operating under budgetary constraints that make the frugality of my childhood seem like a hedonistic Vegas splurge. He probably would not care, if he knew, that yours truly was reduced to scuttling along behind departing conference attendees after this week's Blacksburg Coordinators Brief, stealthily picking up leftover Dasani bottles like some Dickensian street urchin. He is not the slightest bit affected by the fact that, as a schoolhouse, we cannot print manuals without the express written permission of the Secretary of Public Safety. He only wants to sign up for his required course with the least amount of hassle possible, sit through the damn thing, get his piece of paper, and then get back to his day job, his family and all the other pressing concerns of his life. I can't say that I blame him. It's hard for him to see a connection between fighting fires and the Internet. He does not want some yahoo in Richmond, however well intentioned, telling him he's got to make an account in LMS, enroll for the course through the Knowledge Center, negotiate to a certain screen, reconfigure his print settings and print out his own certificate for a course that is already an imposition on his time. And all this on dial-up access. So it's a hard sell.

The other harsh reality is the data migration process from TMS to LMS. This is an ugly for which there appears to be no cure. The TMS system is replete with corrupt data: duplicate accounts, incorrect social security numbers, fake social security numbers, no social security numbers. The state gets two data uploads for free each year. But in eighteen months of trying, even with accounts that seem to be "good" accounts, we have yet to successfully upload a single user account from TMS to LMS. We finally started manually inputting archival information into the LMS from hard copy rosters, but it proved so labor intensive that we were only able to get through about eighteen months before we had to put it down and pick up the current rosters that were piling up around us. Even this system wasn't perfect, as there were names that could not be read on the rosters, line-outs, changed names and email addresses.

All that to say this: it's become apparent to me that the government teat ain't nearly as ample as it used to be. And it's become further apparent that you'd better be prepared to take the rest of the ugly body that comes with it.

The Korean Experience

2009-10-22T20:20:00.002-04:00

For the past couple of weeks, I've run headlong up against the realization that, for all my railing against the homogenization of the world community, global diversity is alive and well. The boys from Seoul left for home Friday and with them, my previous assumptions about the shrinking world and internet-induced culture cloning.

For each of the past three years, Emergency Management personnel from the Republic of Korea have made the long trip to Virginia for a training exchange program of sorts. I say "of sorts," because the Commonwealth has yet to actually send anyone to Korea to complete the exchange and, given the austerity of the current budgetary climate, probably will not. The group typically stays a couple of weeks and wedges as much sightseeing and shopping in between the training as the schedule will stand. In other words, the schedule is little more than a point of departure for a whirlwind tour of as many points U.S. as can be logistically managed. This year, it was a fateful day, indeed, when new girl Kristy volunteered to be the point person for the visit.

The trouble began when the Korean coordinator from the previous two years was pulled for another project. She spoke very good English and had a firm grasp on the cultural differences and their implications, so her loss was a blow to communications. Without her, the coordination conference calls between Seoul and Richmond became two hour ordeals that stretched late into the night. After a time, we were able to establish tenuous communications with the translator from the previous two years and she ran a kind of long-distance interference in between other translating jobs. After one particularly long call in which nearly everything had to be translated to Hangul to English and back again, I thought we had an understanding on a schedule and a way ahead for the visit to proceed.

It turned out the schedule was not firm, the group wasn't happy with the hotel arrangements, and they were not at all enamored of the rate they were getting on a translator. We met Na Song, the translator, in person for lunch on the Thursday before they were due to arrive on Tuesday and (much to my relief) clarified most details of the visit. By Thursday night at 9:30, there was no more Na Song. Instead, the Korean-based travel agency found a guide over the Internet based on his Korean-language blog that said he lived in Midlothian. This and his day job as a shoe store manager was apparently enough to qualify him. The new guide, in turn, hired a new translator who was all of nineteen and had been in the U.S. for most of her life. There were no contracts, there was no money exchanged ahead of time, and the group had never met either the guide or the translator. When the group of twelve angry men arrived after a day on the west coast and an all-night flight into Richmond, the scene was set for a heavy-duty culture clash seen previously only in a Ha Jin novel.

By way of background, the delegation's senior guy was a fellow named Mr. Wan Taek Jung. But the senior guy in Korean culture doesn't actually take charge of anything. The group's coordinator was his second in command, Gil Dong. Wan Taek, Gil Dong, et al, managed to elude our representative at the airport, slip by and get loose on the town before I was able to reach the new translator. They promptly went for Korean food, although I tried to tell them we were having a luncheon reception in their honor not two hours hence. According to Ha Young, the new translator, (see how confusing this could be?), they had been without Korean food for two days and were insistent on having some. I thought it ironic that they'd come all this way to eat Korean, but I shrugged it off and told her to get them to the hotel as soon as she could.

When the boys arrived, the hotel met them with a contract (the same one we'd been trying to get signed for over a month, mind you) and an insistence that they pony up a payment method. The lobby was instantly filled with garrulous Korean men alternately demanding their keys, expressing outrage over the way they were being treated and denying any responsiblity for payment. Granted, I do not speak Hangul and they only speak limited English, so some of this was inferred and some of it was filtered through the translator. Finally, Han Lee, the guide, said he would sign the contract and provide his personal credit card as payment guarantee until he could coordinate with the Korean travel agency to wire money to him for payment.

After this near-debacle, I thought everything was running along fine (famous last words) until one afternoon when Gil Dong came to get me and insisted that I make Han Lee give him his identification. Apparently, Gil had gotten it in his head that Han was not who he said he was, that he didn't have a contract and he was just some guy trying to swindle the group. Some of this was a result of the fact that all prices in Korea are inclusive (tax and tip included), whereas all prices here are obviously not. So when the boys went to a restaurant and assumed that $5.99 meant $5.99, they were extremely displeased when Han went around to collect tax and tip money. Some of it was because one of the money wires from overseas had not arrived and Han was concerned about having money to cover the visit. Gil got wind of this and was more convinced than ever that Han was just some guy bent to make money off of him and his cohorts. It was extraordinarily difficult to get all of this out, as we couldn't go through the swindler guide and his in-cahoots translator. So Gil and I went back and forth in broken English until I thought I understood. I then had to go back and forth between Gil and Han to get both sides of the story. This was taking too long for Gil's taste, so there ensued a huge scene in the hotel driveway that featured fifteen participants: Gil Dong and Han Lee alternately arguing and talking on their cell phones to Korea; me trying to make peace; the translator in a huff because the guys had told her to sit down and shut up; and eleven Korean men standing, smoking and looking off into the distance and trying to listen without becoming involved. In retrospect, it was a fascinating dynamic. The senior guy at some point finally stepped in and tried to calm Gil down, to little effect. Han Lee at some point said he was leaving and a couple of other members went after him and begged him to stay. This caused Gil to lose face with the group so he became even more upset. I finally stepped in when Gil and Beom Sik Kim almost came to blows.

Needless to say, there was no recovering from that. The group retained Han Lee's services just long enough to get to northern Virginia and then they let him go. I heard about this when the new guide called me during my drill weekend to try to get information about the schedule. I gave him the information and told him he needed to call Han Lee, as that was the only contact we had with the group. And that was how Han Lee found out he was being let go.

He sent me an email that night expressing his great relief.

And so the twelve angry men arrived in Hampton for our statewide coordinators briefing on Tuesday with yet another translator and guide. We got them rounded up and where they needed to be for that day and the next. They departed Richmond on Wednesday morning for a FEMA tour and some last minute shopping time in D.C. Their parting shot was a luggage van that was two hours late (the 15 passenger van they were riding in did not have room for luggage). We ended up schlepping their luggage out of our classroom where it was temporarily stowed and onto the tour agency van. Last I heard, my boss was having some difficulty trying to get them into FEMA on Thursday morning. He sent me an email to remind him to tell me about the experience. I replied that I already knew.

Jimmy's Right

2009-09-24T20:23:00.003-04:00

Last week, Jimmy Carter drew fire from the right over statements that the more viruluent strains of criticism toward Barack Obama were based in latent racism. He was particularly critical of Joe Wilson's "You lie" outburst, and of email strings that continue to be circulated by conservative interest groups that compare Obama to, alternately, an animal and Adolf Hitler. Since I have the misfortune of having a new boss who is fascinated with conservative talk programming, I am force fed Fox News Network and Rush Limbaugh in stereo most days. Somehow, by the time those talking heads finished spinning their revisions of his comments, Carter had said that any disagreement with the President's policies equated to racism. The network even trotted out their usual stable of conservative minority commentators who, to a one, denounced the former President as an unrealistic apologist, wallowing in white guilt.

But was Carter really off the mark? It used to be that a certain level of formal respect was afforded the office of the Presidency, period. There was a sacred and inviolable decorum required of and around our highest levels of government, period. Opponents may not have agreed with the decisions made, may not have even respected the man himself, but one of our country's strengths has traditionally been our ability to debate our differences and then respect the decisions made by the majority of our countryment. Our government has always been one built on civil discourse and compromise. That's why the level of disdain shown our President over the past couple of months has been both unprecedented and unconscionable.

Granted, many of the issues that have been debated recently have been the most divisive in my personal memory. The country faces deep philosophical rifts in many areas, not the least of which is health care. But when the President WE elected to office not nine months ago is blocked from speaking to school children about such an innocuous topic as responsible behavior, ostensibly because certain groups don't want to risk politicizing the schools; when an elected Congressman feels justified in calling the President a liar in a joint session of Congress ostensibly because he passionately disagrees with what is being said, WE have a serious problem the root cause of which no one besides Jimmy Carter seems to want to admit. What other President has ever been blocked from speaking to school children as if he were some common pedophiliac who couldn't be trusted alone with our children? What other President has been called a liar in a joint session of Congress, in front of a national television audience? What else has changed? What other conclusion can be drawn? That these public displays of utter disrespect are somehow justified because the country is facing more challenges than ever before? Please, refer to the Great Depression and World War II See also Vietnam and energy crisis of the 1970's. More likely, it is the 2 ton elephant of a racially divided past that we're still not ready to honestly confront. That elephant may be covered in a cloak of policy disagreement, but it's still a big damn elephant.

I Will Fish No More Forever

2009-09-07T14:31:00.003-04:00

Late last Wednesday afternoon, I was hugging myself, knowing that I had just set in place the last of a carefully choreographed series of events that would result in the orderly departure of almost 4,000 used books from my bookcases and, in turn, the bookcases themselves. I congratulated myself on having managed all this with minimal interference to my new job and finessing the details down to the point that I would only need to take three hours off of work (time I had already made up, no less) to get it done. I had spent several nights in a row at the bookstore and had gotten all the new books off the shelves, stacked them in the floor in a way that wouldn't interfere with the removal of the book cases. I had gone to bed Wednesday night wiped out, but with an overwhelming sense of relief that things were finally happening.

Thursday morning at 8 o'clock, the thrift store employees who were supposed to be taking all the used books away decided they couldn't manage it. It was just too much. Never mind that I had very carefully explained the scope of the task beforehand. Never mind that the same guy had vehemently insisted that not only could they do it, but that it would be done in time for the book case people to show up at 10:30. Never mind that he had shown up at the store at 7:45 with two guys and a truck, and I had someone there to meet them as we had discussed. I made it to work at 8 a.m. only to get the call that my carefully laid plan had just fallen apart.

A melee of frantic book and shelf moving, a too-long truck, a busted light on the building across the alley, denials by the truck driver over the light, many hours and much sweat later, I said goodbye to the book cases. It was striking how much care had gone into placing them, just so, into the building, contrasted with how little care had gone into slinging them willy nilly into the back of a semi to jostle across Virginia to their new home in West Virginia. I was left with 6500 books stacked on the floor, so I decided to open the store ONE MORE TIME on that Saturday to try to rid myself of as many of them as possible.

So what does this have to do with fish, fishing, or the price of tea in China? After this flurry of late-week activity, we got up early Sunday morning and went out on the Swift Creek reservoir for some much-needed relaxation. I've never really been much of a fisherman as an adult--somehow it seems kind of self-serving. Who am I to kill worms and inflict pain on a fish just to amuse myself? It doesn't seem fair. So mostly I just lay around, drive the boat, look at the wildlife or swim and let other, less moonbeamy people fish.

But on Sunday, moody thing that I was, suffering from the collective exhaustion of several weeks of doing two jobs, and the recipient of a brand new bream buster pole, I decided I'd do some fishing. My book-weary hands were too stupid to do anything that required manual dexterity, plus I hadn't seriously fished in several years, so it took some doing to set myself up with a rig. By the time I settled down to fish, Beth had already gone around the bend to fish her own spot.

I experienced a minor moral crisis when it came time to put the worm on the hook. I am not a vegetarian, but I have a hard time inflicting pain on any living thing when there's no good reason. I managed to reconcile myself with that concept by promising the worm that his life would not end in vain. I spoke it out loud: I would take any legal sized fish I caught home, clean it and eat it.

I only had a few minutes to wait. I felt a tug, saw the cork disappear, and snatched up a little bluegill about the size of half my hand. I pulled it on into the kayak and saw, to my horror, that the poor bastard had swallowed the hook. An existential crisis ensued. I tugged on the hook. I looked again, it was still buried. I searched my limited tackle for pliers. None. I tried emergency surgery with a fish stringer. To no avail. I burst into tears. The fish stared at me accusingly. I had, after all, promised. I trailed the poor fish behind me and set out across the lake for where Beth had disappeared. It was like the canoe chase scene from Last Of the Mohicans. I was crying and rowing for all I was worth. By the time I reached her, all I could do was sputter and bring the hooked fish (with its accusing eyes) around for her to look at. She shook her head and said she couldn't do anything for it.

I do not recommend having a breakdown in a kayak. After I cut the line and let the fish go to what I am sure was a starvation death, I drifted out in the middle of the lake and cried me a river. Not only for the fish, but for the bookstore, and for the realization that I, like so many others, can't always keep my promises.

Return to Normalcy

2009-08-22T19:03:00.003-04:00

Warren G. Harding (who is, to the best of my knowledge, the only President to date who has sported a middle name of Gamaliel) ran for office in 1920 on the "return to normalcy" ticket. The war-weary country swept him into office, along with a Republican majority in the Congress. While I am not a particular fan of Warren Harding, I can understand the attraction of his promise for the country at the time. I've bounced around from upheaval to upheaval over the past few years, and I'm just about ready to sew up the borders.

Like most aspects of being in business for myself, the bookstore's denouement has been both more time-consuming and more costly than I anticipated. When I decided to close the doors, I didn't really stop to consider that I could be left with, literally, thousands of books on the shelves. I was too proud to discount the new books any more than 50%, reasoning that I could send them back, and refusing to give the vultures who were circling, waiting for the 90%-off fire sale, the satisfaction. And this is, on a theoretical level, true. I CAN send the books back for credit from my distributor. The question is, when exactly do I plan on doing that? Since I started my new job, I've begun a 40 minute daily commute, dove headlong into a demanding new position, and tried to deal with 9-5 type bookstore issues before 8 or after 6. This weekend, I'm in Norfolk for drill. It reminds me a lot of my shipboard days, during which I grew to resent such normal, mundane tasks as laundry and toenail maintenance. I've got a buyer for the shelves who wants to come pick them up Thursday night, but no buyer for the books. And as much as I would love to recover the money I've hemorraghed over the past 18 months, I'm going to draw the line at dragging several thousand books into our basement.

