Monthly Archives: October 2006

Mr. Tharp’s Review of Books…

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I don’t generally have high praise for the New York Times or its reporters, but on my last trip through the airport I picked up a paperback copy of Rick Atkinson’s In the Company of Soldiers. I bought it mainly because I needed something to read on the flight home, but also because I thought the author made an excellent effort in his Pulitzer Prize winning An Army at Dawn. I don’t get much of a chance between work and school to read as often as I would like, but with a few dozen pages left to go, I’m satisfied that he has put together another searching overview of an army at war. Unlike his research into the invasion of North Africa, Mr. Atkinson had the opportunity to accompany the troops of the 82nd Airborne on their drive into Iraq. While his handling of Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the senior civilian leadership is heavy handed at times, he consistently displays a respect towards the officers and soldiers of the 82nd that they so richly deserve.

At just over three hundred pages set in fairly large type, it’s an easy read and I would have liked to see a book about twice the length to really get into the meat of the stories. It’s a good book for a quick fix of military history, but not so jargon-heavy that the casual reader will be lost in its intricacies. Lots of other books in the coming years, as well as the official record of the Iraq campaign that will ultimately be written by Army historians will fill that niche.

With that being said, I recommend Soldiers to you without reservation.

This message will self destruct…

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When you die, who gets access to your email and other electronic information? An article yesterday on msn asked just that question and it really started me thinking. My immediate response was that I want the electronic innards of my pc fried upon confirmation of my untimely demise. There are lots of files that I would not necessarily want my then grief-stricken family to go wading into… from years worth of journal entries, to draft blog posts too harsh to see the light of day, to yes, you guessed it… internet pornography.

Of course the other reality is that with online banking, investing, managing credit cards, and electronic billing, much of the things that use to end up as paper files in someone’s desk drawer now litter files on our hard drives… when they exist at all. The issue is sort of a novelty now, but by the time our generation starts shuffling off in large numbers, it’s going to be an issue… So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Camelot…

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I ponder things. While I don’t consider myself a great thinker or rhetorician, I do like to spend time thinking about the world around me and my own observations of it. Over the weekend, one observation that has stuck with me and given me some pause, is the size of a band I use to call my own. In 1996, we were a group of 40 musicians and 8 or 9 color guard. Not a large group, but in a school with a total population of around 400, it was respectable enough. To say that the current group is a shell of its former self would be misleading at best. With 7 instrumentalists and 2 color guard, they are a walking shadow of what was once a championship-winning organization. Surprisingly, it’s not just my old group that has been diminished, but also groups that we once competed head-to-head with every week. Groups that were once 150+ members barely muster 50.

I wonder if it’s the same in other extra-curriculars. What we use to do required hours of practice, sometimes mind-numbing repetition of the same eight measures to begin closing in on perfection. Mostly, it required dedication and a willingness to allow the requirements of the group to subsume personal preferences and agendas. Is it a sign of the times that these kind of activities no longer attract the best and the brightest to the fold? A larger question is whether this decline is representative only of one economically depressed region or if similar observations could be made across wide swaths of the country.

I don’t want to be one of those people who spends a lot of time talking about how we had to work so much harder, but I don’t shrink from asserting that we did it better.

Last night I had the opportunity to talk to an individual whose opinion and respect I value highly. Unprompted, he mentioned much the same thing I had been thinking. Shaking his head as he walked away, he mentioned only that we had been in a special time and place those years ago and we would likely never see anything quite like them again.

Oh yeah…

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I’m pleased to report I am alive and well in Western Maryland, but the thought that occurs to me is that outside of a few old friends and family members I don’t actually know anyone up here any more. I’m not sure why that actually surprises me, though. It’s a “discovery” I make pretty consistently every time I am here for a weekend. Not so much a complaint, just an observation.

Going to the well…

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Have a six-week road stand starting a week from Monday with a 900 mile drive to Memphis. You might be expecting a rant, but the reality is the only thing I am mildly agitated by is paying $1000 a month rent for an apartment I am going to be using as a glorified storage shed/mailbox while I am gone.

Like before almost all of my long trips, I feel a compulsion to go home this weekend. It’s an almost visceral need to stand, again, on the good earth of my childhood; to go once more to the wellspring to drink deeply and gather strength for the next push, the next campaign in my most recent long slog. I’ll go home and smell the first crisp air of fall and watch the mist burn out of the valley in the early morning. I’ll sleep, peaceful in the quiet home of my family a few more nights before turning out to late nights in tacky hotel rooms. For a few days more, I’ll be home.

I’ve crossed continents, but ultimately, every place I have ended up can fit into the category of “just the place I live.” I’ve had my share of rolled eyes and sarcastic comments about Western Maryland and I can’t imagine living there again, but somehow, I can’t imagine it ever not being home.

Lust in my heart…

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Again. Being with me on a Saturday morning down here is a bit like being on a grail quest. I’ve convinced myself that the perfect old house is out there, somewhere, taunting me just over the horizon with it’s agonizingly French accent. It takes a leap of faith to make an offer on a house. Making an offer on a house in a state when I don’t yet technically have a job is more like taking a header into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. Yet somehow I think it’s what I am about to do.

This house was the second of three I visited today and was the only one that was ever really in the running. I could go into several long diatribes about the evil things people do to old houses, but that will wait for another night.

Suffice to say that the pictures don’t come close to doing justice to this place. At 106 years old, she was built when Victoria sat the throne of the British Empire and William McKinley was President of the United States, gutted in the last five years with all major electrical, plumbing, and mechanical systems replaced, 2000 square feet put under fresh roof, floors refinished, original trim restored… and for sale at the asking price of $135,000 in a sleepy Southern town of 10,000 (more on the town will follow).

