Monthly Archives: August 2015

More of the same…

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The White House announced a new Heroin Response Strategy today. This new initiative will roll up initiatives already underway in five separate hot spots, including Maryland’s beloved Baltimore. Our elected officials were quick to trumpet this new program, which isn’t surprising considering how badly handled the war on drugs in this country has been in general – and let’s be perfectly realistic here for a minute – how shockingly incompetent it’s been at crushing the heroin trade in particular.

I’ve always been of the school of thought that says the moment you ban something, you make it more attractive to a certain subset of the population. You also make the banned substance more expensive. Criminal enterprises spring up to fill the newly created market niche… and then federal and state money pours into fix a problem that they created in the first place. Still, the nature and efficacy of prohibition isn’t really the point here.

My point is it’s damned near impossible to legislate yourself out of moral or medical “problems.” The 18th Amendment raised up men like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly. I’m not sure why we thought alcohol was a special case. The war on drugs features a different substance, but the same approach, and has garnered much the same result. I would never dare march under the banner of outright legalization of any and all comers, but expecting the new Heroin Response Strategy to do any better than the “more of the same” that has come before it is futile at best.

Perhaps it’s time to focus on the criminal acts rather than the substances themselves. Does society care if you get high as a kite and drop dead in your bathroom with a needle in your arm? Maybe a little, but not enough to do much about it. Now if you get high and then proceed to rape, rob, or steal, well then society has a problem. We can’t have the addicts running around bothering the mostly nice, mostly law-abiding civilians. If we can’t manage to address the root cause of addiction, perhaps we can at least mitigate the symptoms society has determined are most unpleasant… because if I’m bluntly honest, I don’t much care if Jane Junky ruins her life right up to the point where my television, a laptop, and the window she broke to get in the house become collateral damage to her addiction.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. There’s no law banning heart disease (although there are some laws encouraging more healthful behaviors). If beating a heart attack were as simple as passing a law criminalizing it, well Congress would be full of heroes – and prisons would be full of middle age men who had one too many cheeseburgers. Instead of criminalizing heart attacks, we’ve build an entire medical establishment around saving people from the consequence of a high fat, high cholesterol diet.

Surely our friend Big Pharma would love to find itself with another readymade customer base. It would be good for the taxpayer, good for shareholders, and dare I say it, good to Jane Junky too. Even if that’s not true on all counts, it could hardly be worse than what we’ve been trying for the last fifty years.

LinkedOut…

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In an ongoing effort to un-muddle my digital footprint, I deleted my LinkedIn account over the weekend. I talked about doing it a year or two ago but didn’t get around to it. A spate of emails from the service this week drug it back onto my list of things to do. I wanted to like LinkedIn – and maybe if I worked in a universe that traded on creating a massive professional network I would have. But for what I do, and the scope of people I need to interact with, it just wasn’t doing much for me other than sending a dozen emails a week to my inbox. I don’t need that kind of help.

I have to think LinkedIn is so popular because it creates a benefit for people in a sales environment, or those interested in building their professional network, or those who have any kind of professional ambition left. Since I don’t fall into any of those categories it was just one more extraneous feed of information I wasn’t using.

The simple fact is I don’t really identify, even “professionally,” with my 9-5 self. If someone wants me in their network it should be as a sometimes writer, a blogger, an opinionated blowhard, a reader, and hopefully, in some small way, as a thinker. That other stuff, how I whore myself out to pay the bills, is entirely secondary to what I consider the “real” me.

It’s just the most recent bit of transition from a guy who long ago thought what he did for a living defined who he was to a man who’s trying to define himself in some other – if far less tangible – way. What that definition is, what it will become, remains to be seen.

Whatever the definition, I know with certainty that future self doesn’t require an account with LinkedIn.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Waking up angry. There’s something about going to bed an hour earlier than usual. It’s a hope that the extra hour of down time might drive away some of the serious exhaustion that’s got to be showing in your eyes as the end of the week draws in. But then you wake up feeling even more strung out than you did when you went to bed – still exhausted, still mad at the world, where every little obstacle is a potential tripwire. Then it’s drag out of bed, shave, hope you can paint a convincing image of not loathing everyone and everything you come in contact with, and muddle through the day until it’s time for bed again. Even then you know the next morning won’t feel rested, that extra hour won’t matter, and you’ll be right back in the shit before the day even gets started. Yeah. That’s the kind of week it’s been.