I called this week to set up a haircut appointment with a woman who used to cut my hair at the Navy Exchange when I was stationed in Norfolk on active duty. She was a lively little Filipino woman who bantered constantly and almost always cut my hair too short. Still, I knew what to expect, and I liked having a regular "stylist." She had left the Navy Exchange just before I left active duty to establish a salon with her sister in a little shopping center in Virginia Beach. When I called, her sister said she didn't work there and hadn't for several months. She wouldn't tell me where the woman had gone, but I already knew where to find her. I got my hair cut by her this evening at the Norfolk Navy Exchange. She'd gone back to her normal, and I understood it perfectly.

Closed Due To???

2009-08-05T19:42:00.009-04:00

I understand human nature, I fancy even better than most. Extended time spent floating around on the open ocean on a 500-600 foot long hunk of steel with 300 folks of varying ages, backgrounds, education and personal hygiene levels gave me that much (along with really bad habits of wanting to eat pizza every Friday and wear flip flops in the shower). Add to that over a year of seeing ALL kinds of people come in and out of the book store and I pretty much have a BS in, well, B.S. So it should come as no surprise to me, nor should it be particularly upsetting, that my going out of business sale has been like blood in the water. The chum bag shaken into the water from the boat stern. The death throes of the slowly dying animal. To the tune of, the website got 2-3 times as many hits as before, and I did more business in the six weeks between the initial announcement and today than any other six MONTH period to date. I've managed, for the most part, to stay philosophical about this. I reason that people in general are going through economic hard times and want their money to stretch as far as possible. So, while they may not buy a new book at regular cost, they might be able to reconcile one at 50% off with their budget. While they might not be able to find the store for, oh, I don't know, fifteen months prior to the going out of business sale, the big sale might provide the impetus to call or check the website for directions.

But enter the offer of free books for teachers, and things reached the kind of fevered pitch seen only approximately twice in retail America: Cabbage Patch Kids and Tickle-me-Elmo. Okay, maybe the X-box too. Last Saturday was my first day of the offer, and it was the first time I'd ever had more cars in the parking lot than the tattoo parlor during mutual business hours. If statements to the effect of, "I'm sorry I didn't know about this sooner," were nickels, there would be no reason for me to go out of business. In fact, if only half the people who came in the store last Saturday, yesterday and today had come in even once during the 15 months I was open and bought one or two books, there would be no reason for me to go out of business. This in spite of the fact that I sent multiple emails, flyers and announcements out to all Petersburg teachers through the same channels that I sent the free offer. This in spite of the fact that I offered through those same channels teacher and student discounts, multiple free literacy programs for kids and over 6,000 used books at bargain prices. Either something about the word "free" really makes people sit up and take notice, people regularly ignore emails from the school district's administrative offices, or the what's in it for me factor wasn't high enough before.

I get that opportunism is common to all mankind. It's part of what makes us human, kind of like opposable thumbs. And Lord knows I would do some of the same things--in fact, I did, when I was getting ready to open the bookstore. I scoured the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area for the best bargains, went to all the big sales and loaded up with as much for as little as I could. I know this on a cerebral level. That didn't stop me from having a sick feeling in my gut as people gleefully rummaged through the bargain bins of my children's room, picked out their free books and rolled out, seemingly without a second thought. I couldn't help but wonder if they stopped to consider the cause and effect of, hey, if I had come here a couple of times, maybe this little store could have really made a difference in our community. Not once, as a sort of going out of business swan song, but repeatedly. There are a lot of people in Petersburg who got that. I will miss them as if they were family. But there are a whole lot more who did not. And that's why my doors are closed.

Book Store Up For Adoption

2009-07-15T07:48:00.004-04:00

Now that I have a job, the process of letting the book store go has ramped up in urgency. I don't know my start date yet, don't even have the formal offer where human resources will presumably draw up a salary and benefits package and I will either accept or negotiate. At least, I assume that's what will happen based on tidbits I've been able to gather from others who have gone through a similar process (and some sheer conjecture). This is unmapped territory for me, as it is my first non-military job as an adult. One thing I've learned during my Navy years about the government bureaucracy bus is that the wheels turn slowly, and sometimes it stops in the middle of the road for no apparent reason. But, I do know that I will be starting a new job, most likely before the planned end of my old one.

So, now that the end is in sight, the need to marry the good books up with good owners has become increasingly pressing. I have no compunction about the only so-so books that make up half my stock. They can go wherever, and I couldn't care less. But the good ones, I consider it my job to find them homes. One of my book club members came in yesterday and said her mother was looking for some specific children's books, and I just about fell all over myself trying to cajole her to tell her mother about two of my favorites. I just can't imagine shipping Giraffes Can't Dance and The Two Bobbies back to the cold, impersonal distribution warehouse. Some kid HERE needs those books! They need to be handled, read, loved, drooled on. So I've adopted something of a used car salesman tactic of shamelessly promoting my personal favorites. So what if he came in for a vampire novel? Surely he has a niece who is starting school next month and will need to have Splat the Cat read to her to help calm her fears. Splat the Cat, by the way, has a mouse for a best friend, which I find very cool. That babygrandmama who came in for a couple of classics? Please, take this interactive Dog book. One of the pull tabs makes a dog lift his leg and pee, for God's sake! Don't even get me started on the art section and cook books.

In the last few days, I've been trying to come up with ways to get people to come down and let me do a psychic reading of their literary tastes and pair them up with books that they need. This may or may not involve a Vulcan mindmeld, and I am only half-kidding. A regular customer suggested that I run a book adoption promotion yesterday. If the animal shelters can do it, why not? Anybody out there have any other ideas?

Ideally, someone from the community would make me an offer on the whole store--inventory, fixtures and all--take it out to the main street and reopen. They'd have to take their lumps for a year or two, but I believe they'd then move on to firmer ground. I think this idea can make it under that scenario, and I do believe Petersburg needs a book store. The combination of main street visibility, historical tourism, a pedestrian friendly downtown and the BRAC influx would eventually stabilize the money in-money out ratio. I just don't have it in me to start over like that. But if anyone out there knows someone interested in that scenario, I'd love to talk with them.

Job Hunting

2009-07-11T17:04:00.002-04:00

It may be that looking for a new job is the most humbling thing I've ever done. I used to think that I was pretty darned employable: by virtue of prior military experience, what I flatter myself to think has been excellent performance in a wide array of assignments, current location in a military town, veteran's preference, yada yada yada. That was before the wheels fell off the juggernaut of the American Speculation Machine and Starbucks started requiring a Master's Degree to serve espresso drinks.

So it is in this oppressive economic climate that I have toiled over my qualifications and sweated out dozens of cover letters. I've rewritten my resume no less than 100 times, each time in response to a specific set of job requirements. I've carefully culled key phrases from the announcement, dissected the description to the point of splitting atoms, stuffed the application with all the position specific phraseology that's fit to print. For all this, I've only made it through the Army's Resumix computerized system one time, and I have yet to hear from the hiring official for an interview. It occurred to me the other day, after the umpteenth electronic rejection, that the federal job hiring process is vaguely reminiscent of calling Verizon customer service (i.e. I experienced in each repeated failures to find a way to interact with a human). Say two for new hires. I'm sorry, I didn't understand you. Transferring to main menu. Say two for new hires. I'm sorry, you're not qualified for that menu option. Please call again when you have your doctorate.

I've had some limited success with state job applications. I made it to the interview level for two jobs, only to hear a week later that the jobs are now subject to a temporary hiring freeze that may or may not last the rest of the fiscal year. So it's back to the drawing board. The good news is that, now that my job search is out of the closet, I've had multiple offers to help. It looks like I'm gonna need it.

The Book Pairer

2009-07-02T17:28:00.007-04:00

Today I started the process of sending books back to my distributor. Because I'll be open for almost six more weeks, I still hold out hope for many of the books finding a home here in the community. So these were mostly titles I had multiple copies of, or books that I felt there was insufficient interest in to justify keeping around. It's not like I haven't gone through these exact motions before--culling the herd is a necessary and vital part of keeping a bookstore relevant. This was, however, the first time I'd boxed up a couple of cartons of books with no intention of replacing them on the shelves. And it may be that there are many things more forlorn than a stack of paperbacks whose covers have been stripped waiting to go to book heaven, but I'm hard pressed to think of them right now. There they sit, starkly naked reminders of my inability to pair them with a suitable reader. Failure written all over them, in so many words.

In some sense, I don't feel as if I've failed the community or even myself because this endeavor won't last, but that we have collectively failed the books and the ideas they represent. I know that sounds melodramatically moonbeam-ish, but I've spent most of the day today walking through the shelves as I culled books to send back, making mental notes of my favorites. And every time I come across a book that made me think a little longer and harder about what it means to be human, or helped me understand someone different from me, or transported me to another place or time, I feel the little pang of goodbye. These books, the good ones at least, have souls. As one of my older customers tells me every time he comes in, they're old friends. The Watsons Go To Birmingham is a little sassy, "Seriously? Couldn't you have done a little better by us?" To Kill a Mockingbird cajoles sweetly, "Come on, I've got something important to say and I'm relying on you to get me to the person I need to say it to." The Road, in typical minimalist fashion, grumps, "I trusted you" and lapses back into terse silence.

A very sweet regular customer came in yesterday and thanked me for giving her Garth Stein's The Art Of Racing In the Rain. She and her family had been here a few months ago and had been distraught because they had just put the family dog to sleep. She needed the book, I had the book, so I gave it to her and told her to read it when she felt able and bring it back when she was done. The book's narrator is a whip-smart, witty, wise-souled mutt named Enzo who believes that, once he's learned all there is to learn as a dog, he will be reincarnated as a man. It's a very sweet, well-written story that deals very sensitively with what it means to be human and to have a soul. Anyway, the lady came back yesterday to tell me the rest of HER story. She, herself, had been going into the hospital the next day for treatment of a very serious condition--this on the heels of the poor dead dog. It was almost too much for the family to take. She told me she had been overwhelmed by the simple act of me giving her the book. And I thought, maybe that was why I opened the bookstore in the first place. Maybe it wasn't to build a creative community gathering place or champion literacy or fulfill a childhood dream. Maybe it was because this woman would need this book on this particular spring day, and I needed to be here to pair her up with it. Several months of hard work, a fair amount of stress, a few tears and a couple of buckets of sweat in return for being able to be in the right place at the right time. I think that's a pretty good trade.

The Argument For Buying Local

2009-06-11T11:26:00.002-04:00

I started reading Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation yesterday, and, twenty pages in, it already has me thinking about a whole bevvy of issues. In it, Schlosser explores not only the history and make-up of our still burgeoning fast-food industry but, more importantly, what it has done to our cultural landscape. One of the arguments he makes is that the fast food phenomenon has effectively taken the local out of our localities. Through mass production standardization and national (and international) ad saturation, McDonald's et al have created a nation in which an alarmingly high percentage of available food choices wallow in fat-laden sameness from town to town.
Some of this, Schlosser points out, can be attributed to the car-crazy culture that came about as a result of the completion of the coast-to-coast Interstate system during the 1950s. The new transportation paradigm dictated a shift in thinking regarding speed, convenience and cost of food. Gas stations and restaurants sprang up almost overnight to service hungry travelers at exit sites. This, coupled with the increasing tendency in recent years for both parents to work, has created an almost insatiable demand for the kind of cheap, reliable food that fast food restaurants excel in.
What all this has to do with the price of tea in China is this: around the same time the minimum wage pool of workers was growing by leaps and bounds thanks in large part to the explosion of fast food popularity, the world was becoming smaller in many different ways. Lower cost, more reliable international transportation, vastly improved communications networks, unionized labor's consistent demands for higher wages and better benefits, and a less protectionist foreign policy resulted in the gradual outsourcing of virtually all product manufacturing for American consumption. Overseas manufacturers, not subject to the same labor and environmental laws as their American counterparts, essentially bargained American manufacturers out of existence. Large chains with tremendous purchasing power brought in quality goods at low prices from overseas, and small businesses were unable to compete. The average American, struggling to make ends meet on minimum wage or slightly better, saw only the bottom line, and who can really blame him? When faced with the choice of patronizing several local merchants and paying an average of 15-20% more for the family's weekly needs or opting for the one-stop shopping and significant savings of a Walmart, who can blame Joe Q. Public for choosing the latter?
But what is the real cost? At what cost do we continue to short-sightedly sell our country to China and India at the expense of our neighbors? Is it for a $7.99 pair of shorts? A $2.69 gallon of milk? A $150 phone that can tell us where the nearest Walmart is? And what are we doing with all that money we're saving? Assuaging our national guilt by buying bigger houses and more gadgets and the super-sized combo at the drive-thru? There has to be a better way, and there is. It may not be the least expensive or the most convenient way. It takes discipline, commitment and a willingness to see a bigger picture. But not so long ago, back before the Internet and globalization and big box stores, it was the only game in town. It involves people doing business with people. It invokes words like accountability, responsibility, integrity, ANSWERING THE PHONE. It's called buying local. It's not too late. There are still lots of opportunities to try it on, and you just might like the way it feels.

Great New Site

2009-06-06T15:32:00.003-04:00

So, I'm not all doom and gloom today. I also wanted to share an outstanding addition to Petersburg's intellectual and cultural landscape in the form of a new website. If you haven't been yet, check out http://mypetersburg.net. This site was formed by a Petersburg resident to bring "the residents of Petersburg, Virginia any and all news, information, events, and discussions regarding our city." They are accepting websites to link through their main page and plan to advertise local businesses through FREE banner ads in the near future! Email info@mypetersburg.net for more information. The site features a main page, an events calendar, a discussion forum and a photo gallery. You can also follow them on Twitter and Facebook under My Petersburg. I look forward to a revival of lively discussions between local citizens regarding Petersburg's issues and challenges.

Things I Should Know Better Than To Do

2009-06-06T13:58:00.006-04:00

When I'm honest with myself, it has always struck me as a strange combination: a bookstore next to a tattoo parlor. But for a long time, I naively thought it would be one of those quirky coincidences commonplace in Petersburg, an idiosyncracy that would, in fact, make it somehow more special. For several months, I shrugged it off when I arrived to find beer cans, empty cigarette packs, discarded food containers, used (yes, used) feminine hygiene products and/or the occasional wrecked car strewn about the parking lot. I may have said a few choice words, but I picked the trash up and wrote it off as the price of owning something used by the public. I lived with the gaggles of tattoo-laden smokers hanging out in the alley cussing a blue streak and apologized to my purse-clenching little old lady customers who braved what they perceived as something of a gauntlet to visit me. I dealt without complaint with the fact that my parking is regularly taken up by tattoo parlor customers who can't park in tattoo parlor parking because there are so many employees and other people who seem to hang out all day WITHOUT pay there. I watched without comment as taxi after taxi full of GIs parked in the driveway to unload and clogged all avenues of traffic flow while they went in to collect their $10 per taxi load reward from the tattoo parlor staff.

