goodbye

Imagine my surprise to find my brother Ross has effectively quit his blogging adventures because Facebook has taken him over and is the endpoint of most of his spare computing time.

I'm surprised because, like so many things in our life, we both are doing the same thing at the same time, separately (a phase wherein we were both Led Zeppelin fans comes to mind, he in college in New Hampshire, I in the ancestral manse in Mass). For I too have given up on blogging, thinking it way too one-sided. Why pontificate when you can have a conversation?

So, dear friends, I bid you goodbye from this mountaintop, and invite you to join up and ask to "be my friend." I'm tired of shouting from a balcony.

An Ant as Allegory for the Human Condition;or,Ruminations Whilst on the Crapper

Before I begin, let's get the smirking and laughing out of the way. Yes, I was sitting on the toilet doing my business. Everyone poops, man. Don't you read? I trust the less said the better on that.

Anyway, as I was enjoying my afternoon constitutional, only slightly bemoaning the fact that there was no reading material to while the lonely minutes away, I caught sight of a single ant, scuttling his way across a piece of floor tile. He obviously was separated from the colony and was trying to intuit his way back - except that once he came across a grout line he stopped, refusing to cross it. So he would backtrack and wander, backtrack and wander, until he came across another (or the same) grout line, which he would not ever cross.

This ant will get exhausted and dehydrated and will ultimately die, because he set boundaries on himself that are completely imagined - not really boundaries at all. His failure was caused by his lack of ability to overcome these self-imposed boundaries.

Sound familiar?

Look, I'm the last guy to give new-agey advice. But this was too perfect an allegory to pass up. I firmly believe that 80% of failure is self-imposed.

People fail to do things for so many reasons, so few of them valid. They might be afraid of what others would think if they were to embark on the grand fulfillment of their secret dream; they might be afraid that grabbing the brass ring is unfair to those who cannot stretch out themselves and dare the attempt.

That ant confined his world to a 6x6 floor tile because of an unfounded fear of a dark line and a change of texture. Looking as I was down on him, omniscient, all-powerful, and quite regular, thank you, I realize the folly of his self-imposed prison, the exile of his own making, but he most assuredly did not. So it is, I suspect, with those of us humans who struggle with the same self-imposed boundaries.

Lift them. Understand that they exist in your head. There is nothing that a motivated human being will not dare or do to further the fulfillment of a dream. And conversely, if you unnecessarily constrict your life because of your own imagined fears or boundaries, is it truly a good decision?

To the daring go the greater rewards. Dare!

Random Thoughts

From a recent cleaning of the mental attic:

This may sound infantile or embarrassingly idealistic but there are few things in life more rewarding than repaying a kindness, especially if one pays it forward. This year my family and I have been the beneficiaries of a thousand small kindnesses associated with my father's passing. Sadly, one of my dearest friends - dearer than most of my family - went through the same thing recently. I ran a few errands for them and brought over some cold cuts so that they'd have something to eat. No big deal. A simple, small kindness. But I know firsthand the value of a gesture like that and it was my high honor to be able to help when help was needed. I only wish I didn't know what to do, but to go through something like I went through and not learn from it would have been an even greater tragedy. DB, as you embark on your road, always remember that I stand with you, shoulder to shoulder, here for whatever you need.

On to happier topics...

Good on the Red Sox - they didn't make it to the big dance but they came damn close. Now rumors are swirling about Derek Lowe wanting to come back. You know what? I like the idea. The Sox don't need a #1, #2, or #3 starter - they have Beckett, Lester, and Matsuzaka filling those roles. They don't need a #5 - Tim Wakefield and his maddening, fluttering knuckleball fill that bill perfectly and inexpensively. What we need is a #4 guy who is consistently healthy and who will eat up innings. D-Lowe and his sinker would be perfect for Fenway's much-improved infield and would fit the profile of a #4 guy to a tee.