2. Do “X” then “Y”. It’s a simple formula. Do one thing and then the next. It’s the logical progression of things. Problem is, no one seems to understand that there are potentially hundreds of discrete sub-steps between X and Y. All of them need doing before you can make progress. All of them need attention… and in many cases they are all actions that someone else needs to take. So you end up waiting for someone to do X-1, X-7, X-32, and X-1,245,334 before you can get to Y. That’s good enough when everyone knows what they supposed to be doing, wants to do it, and actually does it in a timely manner. Reality, being the thankless bitch that she is, of course, means that those small steps are rarely taken when they should be – so you end up sitting, waiting, cajoling, pestering, ranting, raving, and losing whatever slight grip you still have on sanity while other people get around to placing their one small piece of the puzzle.

3. My “privilege.” The next person who wanders by and recommends that I “check my privilege” might just get a well-worn size 12 Doc Marten planted directly in their crotch. There’s not a lot of generational privilege when your grandfathers worked the deep mines and heavy manufacturing in Appalachia and your parents took the next step, becoming a teacher and a cop, but only wearing the badge after serving some quality enlisted time in Uncle Sam’s green suit. So then there’s me. The grandson of a coal miner and a factory worker. Son of a public school teacher and a state trooper. I worked my ass off to make the grade in school, earned some scholarships, then worked my ass off in college to graduate magna. Then I went to work, didn’t like what I was doing and changed jobs, changed geographic locations, shoehorned myself into a program that would pay for grad school, and generally made myself available for whatever crap assignment would look good on my resume. I moved six times in ten years to improve myself and chase better opportunities instead of staying put and expecting the opportunities to come to me – or worse, expecting someone to deliver them because I have “privilege.” So when you tell me to check myself, it’s very clear you don’t know me or mine and I’m sure I don’t have a clue what the hell you’re talking about.

Thanks for nothing…

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Due to a particularly long, tiresome meeting today I had papers with margins filled with good ideas – blog topics for days. Once I wrote them down, I promptly forgot about them because, after all, I wrote them down and didn’t need to memorize them. That would be entirely true if I didn’t then chuck my folder with all those margin notes onto a back corner of my desk and then promptly grab my keys and run for the door at the end of the day.

So here I sit with plenty of good ideas locked 20 miles away and utterly incapable of dredging any but the fuzziest recollection from my fragile human memory. This is what happens when I can’t take notes on my phone like a normal person. Yet another reason we should embrace modernity and cast aside the forest of yellow legal pads inhabiting my desk.

So that’s it for tonight. It’s the blog that almost was, but can’t be, because I was fool enough to write my ideas down on a dead tree byproduct instead of recording it as electrons… and because I forgot to throw my folder in my backpack on the way out. But I’m blaming antiquated record keeping methodologies rather than my own, perhaps flawed, end of the day closeout procedures.

The only good to come from this is that it means I may not have to have a single original thought for all of next week.

Blank space…

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Usually by the time I get home at the end of the day I’ve got half a dozen post its or a few hastily scribbled margin notes to remind myself about whatever blogworthy ideas I had during the course of the day. Yeah, I’ve long since given up the illusion that I can remember something that happened at 8AM when I sit down to write ten hours later.

It didn’t happen today. Not one single note anywhere. Plenty happened, of course, just nothing that I would consider even marginally entertaining… and certainly not something I’d want to relive for 30 or 45 minutes this evening. What I’m saying is that tonight I’ve got nothing. Just wide open blank space where a blog ought to be.

I’m honestly surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Even surrounded by the best topics, some nights it just doesn’t happen. Missouri is burning again. A card carrying socialist is drawing 25,000 people to his political rallies. China devalued its currency. The EPA just dumped millions of gallons of toxic waste water into a clear mountain river. The state of Alabama is the subject of a Go Fund Me campaign. There’s plenty enough going on that seems worth commenting on.

Any one of those issues would chew up 300 words without looking back and yet even while I sit here, just naming the jackassery in the air today makes me exhausted. It’s not so much that I don’t care as that I’m too annoyed by what passes for civilization to even be bothered to comment. All I really want to do is shut down, pull a cork, and settle in with a good book. It’s not one of my finer or more engaged moments, but it’s the fact of the matter.

Maybe tomorrow it will matter, but for tonight I just can’t be bothered enough to give a damn.

Neutrality….

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I’m not a parent. It’s not a decision I’ve ever had a reason to regret. While I haven’t had the direct experience of what it’s like raising kids, I can speculate at least from the perspective of having been one once… contrary to the misguided notions that I was either hatched in a lab or sprung full grown from Zues’ head.

The interwebs are cheering Target’s bold, forward thinking decision to do away with gender-based signs in favor of gender neutrality. The CNN article on the topic quotes a Target shopper as being thrilled because she was “so tired of my daughter trying to play with her best friend (a boy) and him not wanting to because whatever she has is a girl toy. Or not wanting to watch the show she suggested because it’s a girls’ show…”

Now it’s been a long time since I was a kid, but I don’t remember making thoughtful, informed toy choices based on color or what aisle something happened to be in – I wanted GI Joes, Micro Machines, toy guns, and styrofoam airplanes that were guaranteed to crack the first time you threw them. In fairness, growing up we were just as apt to make our own toys out of pointy stick and rocks, spend the afternoon trying to catch frogs, or throw a dam across a stream, knock it down to see the “flood,” and the build it back again as we were to play with anything store bought. I don’t remember my toys ever being so much about gender as about interest.