Let me digress here for a moment and say that it is not the majority of the folks who frequent the tattoo parlor with whom I have an issue. Most of them are decent, hard-working folks who would no more throw their trash down in the parking lot, as an example, than my average customer. I actually know and like most of their staff, and I do get some cross traffic from their customers, even if the majority of them only come in to get a print out of their desired tattoo.

But today, I'm pissed. A heavyset pair of women just cruised down the driveway in their Pontiac Grand Prix aiming for the choice lower tier of tattoo parlor parking adjacent to the door. When they saw there were no spaces there, rather than hauling their fat but otherwise able bodies back up the hill and parking a little further away, they decided it would be just fine to use my handicapped space. I went out to politely tell them that the space was reserved for handicapped and that if they didn't have a placard or sticker, I would have to ask them to move. One of them muttered something under her breath. I asked her to please repeat it and she reared back and belted out, "I SAID, you ain't doin' no business over here anyway." I stayed calm long enough to tell her that I appreciated the comment but that I would still need them to move the car. She replied that the other woman was "gon' move it." I thanked them both and told them to have a nice day. Then I came inside, went in the back and cussed my own blue streak. I can't say that I was all that angry because of the young woman's sense of entitlement or even the comment itself. I was more angry because I knew it to be true.

So let this be a lesson to anyone out there in cyberspace who is thinking of starting their own business. There are some things that would do well in such a location as mine. You might run a honkeytonk, or a little bistro, an Internet cafe, a laundromat, skateboard shop, a bike and boat shop or even a gym out here in the hinterlands next to the tattoo parlor. You will not do well with a book store, and the attempt will be an exercise in head-banging that will leave you with little more than a headache and a rapidly dwindling bank account.

The Would-Be Deerslayer

2009-06-02T10:46:00.002-04:00

I don't know if I'll ever understand dogs. Harper Lee is probably the smartest dog I've ever been around, but even she shows no ability to differentiate between a dog biscuit and, say, the flea collar that Dwayne Grubb pulled off her neck only a moment before. We spent Sunday morning in the dog emergency room with a sometimes epileptic dog. Dwayne, as if not to be outdone, would not let us leave him home and insisted on riding along. He suffered a panic attack upon arrival, ducked his collar and ran down the middle of Cary Street for a few minutes before I corralled him and put him back in the car. We ended up spending a few hours and a hundred dollars for the folks at the emergency clinic to tell us, essentially, that they wanted to keep Harper overnight and make her poop.

By this time, Harper was fully alert and acting as if she had not swallowed an unspecified amount of neurotoxin the afternoon before. So, after much deliberation, we decided to take her home and keep a close watch on her. Long story shorter, she had a couple more mild episodes before puking up a big ball of rubberized plastic and getting back to normal. She was more tired than usual that night, but showed no more ill effects.

Fast forward to the next day, yesterday afternoon. We were deep in the swampy recesses of the Appomattox River Trail, picking off scores of ticks and scuffling through the fourth or fifth mile, when the bookstore dog picked up a trail. There ensued a chase scene that would have made Natty Bumppo proud. Harper Lee, fully recovered canine athlete that she was, had scared up a baby deer and was hard on its heels as it emitted the most pitiful, panicked bleating sound I've ever heard. Harper has chased adult deer before, thankfully without success, and we know from experience that we kind of just have to let those chases run their course. She eventually tires of it and comes back empty-pawed and contrite. But this one, we saw, and it was just a baby. Harper was about a foot behind its heels, and the forest was filled with the desperate cries of an animal fighting for its life. All of this conspired to chase away what little bit of prudence I normally have and send me crashing off through the snake-laden underbrush in an all-out attempt to get there before the worst happened. Harper barked excitedly, the deer bleated, Dwayne Grubb ran in bumbling circles trying to track. Beth yelled at me to stop running in deference to my trick back. Suddenly, it seemed all kinds of animals and people were thrashing around in the undergrowth. Then, it stopped.

There we stood: muddy, scratched up, gasping for breath, filled with the worst possible feeling of sick dread. I managed to get a leash on Dwayne Grubb (he's not much of a tracker, and circled too close to me one time). We called Harper repeatedly, started first one way, then the other, and then resigned ourselves to impotently pulling ticks off until she finally trotted back up, some ten minutes later. There were no signs of blood on her, so we could only assume the deer made it to the river and got away. I could have cried with relief. I understand instincts, I get that dogs were domesticated by man and that their wild ancestry tells them to hunt and kill and eat. I am not a vegetarian. I fish. I don't hunt, but I don't begrudge people who do and eat what they take their hobby or way of life. But a cerebral understanding of all that is a far cry from the immediacy of yesterday afternoon in the Appomattox River woods. I'm not sure I could have welcomed Harper back, walked with her, pulled ticks off her on the way home, if she'd come back with that little deer's blood on her muzzle. Thankfully, I didn't have to find out.

Who Is Renting These Places?

2009-05-30T12:33:00.004-04:00

I just read on the Petersburg People's News site that developer Thomas Wilkinson is proposing to develop the industrial property at the corner of Market and Hinton into up to 120 conventional one and two bedroom apartments, with projected rents of $700-$1100. And I had to wonder, is this a case of the if you build it they will come mentality? Permit me a little skepticism. $1100 a month? For a two-bedroom apartment? In Petersburg? Blink. I've rented a house in Virginia Beach for less, and that didn't even include a bonus daily encounter in the parking lot with, alternately, my choice of itinerant panhandler or fake-gun-wielding man in a dress.

This set me to doing a little impromptu research. This is certainly not the first of such projects proposed, nor will it be even close to first completed. You can't swing a dead cat these days without hitting the speculator du jour in the mouth while he's spouting details of the latest development scheme. Mayton Transfer boasts 100 apartments, renting for between $800 and $1600 a month. Then there are South Street Lofts and High Street Lofts and Dunlop Street Lofts, oh my! It appears the going rate for all these several hundred luxury lofts within the confines of one of the poorest cities in Virginia is in the range of $900-1400. SOMEBODY with a large amount of disposable income is renting these places. According to South Street's website, there are only two vacant apartments in their complex. So I dug around on some of these developments' sites to try to find the pool from which they draw their renters (I obviously am missing the boat on this), and what struck me was this: Boy do these places sound like they're in another town! To a one, the "neighborhood" sections of the websites include only the best areas of town (not a single one has pictures of their actual surroundings, opting instead for the more aesthetically appealing Court House, Pamplin Park, Folly Castle (the aerial view), the proposed Visitor's Center, etc. I'm all for putting a positive face on the city, but when Pamplin Park is in the same neighborhood as the Dunlop Street Lofts, I'll strike it rich running the bookstore in Petersburg!

In fairness to the loft developers, these apartments, as restored, are undeniably works of art. They boast hardwood floors, high ceilings, exposed brickwork, open floor plans. The list of amenities is impressive, and some utilities are included at some sites. And, all of the sites mentioned within the context of this blog actually have gated parking lots. So an encounter such as the one I alluded to in my first paragraph is unlikely. But I find myself wondering, how much protection is a fence when the predominant threat is a stray bullet from the surrounding blighted 'hood? And why are service members from out of state signing up for these places, sometimes sight unseen, without a little more truth in advertising from the complexes? Is it because the developers understand that, in real estate, location is everything? And if they showed their diamonds in the rough as they really are, potential renters might not be able to see the pretty new trees for the surrounding tangled forest? Is it also just possible that some of the money and energy being spent to wall these high end, palatial developments off from their surroundings might better be used pursuing improvement of the city at large?

"Liberty" U.

2009-05-23T12:40:00.004-04:00

Heavy-handed tactics. Censorship. Suppression of dissension. Refusal to recognize legitimate political organizations whose ideals are different from their own. Sound like something snatched out of news headlines about the oppressive government of a distant land? Maybe the junta in Myanmar, one of the last Communist bastions of China, perhaps? Try the administration of the ironically named Liberty University, right here in Lynchburg, VA.

This week, the College Democrats club at Liberty U was informed via email that their recognition as a university organization was no more. They were, for all intents and purposes, told "their kind" wasn't welcome on campus. Reasons cited included the national Democratic party's support of abortion, socialism and the "LGBT agenda," referring to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people. The email went on to say that, even though the campus club "may not support the more radical planks of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party is still the parent organization of the club on campus."

I fully understand that Liberty University is a private school, funded by private money and, as such, has every right to control what organizations it allows to operate under its purview. I can see why the right-wing religious contingent might not sanction a Young Satanists chapter, for example. But, seriously? One of this country's two major political parties? You can't find room at the table of brotherly love for a healthy debate with the party that represented almost 60% of your countrymen's views last fall? Hmm. This kind of insular, head-in-the-sand approach is exactly what a university education is supposed to prevent. Hopefully, by the time a young person has attended four years of college, he or she at least understands and respects opposing viewpoints and is, subsequently, more grounded in what he or she believes. The fact that this university is trying to prevent student exposure to viewpoints that don't coincide with its neo-conservative social agenda is problematic on many levels. It smacks of Big Brother protectionism at best, brainwashing at worst.

Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr, apparently channeling his father who once famously said, "Textbooks are Soviet propaganda," among hundreds of other gems, cited "lots of complaints from parents and donors" about the club in a statement to the Associated Press. He went on to say that he hopes these "great Christian kids" find a pro-life and pro-family Democratic organization "so they can become endorsed." In other words, he hopes that they come to their senses and form a campus organization that is an elephant in a donkey suit. Preferably one whose idea of free speech happens to coincide with the neo-conservative ideal of, "He who is not for me, is against me." It is a mindset that is at once McCarthyist, xenophobic and virulent in its protection of its socially conservative morays. It seems that campus officials have decided to suppress one viewpoint out of fear that the young, impressionable students might not be able to choose the "right" path, when actually given a choice. I have to ask, what are you so afraid of? Liberty means "the right to act, believe or express oneself in a manner of one's own choosing." At Liberty U., there's an asterisk beside the word. The fine print reads, "as long as that coincides with what we want you to believe and do."

The Khaki Sausage

2009-05-14T12:58:00.003-04:00

This week, I finally got my orders to report for Navy Reserve duty this upcoming weekend. Last night was my moment of reckoning: the first attempt to pull on the old military uniform in over a year. The result was not pretty. Picture a lumpy, stubby sausage crammed into a khaki case, with hair. A fair amount of sucking in and reconfiguring was required for buttoning and zipping the pants. Sweat stood out on my brow as I cinched the waistline and tried to breathe with everything fastened. This clearly would not do. I could not report for the beginning of a new phase of my career with my uniform molded around my ass like one of those spray-on pick-up bedliners. The despair drove me to change into workout gear and go for the second run of the day. As I ran, I tried to conjure a scenario in which I could somehow buy a pair of pants from the Norfolk Navy Exchange (the closest Navy uniform facility) AND get them hemmed and pressed before Saturday morning. There were two possibilities: contact a friend with whom I've spoken maybe once in the past six months and impose on her good nature, then take the sewing kit down there and hem them myself by the midnight candle Friday night. OR, I could drive down this morning before opening time for my store, somehow finagle my way into the Exchange without a military ID to buy a pair, drive back and take the pants directly over to the military tailors on Rt 36 and slip them a twenty to put my crap ahead of the soldiers already in line for expedited service. Neither of these scenarios seemed particularly practical.

I'll be the first to admit that I have only myself to blame. Having been raised in the Deep (fried) South, I know I'm genetically predisposed to the tiniest amounts of sugar and fried food addiction. Knowing this, I could have exercised a little self-control, maybe pushed back from the feeding trough OCCASIONALLY. I could have started the workout program sooner. I could have tried the %*#& pants on before three days prior to D-day. None of this was a consideration before Wednesday night. So now I've had to get draconian. I've put myself on a Biggest Loser-esque regimen of two-a-day workouts and a scant 1,000 calories a day. I just had salad for lunch with half a can of tuna spread on it, the tease of a tablespoon of light salad dressing drizzled over it. For breakfast, it was an egg, nothing added, and a banana. This makes THE PROGRAM weight loss scheme from last year look like a hedonistic splurge in Vegas in comparison. It seems to be working--already the pants feel less medieval torture device-ish. But, oh, the humanity! I'm left staring forlornly at the carrot sticks I picked out for a mid-afternoon snack and wondering where my metabolism went.

The Eleventh Commandment?

2009-05-14T12:06:00.003-04:00

Thou shalt not circulate virulent chain emails filled with lies and half-truths in the name of furthering your political agenda.

My mother and I went round and round about this during the lead-up to the election. I was, and still am, a staunch Obama supporter; she and many of her correspondents believe he lies somewhere between the Soviet Union and the anti-Christ on the continuum of evil popularized by Dick Cheney, et al. The last couple of months before November's election, the volume and level of sheer nastiness spewed across cyberspace reached a fevered pitch. I couldn't open my email inbox without having my senses assailed by the latest claim associating Obama with terrorism, flag burning and the advocacy of baby killing and doing away with Sunday newspaper coupons. At first, I tried to point out the inconsistencies within these missives, tried to get my mother (who is a smart woman) to apply reason or, at least, Google. I sent her links to Snopes.com or, better yet, to sites where the sources refuted the doctored versions of their ideology kidnapped by the religious right for the alleged greater good. But she took that as the devil quoting scripture for his purposes, and we finally reached an uneasy truce only when the propaganda machine that produces these things wound down, dispirited, after the election.

But now it's back, and revved up. The doomsday predictions from before the election must now be substantiated through a renewed email smear campaign. The latest product can be found in my yahoo inbox, or here: http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/proportions.asp. The gist of this one is that it compares our current sociopolitical landscape with 1930's Germany and, you guessed it, President Obama with Hitler. That's right, all the leading eggheads in the country believe we're headed for Naziism. If you don't believe me, read your Revelations. This one is spreading faster than a juicy rumor via the 21st century version of the church phone tree: the email distribution list. The M.O. for these things is always the same: attach some official sounding credentials--maybe a picture--and a shaky attribution. Run spell check and, quick, get it in the hands of those legions of the neoconservative movement who are interested in it only insofar as it confirms their worldview. The alleged author's refutation can be found here: http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/

I can't help but wonder in all this: what would Jesus do? Why is it that the religious right in this country, seemingly so anxious to create a theocracy with Christianity at its center, regularly disregards the very core tenets of Christianity? Or was that little admonition not to lie only applicable when it's politically expedient?

The Morning After The Anniversary

2009-05-09T12:36:00.005-04:00

This morning, I'm dealing with the aftermath of our Giant Hootenanny Paper Anniversary Customer Appreciation Poulon Weedeater One Year Anniversary Party. It was more wonderful than I could have hoped. It was a gathering of the best possible combination of smart, literate, funny friends and well wishers. It left me with a certain level of disarray in the store and a bout of the kind of torpor that comes from working at a frenzied pace to pull a big event together and then having it come and go.