I’m plotting and planning… with a healthy dose of self-doubt and second guessing… the path that wends its way through giving up my seldom visited apartment, moving a substantial amount of “stuff” into dad’s basement and setting up temporary quarters in his guest room to use when I’m required to be in Washington, and finally arrives at buying a house in commuting distance of a job I might actually be assigned to three months from now.

It all sounds perfectly mad and if I weren’t living it, I would probably think I had finally gone ‘round the bend. I’ve had incredible luck with finding places to hang my hat in the past…. Sweet Jesus, I hope it holds for one more round.

You can’t see it, but I’m knocking on wood out here, folks. 😉

A rant on rails…

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I’ve never tried to run a railroad, but I love things that are organized, so I think I could make a pretty good show if it. Unfortunately, the people at Metro (who have been running a sort of “mini-railroad” for the better part of 30 years) seem to either have an intense hatred for organization or are simply incompetent. This, however, isn’t a rant specifically aimed at Metro’s leadership. Rather it is a rant pointed directly at the asshats who are my fellow riders.

The Green Line was delayed this afternoon due to some maintenance fuck-up down the track and as a result, trains were packed to capacity. Yet every time one pulled into the station, the great unwashed sea of humanity surged forward in an effort to cram themselves onto the already full cars… If you are getting the image of salmon leaping over themselves on their way up the rapids to their ancestral spawning grounds, you’re getting the right idea.

I’m never quite sure what thought goes through someone’s head when they think they are going to fit in the several inches of space between people already standing on the train. They apparently look in the mirror and have some sort of interesting disorder… their body image and the real world are completely at odds. I may be a pasty, white widebody, but I have enough of a concept of my own general dimensions to realize I am not going to fit in the 6-inch gap between some guys left shoulder and the door. Sometimes I wonder what actually goes on in people’s heads when they clearly are doing something stupid, but usually my give-a-shit isn’t strong enough to spend much time pondering on it.

A visit from my black dog…

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Those of you who have been regular readers (thank you, by the way) may possibly have noticed a somewhat cyclic pattern to my posts. I know in reviewing them from time to time, I have identified a pattern that seems to emerge, at least to me, quite clearly… Building up a full head of steam and ranting or railing on a particular topic or series of topics, punctuated buy a post or two of more sullen thoughts. Until I sat tonight to write, I hadn’t put it together that those periods when my mood darkens are closely aligned to the times when I have the least to do… To those times when I have nothing to throw myself wholly into or to get lost in. They are the times I take counsel in my fears.

As I sit here tonight, I thought I might share some of those thought, some of those fears, with you.

Perhaps my greatest fear is that I’ll never be as great as my own ambition. It tends to be worse near my birthday and those who have spent any time with me in late May are probably all too familiar with my lament that Alexander had conquered an empire by the time he was thirty. As I write tonight, however, the thought, the fear, that plays on my mind most, is a question of why my own path seems so different that that of so many others. I’ve watched a parade of friends and associates pair off, marry, and settle into a routine of family life. And I’ve watched myself drive away the very possibility of those things in my on life at every turn. Just the outside prospect that things could move to that point fills me with abject dread and brings on images of the walls closing in on me, of suffocating under the weight of it.

The better part of the last three years has consisted of vaguely organized chaos, of flying across the country at the drop of a hat, of learning to think of hotels as second homes, and of never really being able to plan more than a few days of my life in advance. There is at least a part of me that envies those who know they’ll be home each night and know what and who to expect once they get there. There is more than a little regret for some of the opportunities I have allowed to pass untaken and for those my own chaos has hurt as it unfolded around them. I’ve not always been proud of the things I have done or the decisions I have made, but in almost every circumstance, I believed I was acting for the best. Some, however, were made in moments of fear, and of these, I am the least proud.

I will feel better tomorrow, because that is how these things work for me. Thought my black dog still lies at my feet, writing tonight has been a catharsis, as it almost always is.

I don’t often choose to post something this soul searching, so read and digest while you can… before I wake up in the middle of the night realizing what I threw out for the world to see and delete it… You know how I hate putting a weak face to the public.

P.S. Just so you know I’m not taking things too seriously tonight, I seriously considered posting this under the “Pets and Animals” category just for a lark and to see if anyone noticed.

A rant revisited…

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I’ve covered this ground once before, but feel compelled to go across it (at least) one more time. Let me begin by stating, for the record, that Phoenix is grad school for slackers. I recognized that when I started the process and each class serves as a reminder of the fact. Theoretically, however, I also recognize that everyone who is taking these classes has an undergraduate degree and has at least three years in a “professional” workplace. I am consistently amazed at the inability of these, theoretically, educated individuals to string five hundred words into a coherent thought or argument. Need to meet a deadline? Forgedaboudit.

We all have things we would rather be doing after work than tapping out a well-reasoned argument for why human resource management sucks in most organizations, but goddamn it already. Suck it up and get it done, already. I really don’t think I have abnormally high expectations of people and never expect anything from anyone that I wouldn’t be willing to do myself.

I’m tired of hearing that your boss made you work late (I put in an hour and a half on OT this afternoon). I don’t care that tonight is your wife’s birthday (Nothing like a little forward planning, huh, ace?). And I don’t care that little Suzie had the sniffles last night and you’re tired (When did your personal life become my problem?). I’m interested in results and you asshats are making me look bad. There ought to be a law that keeps these kind of fucktards from drawing down the resources of the productive members of society.