Manny Ramirez went on record as saying he's glad the Sox got eliminated in the playoffs. Hey, Manny (and the media): We get it. You don't like the Sox. This is no longer news. This has all the salaciousness of the Rosie O'Donnell - Donald Trump feud, which is to say, none at all. Drop it already.

Here's a joke you can tell an 8-year-old (which is why I like it so): What did the zero say to the eight? Nice belt.

Did you know that most of the principal actors in Hogan's Heroes were Jewish? The men that played Klink, Schultz, LeBeau, Burkhalter, and Hochstetter were all Jewish. And John Banner (Schultz) and Robert Clary (LeBeau) actually spent time in concentration camps! Werner Klemperer, who played the beaurocratic, bumbling, Prussian old-liner Colonel Kink, justified his playing of a German soldier by saying, "I am an actor. I can play Richard III; I can play a Nazi." He had a clause in his contract that stipulated that the Germans would NEVER triumph over Hogan and his men.

Anyone out there have a holistic remedy for insomnia?

I have a low-grade desire to drive the cars of my youth - a '77 Maverick, a '78 Mustang II, and my '89 Mustang, the first new car I ever bought. None of these vehicles distinguished themselves by being good automobiles; but I joyrode in them a fair amount and got laid in them a time or two as well. Good times, good times.

Where and when I grew up, we had two UHF channels: WSBK channel 38 and WLVI channel 56. Saturday mornings after the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show on CBS at 9:30 one channel showed an hour of Three Stooges; the other channel showed Little Rascals. This is why I never watched Little Rascals way back then. I was too busy watching Moe poke Larry.

On the subject of black and white media, the Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson are genius - even the cheesy ones set in the 1940's where Holmes helps fend of the Nazis are pretty hip in their own way.

How on earth could anyone like mushrooms? You know they're nothing but big mold, right? And that they grow in SHIT? Frickin gross.

I suppose that's it for now. Stay cool everybody and remember: do something nice for someone.

700 Buh buh buh...

Billion?

Is this what it's going to take to right the mighty ship of state? To once again be able to bow before the words "the full faith and credit of the United States of America?" Whose fault is this?

I'll tell you whose fault it is.

IT'S YOUR GODDAMN FAULT. That's right. You. The guy who let some charlatan convince you that you can absorb a $500,000 mortgage on your cell-phone-kiosk-guy salary. The guy who wanted a house so bad that he completely abrogated his financial responsibility. The guy who signed up for an option ARM, knowing that in three years his mortgage payment would be so much higher than his ability to pay that, now that the doody has struck the rotating blades, he just leaves the keys in the door and walks away.

It's tough to blame the banks. They're in it to sell mortgages. They told a happy story that had nothing to do with the truth and many of you idiots out there swallowed it whole.

It's like blaming the banks for the farm crisis in the '80's. Since time out of mind, farmland was about $550 per arable acre. Come, build, farm, live. $550 an acre. Until the banks told them that their land was worth WAY more than that, and loaned them money against land with a phantom value. It's not the bank's fault - it's really not. The farmer who smirked up at the banker and knew in his heart that his land was worth exactly what he knew it to be worth and not a penny more and told him to get the hell off his front porch? THAT guy still has his farm. He didn't lose any damn thing. John Cougar Mellencamp wasn't singing about him on Scarecrow. No, only the stupid ones lost their farms.

It is our responsibility as citizens and consumers in the greatest financial system the world has to maintain a modicum of common sense into the process and recognize a snake-oil salesman when we see him. I'll say it again: LET COMMON SENSE BE YOUR GUIDE. If you've just moved in to a 6 bedroom/4 bath palace in the middle of Happytown, and you spin pizzas for a living, YOU ARE BREAKING THE RULE OF COMMON SENSE.

Buy what you can afford. Do not buy what you can't. Simple advice that, if heeded, would have resulted in the Government not having to bail us all out to the tune of elventy grillion dollars. And by the way: it's not like the Gummint has 700 bill hanging out in a dresser drawer. It has to bond out for that money - essentially to print it - which will further devalue the dollar and contribute to inflation. Bailout or no, this is going to get worse before it gets better.