It strikes me that this 24 hour period is fairly typical of the reason a move must be imminent. Last night, the store was full of people and music, life and activity. People were eating and talking, grooving to the music, running around with their little scavenger hunt sheets in hand, gloating over door prizes. This morning, the inevitable letdown of, welcome back baby, to the po' side of town. No money coming in. Bills in the mail. Tattoo parlor bursting at the seams, book store not so much. The combination of these factors, along with the introspective affliction that strikes me around any anniversary, have thrown me into a strange mood. Be forewarned. This will be some indication: I decided almost subconsciously I'm in a vintage country state of mind and have been listening to George Strait on auto play for over three hours.

This morning, unlike most second Saturdays in which the town sleeps off its collective Friday For the Arts hangover, I had several people in and out. A lady from the library dropped off a book that had been delivered to them by mistake. Another lady came by and picked the book up (she had paid for it in anticipation of the dropoff). A woman who works at one of the local antiques places stopped by to kill time because their business was also dreadfully slow. The merchant organization secretary dropped in to confirm some information. And a woman came in with her young daughter while the husband kept an eagle eye peeled on the tattoo parlor door for any sign of opening. There's kind of a rock concert flavor to the parking lot sometimes. People start showing up an hour or so before the tattoo place opens, and then they tailgate and jockey around for position until the staff throws open the gates and starts handing out numbers. Sometimes the would-be ink-ees go in search of food or a bathroom, while the designated anchor man holds down their place. This particular family showed up at 11:55 for a 1 p.m. opening, the better to be first in line. I watched them run through the standard routine of: check the door (locked), look at their watches, gaze bewilderedly up at the sun, check the hours sign, try the door again (still locked), check the second entrance (also, if you can believe it, locked) and finally resign themselves to the fact that the place was, indeed, still closed. They sat in the car for a few minutes, got out and smoked, walked down the alley and back and finally, the woman brought the kid (who had been staring in this direction since they arrived) in my store.

The kid reminded me of myself at 10 years old--beside herself with excitement at being in a bookstore, exclaiming over title after title, begging her mother to let her get a book. The answer? "You should have brought one from home if you wanted something to read." This woman had dragged her kid out on a Saturday morning to hang out with her for a couple of hours at Petersburg Ink. She was about to drop a couple hundred bucks for a new dragon in a bed of roses tattoo (this is a guess based on historical precedent) but couldn't find $2.50 in the budget for a used kids' book. It's not like the kid was begging for the latest shoot-em-up video game. At any rate, the man called the woman on her cell phone from across the parking lot to tell her that the doors were open, and that was the end of the kid's bookstore excursion.

The same little family JUST left the tattoo parlor and piled back in their car, the kid still staring forlornly in my direction. They were there for over 3 1/2 hours. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to just give the kid a book. It wouldn't have changed anything substantial, but it might have made us both feel better. In that same span of time, I've made exactly $38 in sales and seen over forty people enter the tattoo parlor. In keeping with my nostalgic music theme: We gotta get out of this place.

Selling Houses In the HGTV Era

2009-04-29T17:28:00.002-04:00

God save us from the current real estate market. We have just been through the purgatory of what those in the biz and, thanks to HGTV, millions of others now call "staging" a house for sale. If you've not had the pleasure, take it from me: it is the housing equivalent of girdle wearing--of squeezing your protesting, cellulite pocked, middle-aged ass into that pair of pants that were made for the version of you that was two sizes and two decades ago. Only in this case, you're actually doing everything you can to make things look BIGGER, and it's your stuff that's bloated and out of control instead of your gutbuttthigh corridor.

This past weekend was the yard sale on Saturday, frantic preparation Sat night, and an open house on Sunday. In preparation, we frantically removed all the trash from the trash cans, took down all the pictures from the walls, removed all traces of personal memorabilia (read, liquor bottles--that was all that was left from the last round of showings) from the house. We cut fresh flowers, carefully removed all evidence of pet habitation. We trimmed the hedges and weed-whacked. We lit candles and put on soft music. We baked cookies. Well, okay, WE didn't bake cookies, but the realtor manning the open house did. In the end, I couldn't tell if we were trying to seduce the people, or sell them a house. I guess it was a little of both.

This is what people have come to expect. They want fresh paint and curb appeal. They want spacious bedrooms, grandiose baths, amenities, pristine yards, quiet neighborhoods, home warranties. They want guarantees. They want instant access on multiple occasions to see how the light looks in the living room. They want to shop around, and then shop around some more and then come back to the places they originally visited to compare notes. As exhausting as it is to get up every morning and make the bed, pick up all the dog toys that have been strewn about the living room, keep the dishes washed and the clothes put away and the shades at that precise angle that allows the most light to penetrate--as tiresome as it is to have to remember to hide the sweaty workout clothes and keep the cat litter and dog hair swept up, it must be that much more so for the poor realtors. It's like having Leona Helmsley as a client, every time. They are wanted, they have power, and they know they can afford to be high maintenance. HGTV has created a generation of real estate monsters, and some of them will be looking at the house this weekend.

Still Gullible, After All These Years

2009-04-22T16:25:00.005-04:00

File this one under the category of I can't believe I didn't know better. Apparently, the scam du jour in Petersburg is to make the rounds of the local businesses, telling the proprietors a sob story of the teller's recent release from incarceration out of state. Of the recent, lonely, dusty bus trip down as far south as he could afford, to The Burg to make a new start. Stop me if you've heard this one.

A young fellow came by the other day and gave me his version. It was actually the second recently incarcerated story I'd heard, which should have sounded some warning bells. But he was clean cut, neat, well-spoken, normal looking. He introduced himself with a handshake, came in and looked around for a minute, then left without buying anything or making any demands. I took him at face value, thinking that Petersburg, with its double the state's unemployment rate, was one heck of a place to pick to make a new start, but whatever. I wished him well, and he went on his way. A couple of weeks later, right after I opened that morning, he was back. He was trying to get on his feet and, cue the foot shuffling embarrassment, he hated to have to ask, but he had just gotten a job and a car, and lo and behold, he knew he shouldn't have parked it there, but, golly gee it was an honest mistake. It was towed. And he was short a very specific $17 to get it out of hock. He was exceptionally polite and earnest. He was deferential and respectful and willing to work for the money. He was also full of shit. I put him to work weed-eating in the mass of weeds that is my parking lot. Five minutes later, the weed whacker was conveniently out of string. I couldn't leave the store to go get more, so I told him he'd have to come back the next day. But he had to get his car out of impound today, he whined, or it was going to cost him an extra $25, which he, of course, wouldn't have. So I gave him $20, took and verified his phone number and told him to come back the next day to finish up. See it coming? It's like a horror movie. Groan now, and brace for gratuitous predictability. Of course, he didn't show up the next day, and he was unreachable by phone. I finally got ahold of him yesterday and told him I was bringing the weed whacker in today and expected him to come do his job. He showed up today, but because it had sprinkled a few drops and was threatening to rain more, begged off until tomorrow.

I had told this story earlier this week to my friend who is a fellow business owner here in Petersburg. Interestingly, she had already made the young man's acquaintance. He had insinuated himself into her business by asking to use the bathroom a couple of times, telling his prison story in the process. Today, she called me with a crazy happenstance. Mike came by and told her his car was towed again last night! He needed $18 from my friend to get it out of hock! Can you believe the coincidence? I can't. Especially since I've been in this downtown every day for over a year and have yet to see anything resembling parking violation enforcement.

So, shame on me. I've been all over the world and half of Georgia, and I still can't tell when I'm being had. But these kinds of incidents always lead me to wonder--is it better to be cynical and undupeable? Or is it better to trust and believe the best about our fellow humans, in spite of repeated incidents of evidence to the contrary? I have a theory called the Theory of Universal Justice. It states very simply that people DO get what they deserve, whether good or bad. We may not get to see it, but it happens every day. We don't get to be in charge of that, so we might as well not get our drawers in a wad about it.

The Sinatra Garden

2009-04-18T16:22:00.003-04:00

As I've previously written, I plan to move the store to a more visible location as soon as I'm able to sell this building. So logic dictates that I don't spend a bunch of (okay, any) money on physical improvements at the store at the moment. This makes sense to me on a cerebral level. On a more visceral level, I decided a few days ago that I can no longer take driving up to the industrial wasteland of my storefront. I can live with the fact that there are bald spots around the door from my last ill-advised attempt at decorating (duct tape was involved). I can handle that the bathroom has all the monotone personality of Ben Stein. I can deal with the dust bowl of the adjacent parking lot...well, on most days. I cannot take the bland wilderness of white grass and weeds staring at me as I walk down the hill to start my day of bookselling. So this past week, I planted the Sinatra Memorial Garden in the front center flower bed. I call it that because, if those plants can make it there, they're gonna make it anywhere. In spite of a solid couple of months of strenuous preparation last summer, the bed remains a curious hodgepodge of dirt, rock, peat and old car parts. Couple this with my general tendency to mess up anything green that requires the remotest level of care, and we may have herbal homicide before the summer. The petunias are already looking mighty peaked. If they come back around, I'll post some pictures.

Subject of My Latest Rant: Piracy

2009-04-16T17:20:00.003-04:00

Anyone who has been breathing air for the past couple of weeks now knows that there is an epidemic of modern-day piracy off the coast of Somalia. Anyone who has been there knows that this is not new. Pirates have been operating with impunity in the lawless waters off the Horn of Africa for many years. It's only with the seizure of the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama with its all-American crew that the problem has blipped onto our national radar scope. Cue the knee-jerk response, preferably one flavored with a gunslinger mentality more suited to the wild west. The sleeping giant of national righteous indignation has awakened and, boy, is he mad! He's slobbering, lashing out, ranting. I can't BELIEVE the most powerful Navy in the world can't stop a few third-rate thugs in dinghies with outboard motors. We've got Aegis missile destroyers on station, helicopters, large caliber guns, hundreds of sailors and special forces operators. They've got a couple of RPGs and machine guns in boats that are barely seaworthy, and we can't take 'em out? Jesus H. Christ. It makes me wish for George W. Bush. I may be putting a few words in his mouth.

Ironically, it was on Bush's watch that the problem grew to these proportions. That's not to say it's his fault. He certainly had more than enough on his plate to keep him busy. When the city is burning around them, most folks don't worry about what color to paint the living room. But now that we've had our attention grabbed: Piracy off the Horn of Africa is a multi-faceted problem that will require a multi-pronged approach to solve. I've talked with a lot of people recently who can't get their brains around why the U.S., in particular, can't do something about it. But here's the thing, Somalia's coast line is approximately the same length as the eastern seaboard of the United States. Unclassified source documentation has chronicled attacks over 300 nautical miles from the Somali coast. Do the multiplication, and you have several thousand square miles that would need to be patrolled consistently to even make a dent in the pirates' habits. Even if a merchant ship can get a call out to a patrolling warship on VHF radio, there are a couple of problems with that as well. 1) the warship would have to be within 20-30 miles to even hear the distress call and 2) they'd have to be considerably closer than that to do anything about it in a timely manner. Add all this to the chameleon acts of the pirates themselves (the same guys who were pirates on one outing may have been fishermen on the last one, and may well be fishermen again on the next one), and you have a real time-distance problem. Somalia is the end of the food chain logistically, so any military action is complicated by replenishment and basing issues. A couple of years ago, shipping authorities responded to the increased piracy threat by issuing warnings to stay at least 200 miles off the coast of Somalia. The pirates responded to this by working out a new tactic that enables them to reach ships further from the coast. Then there's the minor inconvenience that most of the ships that have been hijacked recently have been BOUND for Somalia, which also makes it difficult to stay well off the coast. All that to say this: If Iraq didn't teach us anything else, it should have taught us that military action is not the end all, be all. Without the creation of a strong central government, without proactive engagement on the land side, without an economic strategy that brings Somalis out of the abject poverty that makes piracy so attractive, nothing done on the sea will have much effect. It's a big problem that, so far, has not been deemed worth pursuing. A few million paid out by shipping companies to get their ships and crews back unharmed has been considered the price of sailing the seas off of Somalia. Now the ante has been upped. It will be interesting to see how, and indeed if, the new administration responds to the groggy giant of national consciousness.

Occupational Hazards

2009-04-04T10:58:00.002-04:00

When I got out of the military and opened the bookstore, I thought my days of living dangerously were over. I reflected with gratitude that I had survived brushes with ebola, Hezbollah and Saddam Hussein to embrace the bookish, professorial lifestyle of a book maven. I thought the worst hazard of this job would be an occasional papercut. Oh, to have the halcyon days of pre-bookstore naivete back.
Last weekend, I cleaned up after my first toilet accident. I don't mean the toilet overflowed. If you've followed this blog from back in the Myspace days, you know we should be (knock on wood) immune from that for quite some time. I mean, yes, worst case scenario--activate the hazardous materials response team. Well, it just so happens that like most other titles associated with this business, I am also captain and sole member of the Hazmat response team. You might think that a bookstore is a strange place to have any need for a Hazmat response team. You might think this a more likely scenario in a bar, or even a restaurant. At 11 am last Saturday, I would have thought the same. At 12, I was dry heaving and cleaning up the big nasty. An elderly gentleman had apparently taken the military slang name for the trash can literally and relieved himself all over it and the surrounding area, and with a most unfortunate constitution to boot. I'm not telling this story to put his business out there. I know he didn't know what he was doing and, more than anything, I felt great empathy for him. But the younger woman who was with him, who went in there after him and made only a single swipe at the mess before heading for the hills, now she could have done a little better by the old KBster. As embarrassing as it would have been, if she didn't want to or couldn't clean it up herself, she might have at least told me and spared me the ten minutes of wandering around the shop, trying to figure out where the smell was coming from (and worrying in the back of my mind that, somehow, my sewer problems were back). Regardless, there I was, alone in the shop, and the buck stopped with me. So I worked through it. Unfortunately, I had also had a few drinks the night before, so it was doubly painful. I managed to avoid adding to the mess, but just barely. Fast forward a week...

This morning, I came in early to sweep and mop the store. Because I'm situated next to the Dust Bowl (the tattoo parlor parking lot is unpaved--a combination of gravel, dirt and trash), this is a fairly frequent occurrence that I've pretty much gotten down to a science. So I finished that up in short order and went out on my deck that juts out over the creek out back to give it some much needed attention. I noticed that I had some impressive weeds growing from the wall at one end, an eyesore my patrons surely did not need to see as they sat out and enjoyed their coffee and the sound of running water. Tree hugger that I am, I dismissed the idea of coming inside and grabbing my herbicidal sprayer. I congratulated myself on my environmental stewardship, crouched down to reach through my wrought iron railing and commenced to pulling weeds. First one, no problem. Second one, cool. Third one, oh my God, is that a snake? I won't keep you in suspense. It was. A little juvenile SOMETHING coiled up tight under what had formerly been its private green room. My mind always goes to worst case scenario, so naturally whatever it actually was became the meanest individual of a poisonous species lying in wait. So the strange blend of National Geographic, Man vs Wild and the Crocodile Hunter started playing in my head. Yep, the juveniles, they're always the meanest ones too. Blimey! He's a beaut! Their venom is concentrated because they don't know how to control the dosage. He has a small mouth, but he could bite me in the space between my fingers and kill me! Oh Lord, what to do? I don't want to hurt him--he's a beaut aint he?--but one wrong move and... So I ended up taking an ashtray off a nearby table and carefully raking him into the creek below. I watched him swim off before shakily retreating to the store to retrieve my herbicide sprayer. I love all of nature but, hell, it ain't worth DYING over.

Here's My Sign

2009-04-02T16:06:00.005-04:00

One of the more tedious aspects to my current situation is that everyone who reads the gaudy For Sale sign out front with the Business Relocating attachment comes in and asks the obvious question of where the business is relocating TO. Well-intentioned people who aren't satisfied with my stock answer of shrug/"Don't know yet" will ask further questions that proceed inevitably down the same line, and I invariably give up little chunks on information at a time, until I run through the same spiel several times a day of, "Well, I have to sell this building first and then see what's available. I can't afford to pay a mortgage and rent at the same time. I'm looking for a place out toward the main drag, where I can have better visibility and some foot traffic. Probably somewhere on Sycamore St." After several dozen cycles of lather, rinse, repeat, this has almost become verbatim phraseology...and a Pavlovian response. I hear chimes (like the ones that jangle when someone opens my door) and automatically launch into it. I'm thinking of recording it and just hitting play when someone walks in. Or posting a sign on the door. Or wearing one around my neck like the little bus-shaped signs the kindergarten teacher hung around your neck with yarn that reminded you of which bus to get on, in case you forgot. I'm brainstorming here.
Not that I'm complaining. Okay, yes I am. But I at least recognize that I shouldn't be complaining. That counts for something, right? What is a blog, really, except a personal electronic bully pulpit? If I really wanted to complain about something, I should raise hell about the fact that, with the warmer spring weather, has come a return of Crap Alley. I picked up one fresh pile not four feet away from my Dog Relief Station the other, only to step in another fresh pile buried in a pile of weeds. I finished weedeating, left that pair of shoes on top of my trunk to air out, forgot them and only remembered when I looked up to see only one of the pair in my rearview mirror. I retrieved the other one from the middle of Sycamore Street. But I digress. I wish I could say the question and answer scenario plays out several hundred times a day, because that would mean several hundred people are walking in the door (or that I'm on reality television). But the fact that I haven't yet had to make a sign is further testament to the fact that I need to relocate.

First, Kill Yourself

2009-03-11T22:54:00.001-04:00

I am bone tired of the seemingly constant stream of malcontents who go on shooting sprees because their girlfriend left them, or they got fired from the meat packing plant and their Dungeons and Dragons group kicked them out on the same day. I am exhausted with a society that keeps churning out members who think of lives, theirs and others', as a cheap medium for making a personal statement. To those who think that violence will finally free you from a life that is disproportionately harder than everyone else's, that shooting multiple someones will quell your anger at the world and give you the power no one has yet bestowed upon you, I say this. How about doing what the rest of the world does when faced with a crisis? GET OVER IT. Ask for the help you need, talk to someone, pop off a few rounds at some beer cans, hammer a couple hundred nails into scrap wood, take up an exercise regimen, whatever! Stop wallowing in the idea that your particular set of woe-is-me's are any worse than anyone else's, or that your latest bout with mediocrity entitles you to anything other than dusting yourself off and trying again. This is a novel approach for a professed liberal, I know, that of individual responsibility. And I'm not so naive as to not understand that most folks who are prone to violent rampages lack some critical coping mechanism to deal as the rest of the world does with disappointment and despair. So here's the corollary to the "deal with it" maxim. If your life is so hopeless, so miserable that you don't have any belief in redemption, if you are so sick of everything and so angry because no one in the world understands you, if you cannot face that you're no longer the high scorer in HALO or that you were picked on in 9th grade for not having the right kind of tennis shoes; rather than go out and indiscriminately spray bullets at a bunch of innocent people, and then end with yourself, try this. Show a little courage. START with yourself. Shoot yourself at point blank range in the head. This is all but guaranteed to cure any urge you have to shoot someone else.

Before anyone thinks I've lost what little stability I had before, I don't normally advocate suicide, even if it's for the greater good. And I don't really think what I ranted about in the first paragraph is the answer. But I'm so angry about the blame game and the recurring mantra of questions around these incidents that are never adequately answered. Alabama, Michigan, Colorado, Germany, Arkansas. The accents are different, the questions are always the same. How could this happen? Someone should have known. Someone should have done a background check at the gun show. Why didn't the teacher who read the fiction story he wrote in 2006 see that it was a cry for help? The National Rifle Association, it's their fault--assault rifles are the root cause of all this! Please. This is not a gun control problem. This is a society control problem. This is the function of a couple of generations of people who have been raised by electronic surrogates that are violent and desensitizing instead of parents who are involved and unafraid. This is the function of absentee authority figures and even more absent moral codes. When one of these incidents goes down, the scene is always the same, instant saturation news coverage, constant images of the shocked townspeople who can't believe that quiet guy could do this. We're outraged, we're shocked...at least for a few minutes. We pound our fists and demand that someone be brought to justice. We content ourselves with burying the dead and looking for clues in hindsight. Maybe we scratch around in the trailer dirt and figure out the specific string of triggers that set our latest shooter off. We are missing the big picture and missing the point. We never get down to cause and effect. To do that would require holding a mirror up to ourselves, and that has never been this country's strong suit. Instead, we shake our heads in disbelief, shudder a little as we run off to the next obligation. Meanwhile the kids take the shooting game off pause and "kill a few more guys."

Catulence and Dog Nation

2009-03-11T16:54:00.003-04:00

I always said when I was younger that if I ever got out of that animal-hating, penny-pinching, cleanliness-obsessed house where I was raised, I would have a whole HOUSEFUL of animals when I grew up. Well, I'm all grown up, and I do have a house full of animalia...and a new appreciation for why my mother always resisted my efforts to populate the house with every stray thing that wandered up.

Typical morning: I get up and start getting ready to exercise, almost stepping in a hairball puke pile on the way to the bathroom. Now anybody who has dogs knows that this is not really a problem. You call the pile to the attention of one or both of them and, HOOVER, problem solved. Except that they aren't having any part of this particular pile, probably because The Bug (our girl cat) always makes it a point to find the one narrow strip of carpet in the house and puke all over it, rather than the nice, easily cleaned hardwood that covers 99% of the floor. So far, I'm taking it in stride. I clean it up, get my tennis shoes and running stuff on, go downstairs, and find that the cats have gone off their litter. Little SPCA veterans that they are, they steadfastly resist any effort to refine their tastes to a more gucci (read, less disgusting to the primary pooper scooper--me) version of litter and can only be coaxed to pee and crap in a litter box filled with the most vilely cheap and dust contaminating stuff ever known to clog an air conditioning filter. They have also recently adopted a policy of refusing to drink after the dogs, preferring instead to alternately drink from the tub, toilet or any glass that is left uncovered. Let's just say, for example, that I forget and leave the bathroom door closed. Catulence, as the two cats are collectively known, has no qualms about breaking a glass to get to the inch of water left at the bottom. But I digress. Now that I have my running stuff on, the girl half of Dog Nation, as the dogs are collectively known, thinks she's going on a walk, so she's apoplectic. She's thrashing around like she's lost all sense of muscle control and spatial perception. The boy dog, whose given name is Tucker but who we call Dwayne Grubb, couldn't care less about going for a walk or anything else that involves a leash. So I thrust Harper, the girl dog out the door long enough to put his electronic transmitter collar on him before I saddle Harper up with her harness for a run. I'm just hitting my stride when I hear the clicking of toenails behind me. I should stop here and explain why Tucker is also known as Dwayne Grubb. It's because he's an old country good-ole-boy dog, who looks like he ought to be wearing a grimy John Deere cap and slugging a Budweiser while simultaneously working over a plug of Red Man. In short, he's a good fellow, the kind that if he were human, would throw his shoulder out a la Tim McGraw trying to win you a teddy bear at the fair, but he ain't the sharpest tool in the shed. He will not ever be called a pretty dog. The best way to describe him is he's kind of a dog centaur: he has a torso that is at least as long as his legs and it's all the same width from his chest to his neck, all the way up to his preternaturally large dog head. So he's clicking along behind me, unnaturally large head swaying dody-do, to and fro. And he doesn't have any interest in going back to the yard, especially since he's made his break, and I dont have a leash to use on him. Finally I manage to corral him by his transmitter collar and drag him back to the yard, along with Harper, who is pissed because she was short-changed on her run. By this point, I am late in my morning schedule, and I haven't even had a run, although I HAVE had a workout of sorts. Fast forward to the part of the morning "routine" where I leave.

Now, Dwayne Grubb spent the first 7 months of his life in a 10 x 10 kennel so when he became a house dog, it wasn't just country come to town, it was country come to a whole other country. Ole Dwayne has gotten used to the lap of luxury and no longer feels the call of the wild (or the outside). To the tune of, once he hears me making motions to leave, he trots his happy butt upstairs and lies down on the dog bed. No amount of coaxing, cajoling or threatening will get him up and out the front door. So I end up picking his 55 pound ass up and hauling it down the stairs and outside via the side door. Then I quickly grab my stuff, cursing because I'm late, open up the front door, and there he is. If I'm lucky and quick, I make it out before he scoots in past me.

313 Troy Street

2009-03-05T18:10:00.002-05:00

313 Troy Street

I don't know how to commemorate a life
except to show a snapshot of it
exactly the way it was
at some point in time
or, at least, exactly the way I remember
The poets say to be concrete, specific.
So I've turned my lens to their house
that weathered old nondescript place
across the street from the mill
I've tasted peanut dust and machinery hum
suspended
in mid-summer afternoon haze
watched a little white-haired woman
brush off the porch with a sage broom,
cuss horse flies under her breath.

I have racked my brain for details
I have gotten most of them wrong
The color of the carpet is fuzzy
I do not remember the neighbor at 311
the wall where the deer heads were
blurred subjects of yellowed pictures
or the yawning black maw of the fireplace.
But this much is vivid and true
and bathed in blazing technicolor:
There lived in that little old house
the greatest love story I've ever known.

I was fourteen, an eye-rolling know it all
when Granny told the story of their first date
the bumbling bumpy ride to Snellgrove's Mill
the dashing, daring figure he cut
when he dove headlong from the bridge.
I imagined the girlish squeal, the flood of relief
when his head popped up, turtle like
far below.
She said she could have killed him
instead they were married
for more than fifty years
clinging together through
poor and crumb-scraping poor
through ruddy health and the last stages
of time-shifter disease
and everything in between.

This, I believe, is where she is now.
They are on their first date
young and strong and beautiful
She has leaped off the bridge to join him
without fear or pain or hesitation.
He is waiting
and the water is fine.

Writing For Granny

2009-02-25T17:41:00.003-05:00

There is probably nothing harder than writing a poem on demand. As one who has sat in the seedy dive bar of my poetic thoughts with the three ton elephant of a love's birthday breathing down my neck, I felt sorry for Elizabeth Alexander. You remember her, the Yale professor who was tapped to commemorate Barack Obama's inauguration as the first African-American President? How could she possibly come up with anything to say that was more profound than the moment itself? It couldn't have helped that she was writing it for probably the finest orator of his generation. Poor, poor Maya Angelou, who broke a 30 year moratorium on poets by performing a piece she wrote for the event at silver-tongued Bill Clinton's inauguration. No pressure there. And Robert Frost, who not only had the difficult task of writing something for Mr. Ask-Not-What-Your-Country-Can-Do-For-You, but then he lost half his pages in a gusting wind and had to wing a different poem from memory. By all accounts, the winged poem was better than its more pedestrian counterpart.

My sister sent me a terse little email about three weeks ago that said only, "Granny is not doing well. Machelle (our aunt) asked me to contact you about writing a poem for the funeral program." At first I got mad. I was mad as hell because she told/asked me in what I thought was a callous way. I was angry because something seemed inherently wrong with talking about Granny as if she was already dead, as if we'd given up on her. But the truth is, she's been waiting almost 20 years to get back with her husband, who died way back when I was in high school. And after thinking about it a bit more, it struck me as somewhat disingenuous and maybe even dishonest to have spent the entirety of my adulthood away from Alabama, only to criticize my relations' handling of a difficult situation from afar. So I shut up and got to work. I sat in the seedy dive bar of my poetic thoughts and dredged up memories and tried to figure out how to come up with something so profound that it adequately captures the magnitude of her life and all the spiraling circles of those it touched.

Now, I probably spent more time at Granny's during the school year than I did at home. We lived in Clio, which is 30 minutes from where we went to school, so my sister would drag me over there to hang out with the grandparents while she did her myriad after-school activities. She kept a schedule in high school any medical intern would be proud of, and I, being a year young for my grade, was an unintended beneficiary. Looking back, Granny ALWAYS made me feel welcome, even during play season, when the practices stretched until 9:30 every night. I know there were probably times when she wanted to go to bed early, or wanted a little time to herself, especially since she was spending every minute of her days taking care of her ailing husband (who we called PawPaw--that's grandfather, for you non-Southerners). But she smiled and welcomed me, fed me, asked me what I wanted to watch on TV. I grew to love The Addams Family and The Monkees and Andy Griffith, and I was fascinated with the cable channel that showed local weather and announcements. Granny taught me to cuss (she would deny that she ever did, but she was a champion cusser, and I learned through osmosis). To love the old folks' network (CBS). I'm still partial to it to this day. To pour sweet tea out of a two gallon jar without spilling it. To be content with the slow sweetness of sitting on the porch swing and talking. To swat flies with deadly efficacy. That the kind of love worth having stuck around through poor and really poor, through good and bad, through ruddy health and the last stages of Alzheimer's and everything in between. That little 110 pound woman all but singlehandedly cared for PawPaw at home as he forgot where he was, who she was, who he was--almost everything except that he constantly wanted to smoke. When he died, she wanted to go, too, but it wasn't her time yet. What's that old line from Byron---"The heart will break, yet brokenly live on."

I decided a while ago that everyone gets their own brand of heaven. Everybody who makes it gets to stay forever in the place where they were happiest. For Granny, she will be on her first date with PawPaw. They will be young and beautiful and strong, and she will ride in the rumble seat to Pea River at Snellgrove's Mill. The air will be sweet and cool and heavy with honeysuckle and anticipation. She'll see him climb up the tressle bridge and walk out to the middle. He'll look back to make sure she's watching, and she'll squeal as he dives off into the murky water below. She'll think he's gone for sure. Then his head will pop up and he'll laugh and call her to join him, and she will. So that's where she is now, up on that tressle, inching out to the middle. And she's about to join him, about to leap off without pain or fear or hesitation.

So yeah, the Alexanders and the Angelous and the Frosts might have had more folks listening, but Granny's story is at least as profound. And I'm trying to make sure I tell it right.