Where Were You?

Like most adults, I guess, I was at work. I had a meeting scheduled at 8:30 and after about 20 minutes when nobody showed up I called the meeting's organizer and asked her what the deal was. She said "sorry, I'm just so caught up in this World Trade Center thing," and that is how The Day That Changed Everything first entered my consciousness.

I knew it was big when I couldn't connect to cnn.com - when their servers are overloaded you know it's a big news day. We heard the same half-truths and non-truths as rumor spread in the first 20 minutes of chaos. Our accountant ran home and brought in a TV and we congregated in a corner conference room and sat, and stood, slackjawed, at the images that unfolded before us.

Images that are seared forever in my memory: a building afire, thick, acrid, ebony-black smoke spewing out of the top third of it. And not just any building - the World Trade Center, for God's sake - gargantuan symbol of, and paean to, commerce, the almighty American Dollar, and by extension our great nation itself.

One of our salespeople was also a local firefighter (find me a fireman without a second job and...and...well it doesn't matter, they ALL have second jobs) and I remember asking him how much time a person had in smoke that thick and hot.

He thought for a moment and said, "One breath - maybe two."

We sat and watched as the attack - for by now we knew that's what it was - went on. The buildings burned; we heard stories of other planes being hijacked; a plane hit the Pentagon. The PENTAGON, for Chrissake. These guys certainly knew their symbolism!

There was confusion within the halls of power - here in Massachusetts various politicians came on to say that a local election was taking place, others said it wasn't. The President was on Air Force One - first here, then there, spiriting President Bush to various points of safety.

They pulled EVERY SINGLE AIRCRAFT out of the sky. Landed them all.

Then after an hour or so of intense heat and metal stress, we watched in abject horror as first one tower then the other succumbed to the indignities foisted upon them, and they fell. Just collapsed like an old Vegas casino. The only difference is, each collapse took place while hundreds of live human beings still occupied the towers. In those several seconds, albeit shrouded in thick poisonous smoke, we witnessed the mass murder of thousands of souls, whose greatest offense to Islam or anyone else for that matter was getting up that morning and going to work, to conduct business, or serve food, or to clean, or to guard. My boss at the time watched the first tower collapse and put his hand to his open mouth in a gesture of horror, shock and revulsion that, like so many snapshot images of that day and the days to come, I will never forget as long as I live.

Then it was over, if over you could call it. The wreckage steamed and smoked from a dozen underground fires while rescue workers frantically looked for survivors, moving cement and girders with their bare hands. Fire crews from around the region and around the country came to the site by the busload to spell tired rescue workers and to show sympathy and solidarity. Charity of every stripe poured in. Whatever the current rumor had the rescue workers needing, it poured in by the truckload: Gloves. Masks. Dog food. Oxygen. Blood. Everybody wanted to give blood. The Red Cross had to turn people away!

And we mourned. All of us. We mourned for the lives of the fallen, and their families. We mourned for the death of a lifestyle we all instinctively knew was gone forever. We mourned for police and fire crews, those who ran in while everyone was running out. The overarching emotion for most people was not anger - it was sadness. Tears were everywhere. Dan Rather crying on Letterman. Jon Stewart crying on his own show. And how could we ridicule them? We were crying right with them.

Much has happened in the shadow of the events of September 11, 2001. Some of it good, much of it not so good. I'm not going to turn this post into an invective-laden polemic against anyone or anything, except perhaps the vermin who perpetrated this horrific crime against the innocent.

But in the aftermath of that day, the nation stood together, and most of the world stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States. We lost that too, which is also something deserving of mourning.

My People - the Jews - get together every April for Passover. The whole idea of Passover is to retell the story of when the Jews were slaves to the Pharaoh, so that it never happens again and we remain a free, albeit nebbish and neurotic, people.