The Anti Squatter Policy

2009-02-14T15:10:00.002-05:00

It's finally happened. I'm slightly mad. I broke down and made an anti-squatter policy. In other words, I explicitly spelled out Reading Room (seating area) policies for the store, and now I'm having second thoughts. I put together what I think is a tongue-in-cheek, light and gentle reminder that I'm not Barnes and Noble or the public library, posted it and now I'm second guessing: Does this REALLY need to be codified? Does there really need to be a sheet of paper on the coffee table that explains what is and is not appropriate behavior for the seating area of a small, independent bookstore? Do I need to take on the role of politeness police? The answer, apparently, is yes to all. I am amazed at how many people will sit here under my increasingly withering stare and read entire books with no intention of paying for them. I'm not talking about a 30 page children's book, either. I'm talking the entire epic scope of Desperate Duchesses, every sultry word of The Taste Of Innocence. I had one young lady drag no less than 15 different new books to her seating area lair over the course of several hours to research a paper for school. She even borrowed my pen. When she was done, she got up without so much as a thank you and rolled out--you guessed it--with my pen. The tattoo parlor next door opens at 1 pm; I open at 11 am. Sometimes, I get the benefit of their customers' company for the two hours between. They usually settle in with some trashy romance, invariably new, promptly bend the cover all the way around the back, and read until they see the tattoo parlor door swing open. Then, they hurriedly throw the book back in the direction of a shelf and rush over to be first in line for fresh ink. I've had people get comfortable (read, take their shoes off and loosen their belts) and sleep. I've had people hold entire phone conversations of a nature that should not be in the public domain.

In case you're wondering, I don't sit here and seethe in silence during these episodes. I did for a while. Confrontation is not something I enjoy. Now, I am neurotic, so generally, my internal dialogue goes something like this: hmm, looks like we've got another one. Oh come on Kristy, don't assume the worst about people. And don't be a chintzy b**** either. I'm not assuming the worst, I'm being realistic and besides, YOU just don't want to have to say something to them. Maybe they'll only stay a few minutes. Let me just wait and see. If they haven't closed up shop in the next 15 minutes, I'll say something. Please, you see them settling in for the long haul. What was that sound? Was that a pants button being undone? Oh, God. "Hey buddy, don't want to be a jerk or anything but if you're gonna hold that book captive much longer, we really ought to settle up." What happens next is always the same. They get up with a sigh, button their pants and leave without a backward glance.

My fickle faith in humanity doesn't need this kind of pressure. So now I have a policy to fall back on.

Death By Electronics

2009-01-30T17:29:00.006-05:00

I recently returned from a week-long mountain sojourn. A blissful, relaxing week at a posh log cabin filled with friends, camaraderie, hot tub soaks, sightseeing, good food and drink and...all the electronic noise I could stand. So, on one hand, I've come back rested, relaxed and recharged. On the other hand, the next text message alert tone that goes off nearby may trigger a total meltdown.

Don't get me wrong. I ADORE this group of friends--think every one of them is a beautiful, socially conscious, smart, funny person. So if you're one of THOSE people reading this, don't take it personally, or even too seriously. But there were 13 of us, and about 13,000 gadgets. We had Wii, we had Guitar Hero, we had karaoke, we had a theater room and hundreds of movies, we had cell phones, IPhones, IPODs, game timers, laptops with video games going. We had intracabin social networking threads! So I had to ask myself (again), how much is too much connectivity? At what point do the portable communication suites stop being something we use and start being something that uses us?

I sat in my shop with a friend talking about this very subject not long ago. We were trying to get our brains around what has fueled the constant connectivity craze. I know I think and write about this a lot, but it confuses me in the same way the Vanity Press Phenomenon confuses me (everybody is publishing a book these days, but that's a subject for another post). My friend and I reached a somewhat uneasy conclusion--we believe it's...are you ready? Insecurity. Yep, the shifty-eyed monster. If I have 75 friends on Facebook who comment on my constantly updated status, then I must be important to them. If I get 42 text messages while I'm on the crapper, I'm loved. If I publish a blog and fourteen people take a minute out of their already electronically overloaded day to read it, I've said something that matters. Never mind that it imprints on their brains for about 1.2 seconds before they roll on to the next thing. I remember talking to a guy some years ago who said he'd put a network in his house so he and his wife could "talk to each other." At the time, that was really strange and funny to me. Today, it's pretty much the norm. I don't advocate going back to the dark ages before the Internet. I think it's generally done vastly more good than harm. Information availability, better world understanding, improved quality of life for millions--you name it. I just think electronic interaction is a poor substitute for the human touch and wonder what we as a society are losing because we're on a path to forget that.

Stopping For Death

2009-01-15T10:46:00.002-05:00

I was almost run over on the way to work this morning. I had pulled over to let a funeral procession pass and the person following too closely behind me was apparently attending his cell phone conversation more than his driving. He narrowly avoided ploughing into me as he swerved and jerked by, middle finger extended on his phone hand. He managed to drop the phone long enough to blow the horn a few hard times and gesticulate wildly before he passed out of sight.

Way back when I was first learning to drive, I was taught to stop for funeral processions, and I still do to this day, unless I'm on a road where I absolutely can't. Of those who still know about this old tradition, I'd guess that most don't practice it anymore, believing it belongs to another time or place. I understand this--certainly the speed of our lives has increased exponentially and the speed of our transit has, too. It's not always the smartest thing to do, or the safest. I went through a phase where I talked myself out of doing it for a few years, even when I was safely able. But I came back to it. It's not about whether I knew or respected the deceased as a person. It's not that I don't have a sense of urgency about where I go and how fast I get there now that I'm not in the military rat race anymore. I do, probably more so now than then. It's not that I've developed more patience than I once had. I can't claim a highminded embrace of all that binds us together. I lose patience with the indigent population of Petersburg at least twice a day. I see this as simply stopping for just a minute and recognizing that there passes someone who shared the earth with me--who loved and laughed and changed his little corner of the world in one way or another. I guess when it comes down to it, it's a nod to my own mortality, and a moment taken to reflect on how I can live a little bit better. Because even for those who can't stop for death, it WILL eventually stop for us.

Cling To Your Guns and Racism Much?

2009-01-08T18:33:00.005-05:00

A vocal minority of people in the Tri-Cities are LIVID. I mean, they are beside themselves. I haven't seen them this fired up since last year's property assessments came out. I've been reading tirades to the editor of the local paper for the past few days decrying Hopewell School Superintendent Winson Odom's decision to close his city's schools for Inauguration Day, in recognition of the "specifically historic" significance the day carries. The make-up day will be held on President's Day.
One woman wrote in to say that, IF she had children in the Hopewell schools, they would NOT be attending school on President's Day. She didn't say specifically, but I'm sure she'd home school on Inauguration Day. The curriculum? Revisionist History 101. She wanted to know why the Superintendent didn't "take away" Martin Luther King Jr Day instead, asking, "Do our former presidents not matter anymore?" She went on to say (and I'm quoting directly, because I don't want to put words in her mouth) that "Obviously, all the excitement is because Barack Obama won the presidential election based on the color of his skin and not the content of his character and that is the real reason why you've switched holidays." Another woman's brilliant repartee included this gem: "Martin Luther King was NOT a President! He was just a man 'with a dream!' But we are forced to honor him but we can not honor our past presidents! Why are we being forced to forget our history?" Sigh. So much idiocy, so little time.
I thought about writing a reasoned, measured rebuttal to the Editor. But really, what chance does mere logic have against such blind passion? These are the same folks who ARE NOT RACIST (some of their best friends are black), but who cannot accept that a black man, no matter how intelligent, well-spoken and astute, is the best qualified to run the country. These are the same folks who authored and forwarded vicious chain e-lies about Barack Obama's religious beliefs to try to prevent his election. These are the same folks who don't see Virginia's reluctant acceptance of the Martin Luther King holiday only after years of foot-dragging and only with the monicker Robert E. Lee tacked on to the end as anything except a generous compromise. These are the same folks who really don't understand at the most basic level that Martin Luther King was, in fact, just a man. Not a black man, but a MAN with a huge, all-encompassing dream who toiled, bled and died to help us realize our shared humanity. Barack Obama's inauguration is the culmination of the dream. Not just for black people, but for all of us. We all, as Maya Angelou said, "grew up a bit" with his election. Well, at least most of us did. Some sore losers are still throwing temper tantrums in the local paper.
I don't mean to downplay the significance of these displays of barely concealed racism by making them sound like the isolated petulance of a select few. It is both disheartening and infuriating to me that people can't come together and see that this is a huge milestone in our country's history. We are walking on the moon of brotherhood here, and some people are still worried somebody's going to take their share. How sad. It's a long road ahead for them and a long time coming for the rest of us.

The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be

2008-12-19T13:11:00.007-05:00

Last night, the book store fulfilled its promise, maybe for the first time. I had always envisioned it as a creative community gathering place, a resource for the literate and literary. We had sponsored numerous events to foster the growth of that type of relationship with the community, but attendance, especially on non-Friday For the Arts nights, had been sporadic. This was partly due to my sometimes clumsy efforts to promote the events and partly due to the events themselves not quite resonating with their intended beneficiaries. It has been, to say the least, a steep learning curve. But last night, the walls rang with the musical clack and clatter of words bouncing off of words. The shop teemed with talented young writers who shared their work and worked on building their own creative community. The Governor's School Reading Series kicked off here last night, and we traded in ideas, coffee and comfortable seating, the way I've always intended.

It's important for writers to commune and equally important for them to read their work aloud in a supportive environment. But it's not only important to the writers. It's also important to a healthy, vital community to hear new voices and fresh ideas. The best thing about these particular voices is that they're good! So often, young writers (and some not-so-young writers) fall in love with their own vocabulary and use their writing first and foremost as the vehicle to show it off. Another mistake young writers frequently make is to write outside themselves. Because their life experience is usually somewhat limited, they try to compensate with vividly imagined but unwieldy fantasies. Not so with the group that was here last night. To a one, they had something to say; they had strong, viable voices; and they weren't afraid to use them. They wrote and spoke with passion and clarity about topics that mattered. They showed they have the courage to write and speak honestly, and they deserve ears to listen. So mark your calendar for the next reading in the series: January 15 at 5 pm.

The Efficiency Review, Reviewed

2008-12-17T09:56:00.003-05:00

Following is an open letter to the Mayor of Petersburg, pasted in its entirety, from Greg Werkheiser, executive director of the Phoenix Project in response to the paralysis and, in some cases, foot dragging recalcitrance surrounding city government's response to the Berkshire Advisors' Efficiency Review. Will this latest bout of heightened visibility be the impetus for real change in this city's government? It's long, but worth a read through, particularly the recommendations section. My comments on it to follow.

Dear Mayor Mickens,

Thank you for your willingness to adjust the format of last night’s public meeting on the Berkshire Advisors’ Organizational Efficiency and Effectiveness Study to reflect the expectations of the public for a more direct exchange of feedback. I am sure you were as impressed as I was at the size of the meeting’s audience and their deep hunger for timely action on the recommendations of the Study.

As you know, I serve as Executive Director of the Phoenix Project, a nonprofit organization that serves as a facilitator and matchmaker in Petersburg, helping the community identify its priorities for revitalization and helping bring to bear resources on those priorities. Over the past three years, we have built a strong partnership between the Petersburg community and nine colleges and universities, each of which regularly makes available students, faculty and administrators to work on economic and community development projects for the City. To date, more than 350 students, faculty and administrators have completed more than 150 capacity building projects for fifty-five nonprofit and municipal organizations serving the residents of Petersburg. Our work together in Petersburg is now serving as a model for efforts in other parts of Virginia and is receiving national attention. We are grateful for your support of our efforts and your continued welcome of our work in Petersburg.

As we have come to know Petersburg, its residents, nonprofit organization leaders, faith leaders, business community, and public servants, we have been impressed with their resilience and determination in the face of many challenges. As our university partners have brought resources to bear on these challenges in the short-term, we have also engaged our partners in Petersburg in a discussion about the longer-term revitalization of the City. It has become clear to us through these conversations that the lack of accountability and capacity in City government are chief impediments to sustainable revitalization of the City, and that our work here provides short term infusions that cannot lead to longer term positive results without significant changes in the City’s management.

We believe that you and your fellow members of Council were therefore acting responsibly and with great respect for your constituents when you voted to engage a third party consultant to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of City government in an effort to ensure that Petersburg’s citizens are well served. Our Associate Director, Marion Werkheiser, served on the committee that selected Berkshire Advisors to conduct the Study, and the Phoenix Project helped organize community gatherings to provide input to the consultants as they gathered information for their report. We also remained in close contact with the consultants as their report was repeatedly delayed by an inability or unwillingness of city staff to provide basic information about city operations; their contract called for delivery by the end of 2007, yet the report was not delivered to Council until August of this year. I write to clarify some of the process questions that arose at last night’s meeting and suggest a path for Council’s response to the Study.

In keeping with the Phoenix Project’s role encouraging community engagement to develop community-wide priorities, I was particularly dismayed by the excuses offered by five City Council members at last night’s meeting for their repeated and intentional failure to turn in completed surveys to the consultants performing a study for which taxpayers paid tens of thousands of dollars. These excuses included a lack of time to respond (even though they were given more than seven months to respond); inability to articulate their consituents’ preferences (articulating constituents’ preferences is the definition of serving in representative government, even when one is newly appointed to the position); not having the report on which to base the survey (but the survey was required to inform the report); and Berkshire’s failure to receive the survey upon first transmission, and the Councilmember’s refusal to re-send. If City Council members do not have the time or commitment to complete and deliver a survey critical to the fair assessment of the operation of City government, they will not have the much greater amount of time and commitment required to oversee the fixing of the very broken city government. These members should be invited publicly to affirm their willingess and ability to assume the time-consuming responsibility of oversight of transformation change, or they should be thanked for their service and invited to resign from their office to make room for leaders who do have the time.

I was further dismayed last night by Council’s refusal to admit the true circumstances surrounding the absence of representatives from Berkshire Advisors at this meeting. As you know, Berkshire Advisors was contractually obligated to present its findings in person to City Council and to the Board of the Cameron Foundation. Berkshire staff repeatedly, and for many weeks, requested permission from the City Manager for the opportunity to present their findings and recommendations at a City Council meeting, but they were consistently ignored. We are grateful that Council finally voted last night to invite Berkshire to present its findings to the public. Yet this situation reveals the detriment of Council entrusting further action on the recommendations of this Study to the very City personnel who sought to deny the opportunity for the public to hear directly from the consultants. How can you now expect the public to agree with you that such persons are earnestly committed to or capable of fundamental change?

In the first two minutes of last night’s meeting you berated in front of all attendees Councilmember Pritchett for speaking out publicly about the Council’s unwillingness to fulfill its oversight responsibilities by relying too heavily on the City Manager for information and to do the Council’s work. Yet the excuse the Council offered last night for not having developed in the four months since the Study was delivered an action plan to address the significant management challenges it faces was that Council has not yet received guidance by City staff. This failure simply affirms the reality Councilmember Pritchett acknowledged. The Council seems unwilling or unable to offer leadership independent of the City Manager.

This places front and center the question raised by the Study: whether top City staff, on whose long watch the dysfunctional conditions have manifest, are the appropriate persons to lead the City through transformational change. Of course it is the case that no single person is responsible for the maladies facing the City. But top management has demonstrated clear and extensive failures within their direct control. As the Efficiency Study pointed out, there are no accountability mechanisms for government in Petersburg. Is the Council still not willing to put in place such measures of accountability at all levels of government, including top management?
The Study proposes significant changes in every City department, the implementation of which could take a number of years. It will be important for Petersburg residents and community leaders to be involved throughout that process, as difficult decisions are weighed and made. To that end, I respectfully suggest the following course of action for City Council:

1. Prior to the next City Council meeting, members should frankly assess whether the transformational leadership required to fix the many troubles identified by the Study will require more time and/or energy than they are personally able to commit over the next several years. If so, they should have the courage to tender their resignations at the next meeting. Candidates to replace them should be asked to describe in detail their plans for supporting transformational change in the management of City government.

2. Those members of Council who remain should prepare themselves to describe in detail to the public at the next meeting and at all meetings thereafter, their personal plan for supporting the transformational change required in City government.

3. You stated last night that City Council will receive memoranda from City staff containing scenarios for implementation of the Efficiency Study recommendations at a meeting in January. Please request that those memoranda be submitted to Council and made available to the public at least one full week in advance of the January meeting. Failure to provide the memoranda in advance severely limits the ability of Council and the public to prepare for the meeting and further delays informed discussion of action that must be taken.

4. As you indicated you would do last night, employ the public school phone tree to provide notice of the next public meeting; also, ask the Progress-Index to do an article in advance of the meeting (in addition to the legal notice), put details of the meeting on the City’s website, and circulate notice to City leaders for whom the City has email accounts encouraging them to circulate it to their contacts.

5. Council should be prepared at the January meeting to announce a complete schedule of meetings for 2009 and 2010 dedicated just to public discussion of progress in reforming City government as indicated by the Study. The meetings should be held at least every other month, in an open-exchange format, without the presence of City staff. Every City Council member should come to these meetings fully prepared to discuss and answer questions about progress on specific action items. The maladies diagnosed by the Study are far too serious and numerous to be adequately addressed to the public’s satisfaction in a handful of episodic meetings.

6. Appoint a private citizen-led task-force to provide guidance directly to the Council on implementation of recommendations of the Study.

7. Set aside thirty minutes at each regular City Council meeting for members of the task force to report exclusively on the City’s progress in tackling an aspect of the dysfunction in City government diagnosed in the Study. The Council should suspend its practice of not responding to specific citizen questions for this portion of the meeting.

8. When inviting Berkshire Advisors to present their findings and processes at their earliest availability, please advise them to be prepared to describe the process through which they solicited input from City Council members and City staff. The public deserves to understand the true circumstances surrounding their representatives’ failure to participate in the survey process.

9. Conclude, as so many of us have, with deep regret given our personal affinity for Mr. Canada, that it is no longer an open question as to whether he has the ability to lead transformational change in City management. Hire a professional recruiting firm and task them with securing the highest quality applicants for the position. Set above-market salary for this position to enable the recruitment of applicants with proven experience in turning around broken city governments. Have a candidate in place by March, allowing him or her to immediately, with the further assistance of the recruiting firm, hire replacements for the many vacant positions in City staff leadership and build a team capable of delivering the change the community so deserves.

The Phoenix Project stands ready to partner with the City in this process of transformation, and we will seek out resources from all of our university partners and other contacts to assist in whatever ways we can be helpful. We are committed to our work in Petersburg and believe that the Efficiency Study represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Council to reverse Petersburg’s decline and chart a new course for good government and prosperity for all residents.

I have been impressed by your personal character in the three years in which we have had the opportunity to work together. I think you have the ability and the courage to set an example for other Council members at this critical time in the City’s history. Should you lead boldly you will have my full support and deep gratitude.

Respectfully yours,
Greg Werkheiser
Executive Director
The Phoenix Project

Who Is Venus Flytrap?

2008-12-13T11:39:00.004-05:00

He's not speaking in a dungeon, really. It only looks that way because my camera is cheap and crappy.

The world needs more Tim Reids. Tim Reid was an articulate, insightful, thoughtful black man before Barack Obama made it fashionable. Long before Obama rose to rock star status after the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Reid quietly laid part of the path for him by chipping away at overt and covert racism through television and film. Reid has made it his life's work to bring real African-American people to us through his characters. Real people with real problems, joys, sorrows and triumphs. People that aren't based on exaggerated stereotypes and white perceptions of how black people "should" be. People that don't demean themselves by taking the path of low self-expectation. People that don't spend their energy denigrating themselves or others. People who, in short, don't cater to the lowest common denominators of our society, whether they be racist, misogynist or otherwise unable to see and respect our shared humanity.

Tim Reid was here at the store last night, and it was a rare treat to hear him speak. He spoke about passion and integrity in art and life. He spoke about the responsibility he felt to use his art to add something to the world. He lamented the lack of moral compass in today's artists, particularly comedians. He talked about the way young comedians of the hip-hop generation (whether black or white or whatever) spend a lot of time and energy trying to come up with new ways to be shocking, but not much time inventing new ways to be FUNNY. He talked about how our political correctness has taken a lot of the fun out of our culture.

What struck me maybe more than anything about his talk was that his voice was the same one in his memoir. The same quick, mildly self-deprecating wit came through in person as did in the book. Normally when a celebrity "writes" a book, they do little besides allow limited access to the person who REALLY writes it, and provide a name to stamp on the front. But Reid managed to once again, tell a very compelling story in his own voice in his memoir and, by doing that, has once again given us a real person to admire.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go Now?

2008-12-11T13:09:00.002-05:00

Petersburg is all about opportunity right now. The city brims with potential. All over town, airguns and hammers and drills drum a steady cacophony of progress. There are at least ten buildings I can think of off the top of my head whose owners are pouring ideas, money and sweat equity into them in the hopes of renting the bottom floor to a business and the top two or three to residents and, ultimately, creating the kind of urban vibe that makes people excited to come here.
So now I'm in that mix (as if I weren't already). I've been introduced to an opportunity to move my store from its current back alley into the commercial corridor of Sycamore Street. This may seem like a no-brainer, but it's actually kind of a tough decision. On one hand, I get approximately zero walk-up customers and no impulse shoppers at my current location. It's a full five minute discussion to explain to someone how to get to me. Sometimes, it takes multiple phone calls. There is nothing particularly special about the building, except that it does have a warm, open feel and, maybe most importantly, it's MINE. I own the building and all the sweat blood and tears I and many of my friends have poured into it. I've thrown my back out there, right there in the front flower bed. I've dug up spark plugs and light bulbs and manifolds. Beth and I painted the floor its current Ronald McDonald red.
Flip side: the guy I'd be working with to renovate the proposed Sycamore Street location TO SUIT has already been featured on HGTV's "What You Get For the Money." His sense of style and aesthetic are impeccable. And he's excited about putting together an ultra-hip book store/coffee shop/neighborhood hangout in the space. The kind of place people go to because it's cool to be seen there. The space itself is located on Sycamore Street in the Uptown section. So it's not exactly "there" yet, but it, like so much else in Petersburg, has a lot of potential. It's a few blocks removed from the bulk of the existing businesses and the Friday For the Arts crowds, but one of the city's best galleries will move there in the summer and another is projected to open next year as well. The new ice cream and snack shop just opened, a full service spa is already there, and another beautifully redone historic building waits for the right tenant in the next block.
Flop side: the parking situ is less than optimal. There is minimal onstreet parking, usually full, and only one city lot in the back to service increasing numbers of residential and commercial properties. Although my potential landlord says he's never had a problem finding parking, I have...several times. And, as far as walk-up customers, it may be jumping from the freezer to the ice tray. There is little pedestrian traffic in the area right now, partly due to limited parking and partly due to limited business to attract it. There is the pain factor and expense of moving, not to mention the minor problem of needing to sell the building I'm in first. In this economy, that may be the long pole in the tent. So I'm torn. On one hand, I see it as a great opportunity. On the other hand, I see it as yet another leap of faith. I've made so many of those in the past year, I'm starting to worry that not having a net is going to catch up to me.

Tha Dog Pound

2008-12-11T12:10:00.002-05:00

It was unnaturally warm last night. So much so that we were sitting on the front porch enjoying a beverage when a meatheaded old brindle pit bull we'd never seen before wandered into the yard to play with Harper. It was an idyllic dog romp through the clover--Harper dominating the dog as she is wont to do, him letting her, us petting them both. Then Shaft, the skulking little ne'er-do-well male dog across the street, decided he couldn't take this affront to his territory.
Side note on Shaft's personality: Shaft is the kind of uneasy little beast who sees you come in and out of your house several times a day and sometimes he barks at you and sometimes not. When you're out walking sometimes you'll get a sense that something is following you and you whirl around expecting to fight the Walnut Hill knife rapist, but it turns out it's only Shaft, sneaking around behind you like he's trying to pull a flank maneuver. You call him, he starts growling. You walk toward him, trying to make friends. He turns and slinks off, only to resume following you after you turn and keep walking.
Meanwhile, back at Michael Vick's Ranch: Shaft charged down the hill toward the street and growled at the stranger dog. Bared his teeth. Then he ran. Well, he got about ten feet before that pit bull was on him like stink on crap. A blur of brown and white and then the most horrible, asphyxiating yelping sound. The pit had him by the throat. That fast. And he wasn't letting go. I have never seen anything like a pit bull when it has something locked up. The scene escalated rapidly. Beth ran over, the people in the house came out. When I ran over, a fully grown man and woman were out there kicking and hitting this pit bull as hard as they could, screaming, cussing, etc, hollering about, "he's gon' kill that mother f------!" And ole Shaft WAS, in fact, rapidly expiring. Beth and I both yelled at them to get a water hose, because that's really the only chance to get a bulldog off of something without killing it. About that time, one of the men went and got a shovel and was about to brain the dog. The pit got distracted by the woman hitting him in the head and went to shift his grip and Shaft somehow weaseled out of there. He ran on around the house with the pit hard on his trail. The neighbors managed to get Shaft into the house and the door closed just before the other dog showed up at the door. Just as quickly as he'd gone berserk, the pit calmed down into the same docile fellow he'd been before the ugly scene. He was wheezing from the exertion and from being kicked in the ribs and his nose was bloodied but, other than that, he was totally calm. It's hard to tell, because it seemed like everything was in super slow motion, but I'd estimate the whole thing lasted less than five minutes. If it had lasted a minute more, I have no doubt there would have been at least one dead dog.
We fended off the guy with the shovel, who looked like he still had some inclination to use it, and took the pit bull back over to the house while we called the police. They didn't want to send anyone out at first, because it was an animal control problem, but finally they agreed. Fast forward to the end. After some cajoling and convincing on our part (there apparently is no provision for after hours animal control emergencies except to call someone with a key and hope they can come out), the dog rode off in the back of the police cruiser.
All that to say this: the ugly, snarling, violent scene last night made me kind of rethink my opinion of pit bulls. I had always thought they were a breed whose behavior doesn't justify their negative reputation. I had always thought the way an animal, any animal, acted was a direct reflection of its owner and how it was trained and treated. I had owned a pit bull before and thought it was the most loyal, gentle dog I had ever had. But this dog was also someone's pet. It was well cared for and not scarred. And it turned on a dime and became a killer. Granted, Shaft is annoying and it wouldn't have been any great loss to the Brandon Avenue scene, but still. I wouldn't have a pit for a pet now. Not after seeing what I saw last night.

Two Worlds Collide

2008-12-05T14:10:00.004-05:00

About three weeks ago, I received the "gift" of a starter for Amish friendship bread from an alleged friend. We'll call her "Lana." Now, I have the cooking skills of a caveman, but this was something I could appreciate--an easy, gradual-rising recipe with explicit instructions. Although my culinary past has been checkered at best, I saw myself working through my cooking issues with this, then moving on to more and more complicated recipes before finally romping gloriously through Elysian Fields with the Larousse Gastronomique.
The idea of the bread being slow and methodical appealed to me. I liked that "only the Amish know how to make the starter." I pictured some humble, Nurse Ratched-haired Amish lady back in rural Pennsylvania humming as she mixed it by hand before sending it out into the world, and I teared up at her innocence. I loved the notion of kneading and burping the bag every day and watching it bubble and ferment. I liked that you could only use wood and glass cooking implements. Somehow, it harkened back to a simpler time. AND, given my current fiscal constraints, and my ever-growing disdain for the gross commercialism Christmas has become, I thought it would neatly address both these issues. I would give a loaf of bread and a starter kit to many of the people on my list. It would be both thoughtful and frugal. That is, if I survived the vicious cycle of the bread itself.
The first run was almost biblical in its magnitude. Each bag makes four more starters and two loaves, which made me think of the five loaves and two fishes (or two loaves and five fishes, I forget). We were gonna feed the multitudes, except we couldn't give the things away. Most of my friends, it turns out, have already been through their friendship bread cycle and have no desire to get caught up in its yeasty clutches again.
Every day, there's work to be done with the starter bags. I'm either kneading or adding ingredients, or both. This is all well and fine--it doesn't take that long and it's easy--until day six comes and I'm late for work and out of milk and the $*^&# starters each need a cup of milk, in addition to a cup of flour and sugar. Then I realize, I have become a slave to the bread. I get two of the four situated at home by diluting the 2% milk with water to make two cups, dropping half a starter on the floor when the bag slumps over the counter edge while I'm diluting the milk. The dog dutifully laps it up before I can get to it, and I'm already running through my mental phone book in search of an auxiliary kneader for day seven, because I'll be at the vet all day with the sick dog. Because there's no way I can make it by the grocery store AND open on time, I drag the other two bags to work with me and do my duty by them with milk from the store, promptly squeezing a big splash of starter onto the counter and floor when I knead a bag that wasn't fully closed. It's 1050, I open at 11, and the bread has just taken over the last bastion of my sanity. By now, I am hating on the Amish--God bless their modern-convenience-hating, wholesome family-oriented gray-clad hearts! I seethe through days 7,8, and 9, lulling myself into a false sense of normalcy. Day ten rolls around, and I realize when I walk in the door at 9 pm and four bags are sitting there staring at me like some evil, amorphous, self-rising devils; that it's baking day and I was supposed to get the vanilla pudding on the way home, but I didn't and now Food Lion is closed. So I put it off a day, come home the next day proudly dragging the bag of vanilla pudding, only to realize I'm out of sugar. The bread is, by now, LAUGHING. I hear it when one of the bags explodes because I forgot to burp it on days nine and ten. Exhausted, I call Lana and make her feel somehow responsible--you GAVE me this stuff, remember? So she gets out of bed and brings me all her sugar and I manage to make it through baking two of the starters before I collapse in a flour-coated heap on the floor to awaken the next morning and start the cycle all over. I want to throw the remaining starters away, but somehow I can't bring myself to do it (what if it doesn't come back around in time for Christmas?). So I put an ad on Craig's List to give them away. So far, no takers.