We can learn a lesson from Passover if we apply the same philosophy to 9/11 and retell the story every year - shed real tears for the fallen until all passes into distant memory and we spill a drop of wine for them - and never, ever forget the events of that horrible day, when everything changed.

Reprint from BDD

This piece originally showed up at the Boston Dirt Dogs website, a Red Sox-based site owned by the Boston Globe, to which I contribute from time to time. I wrote it the Friday before Father's Day.

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Father Time

From Gary Jacobs, BDD contributor

PAWTUCKET, RI | June 13, 2008 – It is, like most days here, a beautiful day for baseball. The players are playing in bright sun, though their shadows dance long in front of them. The gametime temperature is 77 degrees and the gentlest of breezes cools the foreheads of the near-capacity crowd of over 9,000. The day couldn’t possibly be better suited to baseball.

Baseball was the game I learned on my father’s knee, the first game I gave my love to. And though I learned to love hockey with almost the same ferocity, baseball is what connects me with my youth, with memories of glorious summer days with nothing to do, and with my father.

We could always count on baseball and the Boston Red Sox to provide common ground, Dad and me. In 1986 I was a willful 17-year-old know-it-all with a full-on case of cranio-rectal inversion. You couldn’t talk to me without me flying into an adolescent rage, no matter the subject. My parents were idiots and worse yet, major crampers of my style. We went nose to nose many more times than once; we came to the brink of a fistfight on at least one occasion. But we both had the Red Sox that magic season – expectations were so low for that squad that they took the city completely by surprise. And when neither of us had much to say to each other, we could always talk about baseball.

Years later, when time started taking its inevitable toll on the old man, and he complained constantly about being cold, I bought him a satin lined Red Sox jacket. He wore it constantly.

Right up until the day he died, which was last month.

And today, as I sit in the PawSox pressbox squinting from the lowering sun, trying hard to concentrate on a baseball game that I’m supposed to be covering, all I find myself thinking about is my dad, and how he absolutely adored sunny dry days like this, when baseball in the evening was a given, and the only question was radio or TV.

Like most men of his generation, my dad was far from materialistic. He wasn’t much for jewelry or trinkets of any kind. After the funeral my mother bade us take what mementoes we wished to remember him by. I took two things: an International League baseball that I got for my dad (a friend of mine actually got it for me; it’s bad form for a reporter to ask for a baseball), and his Red Sox jacket. When I took it home I discovered quite poignantly that it still smelled like him.

Much has been said about the generational nature of baseball, of how it binds father to son. And every morning when I wake up and I see Dad’s jacket hanging up, I find that it binds us still.

Happy Father’s Day, everybody. If you’re lucky enough to still have your Dad, give him a call or head over the house on Sunday – maybe talk a little baseball. -- In Memoriam, Cyril R Jacobs, 1933-2008

And Speaking of Lennon...

(news from CNN - Thanks Ted!)

(CNN) — John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, was denied parole for the fifth time Tuesday.

The New York State Division of Parole issued a release saying Chapman’s request was denied “due to concern for the public safety and welfare.”

Chapman, 53, is serving a sentence of 20 years to life in prison for the shooting death of John Lennon outside Lennon’s New York City apartment on December 8, 1980. He has served 24 years of his sentence at the maximum-security Attica Correctional facility.

Hosanna to the god-damned highest. If there was ever a stupid, senseless death, it was this one. Mark David Chapman robbed the world of a mature, wise, seasoned John Lennon and who knows what that man would have been? Almost certainly he would have reunited with the other Beatles in 1987 to do Live Aid. Whatever the case, we have missed out on 28 years of great music, introspection and a strong advocate's voice for peace.

And, closer to home, Sean and Julian lost their father. Julian was around 19; poor Sean was only 5. Too soon, too god-damned soon.

So: kudos to the State of New York for making the right decision. MDC can rot in his cell for the rest of his life and in his case, I wish I were wrong about there not being an afterlife, so that he could rot in hell. He stole something absolutely precious from millions of people.