The Trucker Butterfly

2008-11-21T15:28:00.005-05:00

So I was sitting here a little while ago bawling my face off over an article in the paper about a couple in upstate New York who stinted the broken wing of a monarch butterfly and sent the recovered insect to Florida with a trucker who was willing to take responsibility for its safe passage. This is the second time in about a week that I've walked around my shop a wreck--a big emotional sucking chest wound--and I don't know what's happened to me. It seems I'm becoming my mother, who will drop a tear on you before you can say Hallmark Christmas movie.
Also today, I've been helping my sister edit poems and stories from her middle school-aged students via email. They're bright kids and well-taught, but they use language in the same way gangly-legged, pimply-faced pubescents french kiss. They're so excited about their new skill, and so they practice it with great enthusiasm, in staggering quantities, but without much discretion. And boy, is it messy. Time after time, I've written comments to the effect of, "So what?" (phrased in a more tactful way) and "Give us concrete imagery and examples instead of big, abstract words." I told one young lady that I cared less about her entire first stanza than one crumpled deer on the Maury River roadside. I went on to explain why: because I see that deer, picture it bounding across the road. I see it freeze in the arc of headlights sweeping around a blind curve, and then I picture it lying in the unnatural pose in which it fell. Why does that mean something to me? Because as a human, I identify with something else alive. I identify with the concept of going about the business of my life until waylaid, maybe even run over, by some uncaring juggernaut. My point is this: there is nothing more immediate and real to me than something else alive, in need, and nothing more human than trying to help. On the surface, it's an insect, and maybe the laws of selection dictate that you should leave it alone. Dig a little deeper, though, and it's a snapshot of the connection between all life. It's the illumination of one tiny act of humanity. It's a good news story in a time when we don't get many of those. It's getting outside the mindset of, "It's not my business--probably wouldn't make a difference anyway" and making the world better by the breadth of a butterfly's wing.

Chester Envy

2008-11-18T14:12:00.005-05:00

Yesterday, I drove the 20 minutes north to Chester to a friend's shop. The friend was one of the first people I met in Petersburg and helped me immensely in establishing a foothold on the slippery slope of small business ownership and in setting up my shop in Petersburg. Little did I know that, three months after my grand opening, she'd move on to the greener pastures of suburbia. I felt betrayed. WHAT?!? You're leaving? But you just opened (in the space I pined away over for my store, no less)! And the arrival of an independent bookstore surely signals the beginning of a major renaissance. Here I come to save the day!
But as I drove on non-potholed streets past eclectic shopping centers and newish, fully accredited schools, I started to understand why she moved away from a downtown that is surely, this time, like so many times before, on the verge of being something special. In fact, I may have developed the slightest case of Chester Envy. Restaurants, shops, schools, houses neatly arranged with, get this, ample parking designated for them! No psychiatric deficients manning the front doors like it's their job. I was not approached for a cigarette or bus money, I was not asked for an odd job, nor was I verbally assaulted for being married to The Doc (all regular occurrences on any given day in the 'Burg). Although I didn't know exactly where I was going, I felt safe. The growing sense of envy was not helped in the slightest when I pulled into her parking lot. Pristeen black asphalt, new building, fresh paint, workable public infrastructure and, best of all, a community dedicated to sensible development. In short, all the things Petersburg does not have.
That set me wondering why people like me make Petersburg our home. Why do we keep believing and pouring our blood, sweat and tears toward what we hope will be the town's eventual triumph? Are we hard-luck cases ourselves? Do we want to be the proverbial big fish in the small pond? Do we want to be the only game in town? Is it easier to have the safety net of being able to blame our personal failures on a city that's failing? Maybe, maybe not. It's hard not to hope for good things for this city. We see so much potential for a phoenix rising from the ashes of the past. It's hard not to root for the underdog. This city has certainly had its share of adversity. It's hard not to get caught up in a sense of the excitement of possibility, especially given our country's recent path. So we choose to live and work here and, on some level, to cast our fortunes in with those of the city. But it's also really hard to keep being positive when there seems to be no comprehensive plan to "get there from here," and seemingly no sense of urgency about developing one. Seeing a town that's already there makes it that much more obvious.

The Art Of Guileless Fiction

2008-11-13T17:53:00.006-05:00

I've been trying to understand why I love a good children's story almost above all else these days. This after I've just sat here and sobbed through Kate DiCamillo's Because of Winn Dixie in preparation for my Kids Book Club meeting tomorrow morning. The conclusion I reached (after ruling out regression) is that there is nothing better to me than a good story, simply told. I'm of the school that believes that good stories want to be told. There are millions of them out there right now, sailing around on the winds like dreams, waiting for their chance to be born. Looking for the person who has enough self-confidence to see the story as bigger than themselves, someone who recognizes beauty in simplicity and can get out of the way of it.
Children's authors, perhaps because they make their living writing for an audience that hasn't learned the art of guile, seem to understand this better than other authors. I'm so tired of books that are studiously and condescendingly obtuse, as if their authors are writing for the Pulitzer Committee instead of for the sake of the story itself. I'm tired of fluently jumbled chronologies, tired of innovative techniques, bored with trickster narrators, exhausted with the lion's share of the history of a country summarized neatly in footnotes in a work of fiction! Tell me a good story well, and you don't need gimmicks. Tell me something that illuminates our shared humanity. Tell me something that surprises, enlightens, makes me laugh and cry. Tell me something true. You don't need $50 words to do it. You just need to listen and then get out of the way. And read some children's books before you start.

Squatters

2008-11-11T15:19:00.002-05:00

One of the many interesting things about the transition from military life to that of a self-employed business person, is that it has changed the definition of, well, almost everything. Here's a less than profound for-instance. During an adult lifetime spent in the military, cruising around to some of the world's least desirable places, "Squatter" was how I thought of myself in most foreign countries. Certainly, I considered the political aspect of the term: that we were unwanted temporary residents of whatever port we'd crashed for that particular 3-6 day span. But mostly, it was even more fundamental than that. That is to say: You didn't ever SIT on a toilet in east Europe or west Africa or, say, in certain southern Georgia gas stations (even assuming there was somewhere to sit, which wasn't always the case). You squatted and worked your little excremental muscles to direct the stream in what you hoped was generally the right direction, wiped what you could with toilet paper you had stuffed in a pocket for the evening and left without looking back in the hopes that whatever vermin resided there would be so impressed by your unflappability that they'd leave you alone. This concept served me well for more than 16 years and allowed me to escape such notorious armpits as Lagos, Nigeria and Naples, Italy without incident.

Now that my most exotic destination is West Bank Street in Petersburg, I've refined the concept of squatting to serve my civilian needs. Over six months of looking through the glass bowl of small town central Virginia, "Squatter" has come to mean those members of our society who make a living out of glomming free stuff from local businesses. I should point out here that I'm not talking about folks who come in, buy a cup of coffee, set up their computer and use my wi-fi to check their email and surf the Internet for an hour or two. I'm not even implying that coming in and hanging out at the local bookstore without buying something ain't cool. The whole point of having a comfortable seating area, wi-fi and coffee is so that people feel welcome to come in and chill for a little while. I'm mostly talking about the professionally unemployed folks who make up a sizable minority of Petersburg's population, typically on some form of disability payment, who literally have nothing else to do besides hang out either in the streets or in whatever business they've selected as the day's mark. I know this probably sounds mean-spirited and petty because, without firsthand experience with Petersburg's storied partnership with Central State Psychiatric Hospital AND the city's cultivation of a Section 8 housing market cities four times its size would envy, I would have thought so too. I've read some references that estimate that over 40% of the population is disabled in some way, and it's a well-documented fact that the literacy rate here hovers around 60%. This is certainly not the fault of the people who are disabled, and I don't put it on them, but it does lead to a somewhat dysfunctional city. So here, without my trademark tendency to exaggerate, is a sampling of descriptions of my Squatters to date.

Squatter #1 skulked in a minimum four of the six days per week I was open during my first couple of months. Some days, he'd sit on the wall outside waiting for me to open, but always, he was here by the time I'd been open an hour. Ex-military himself, he apparently believed this gave us instant rapport and would set up base camp on one of my couches and proceed for the next five to seven hours to hang out with his new vet buddy. He didn't even leave to eat, he laughed and talked loudly to himself, he got up and grabbed books periodically to use as reference material for whatever project he had spread out over half the seating area. He talked to me almost constantly as I worked on the administrative tasks required to run the business during my slow times. It exhausted me to keep being nice when all I really wanted was soem quiet, but I convinced myself that even this wasn't so bad--he was a nice enough fellow, just seemed to have some social adjustment issues. Then he also developed the tiniest little annoying habit of insinuating himself into conversations with other customers. Finally, after the fourth customer commented on his unsolicited comments, we had to have the "appropriate amount of time to be spending here" talk. This was my first time kicking someone out, and I felt like an absolute ass. In spite of exercising as much tact as I could muster and reassuring him that he was a good person and it was nothing personal, it was like I'd kicked the poor guy in the face. I haven't seen him since, but I HAVE refined my squatter confrontation technique on a couple more.

Squatter #2, I can't actually pigeonhole as a squatter: we'll call him a polite and likeable gentleman with a job and slight squatter tendencies. #2 would come in about once a week and browse the fantasy and graphic novel sections, then settle down with his chosen paperback, reading sometimes the entire book before putting it back on the shelf. Alternately, he would fall asleep on the couch and I'd have to wake him up and tell him this really wasn't the appropriate place to nap. He was always extraordinarily polite and solicitous of my well-being, and he sometimes bought an item, so having "The Talk" with him was a tough call. I mean, what kind of petty jerk squabbles with a customer over a couple of paperbacks? Our Squatter/landlord relationship finally ended after his third fully read Jim Butcher novel made its way back onto the shelf unpurchased. I took him over and gently showed him the difference between the spines of all the unread books and those he had read. Soft covers that have been read are easily distinguishable because all the other spines in the bookcase are pristeen, and the ones that have been read have noticeable creases in them. Barnes and Noble may be able to afford to replace them, but no small bookstore can. Fortunately, squatter #2 got the message and has since turned into a regular customer who DOESN'T read entire books without buying them. Come to think of it, he hasn't been in to sleep on the couch in a while, either. Ah, a success story.

That success was short-lived, however, as Squatter #3 has been my most challenging case. Squatter #3, you see, is transgendered, not that there's anything wrong with that. But before I knew her as a him, I had noted that she had come in once and hung out for an extensive amount of time, reading a couple hundred pages of a couple of books and making copious notes out of them, even taking her shoes off to get a little more comfortable on her first visit. So I had already filed her under the "Potential Squatter" category. The second time she visited, she informed me (and everyone else who happened to be in the store that afternoon) that his name was Keith (not his real name) and that he was transgendered. Roger that, good on you, I went on to shelve some more books. He went on to talk fairly extensively and somewhat graphically with a friend of mine who happened to be in having a cup of coffee (see how that works?) about the procedure for transitioning. Now, although this was beyond the scope of what I feel like I ought to hear in a bookstore in the course of a business day, he seemed to need someone to talk to, and my friend seemed to not be offended. Neither of us encouraged any personal details, but what the hell? Let him talk for a few minutes. Until one of my little blue-haired Daughters of the Confederacy rolled in and I hit the panic button. Fortunately, with the help of my friend, we managed to avoid the impending train wreck. I talked loudly with the little old lady about the weather until my friend could steer Keith onto safer conversational ground. Next time I saw Keith, he was railing about how someone or other was dissing his decision to live as a man, and since he considered me an open-minded person, wanted me to help him find help. So I did some digging around and sent him off with the web address of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered group out of Richmond and off he went to research the new possibilities. Well, he came back the other day to report his progress, loudly, with two of my good conservative Civil War historians from Prince George County in close attendance. Now, don't get me wrong. I couldn't give a crap that Keith is living as a dude and don't really consider it any of my other customers' business. My problem with Keith is this: he MAKES it my other customers' business, and most of my other customers definitely would rather not be involved. In other words, it's like this has become the testing ground for various over-the-top strategies to be acknowledged as a dude. This particular day, he was standing up here at the check-out counter, looking like a badly dressed woman, talking in a woman's voice to the retired Air Force guy and the Civil War historian woman, getting into a grip contest with the man, and telling the woman he'd hold his strength back when shaking her hand because she's a lady. He introduced himself as Keith and got into a mock sword fight with retired Air Force as he was telling me he had resolved his "issues" and gotten happy with himself. I prayed he didn't elaborate and held my breath until the old folks left. And this really sticks in my craw, because I don't want to get into the habit of playing morality police based on my perceptions of what my more conservative customers consider moral. If some of my customers are offended by Keith's decisions or actions, isn't that a problem between them and not me? I don't want to get into the habit of babysitting people for appropriate behavior, especially when appropriate is such a subjective term. But where I draw the line, where I HAVE to draw the line is at the bottom line. If his behavior loses me customers, and I feel like it eventually will, then I have to have "The Talk" with Keith next time he's in.

Intellectual Dishonesty

2008-11-08T14:07:00.001-05:00

Despite all economic indicators to the contrary, I decided it would be a good time to open the independent bookstore of my childhood dreams, in a town mildly infamous for its 40% illiteracy rate, in May. Six months later, I sit alone in my shop on a Saturday afternoon, taking an inventory of my marketable skills, and trying to decide what to do for money until the City of Readers engages with me. Fortunately, it turns out there is a wealth of opportunities for freelance writers out there in Internet-land. Without exception, these positions offer diverse assignments to choose from, the ability to work from home (or in my case, work) and the promise of riches untold. Great, I think, sign me up.
So I sign up to be writer number 24601 on Essaywriters.net. Get my welcome aboard email, studiously read the guidelines (to include a very THOROUGH--and what turns out to be thoroughly ironic--briefing on plagiarism), sign off on the policies and eagerly open up the assignments tab to start my new part-time career. What awaits me there is page after page of academic possibilities: there are essays due, some apparently in three hours, that must be ghost written. There are research papers, theses, midterm projects--from high school on up through doctoral level--that the student can't be bothered to complete. Most have source requirements, some require specific documentation formats, a few even require you to make a specified number of spelling or grammatical errors so the "client" doesn't have to go in and insert them to personalize the work. The going rate for your intellectual integrity? Anywhere from $7 on up to around $90.
I have to be honest. I don't have any cause to pass myself off as holier-than-anyone. I thought seriously about it for a while. I mean, hell, what business is it of mine if little Johnny likes to party instead of write his papers? I'm not making any money selling books, and I need to make some little pittance for not only my fiscal situation, but also to feel like a self-reliant, capable human being. What difference does it make whether I do it or someone else does it? It's not like my participation or lack thereof will even change the speed of the academic paper supply juggernaut. There are hundreds of other little anonymous writer numbers who will take the assignments if I don't, and that's only on THIS particular site. I can write this stuff well, with one brain hemisphere tied behind my back. Why not? Why should I sweat what happens to these few sentences strung together after they leave my computer? I guess it really comes down to one thing: because it's just plain dishonest. On the most basic level, this moral dilemma equates to the same reason I left the military: I was making good money, but I felt in my gut that I was selling my soul for it. So I won't do it. Someone else will. The papers will still get turned in, and that's okay. I'm not responsible for making the whole world better, only my little corner of it.