None of that is really the point though. I don’t rightly care if you want your little Johnny to play with dolls or your little Susie to play with balls (or whatever it is that boys are “supposed” to play with these days). My point is we seem to spend a hell of a lot of time and effort in this country to satisfy whatever wild ass issue of the day one special interest after another comes up with. The better option, if I may be so bold, is for the parents out there to actual do some parenting.

Instead of expecting Target to do it for you, how about you as a parent decide what is an isn’t an acceptable choice for your child. Just because Target or Sears or LL Bean put something in a particular aisle, really shouldn’t flavor how you’re choosing to raise your lovely little hatchling or what you’re encouraging them to play with. Kids, being the ill tempered, uncensored little hoodlums that they are will tell you quickly enough what they want to play with and whether they consider it a “boy toy” or a “girl toy.” That’s a decision for you and them… whether Target puts it in Aisle 4 in a blue box or Aisle 6 in a pink box is likely to be incidental at best.

Body cameras…

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I’m not sold on the idea that every cop in America needs to wear a body camera for the duration of his or her shift. I don’t think they should be a special exemption just for the sake of being police, but the whole concept of the body cam is one I find intensely problematic. If the police are the vanguard of this “always filmed” society, how long does it take until they’re standard issue in other sectors. Slap a cam on retail employees to make sure they’re being polite to customers. Check the vid feed from guy running the register to make sure he’s not handing out a free apple pie with that #3. Securing information is a breeze when everyone with access to it is required to wear a cam so the security guys can overwatch everything set in front of them.

There are plenty of supposed benefits to slapping a camera on everyone. For me, so far, the case hasn’t been sufficiently made. It feels wrong. It feels vaguely un-American. I’m just not sure that I want a camera hanging around my neck to film my next walk to the coffee stand, or to the restroom, poking through unread emails, or taking a loop around the courtyard while I’m trying to chew over a particularly troublesome issue.

Being filmed during the day from start to end feels incredibly intrusive – and while it would undoubtedly change some behaviors, I’m not at all sure it would make me a better employee. It would make me a more cautious and fearful employee, but that’s a long way from making me better. Maybe in this one thing my thinking is a relic of the last century, but the current obsession with getting it all down on film screams a vote of no confidence in your people to do the right thing more often than not. If your people are scumbags, the camera won’t fix that. If they’re not scumbags, no camera is necessary. I know which way I’d address the issue, but getting rid of the asshats up front is a lot harder than just buying some fancy new gear and calling the problem fixed.

If history is any guide, of course, we’ll continue to chase the easy solutions until all we’re left with are the hard ones. Some things never change.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. National contrition. I had the great fortune to meet Brigadier General Paul Tibbets (retired) not many years before his death in 2007. He was speaking at the aviation museum in Richmond, Virginia that ended with a question and answer session. The first, inevitable, question – one that was probably posed to him every day since 1945 – was if he had any regrets about commanding the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His response, a single word, “No.” That’s sort of how I feel when I read articles telling me that we should apologize for dropping the bomb on Japan. America didn’t start the damned war, got sucker punched to bring us into it, and then the apologists want us to feel bad that to end it the full force and power of the American military came crashing down on the country that was then our enemy. Our job in August 1945 was to win the war with as few additional American casualties as possible. That’s what we did. So, no, I won’t apologize for that. Not now. Not ever.

2. Ten candidates. Later this evening the “top ten” Republican presidential candidates will engaged in what passes for a contemporary debate in this country. They’ll each have 3-5 minutes to pull off a sound bite they can use in their campaign material, but there won’t be time for a discussion of substance. There are lots of familiar faces from elections past going on stage tonight, but there is damned little sign of new blood in the arena. Most of the contenders couldn’t make it to the big game the last 2 or 3 times they tried. I’m not sure I see where much has changed. I don’t expect any of these ten to speak to my peculiar combination of important issues. Then again, I don’t expect anyone from either party to do that. Before this debate even gets started I’m already thinking that the best outcome from it would be for me to go to bed on time and at least try to get a good night’s sleep. That would be far more beneficial than anything we’re likely to hear on television tonight.

3. Cooking. I was away last weekend. I haven’t had a chance to get to the market this week to pick up more than the requisite salad for my tortoise and creamer for me. Being away also meant that I wasn’t able to do most of the week’s heavy cooking on Sunday afternoon. Which is how you end up needing to fiddle around the kitchen making a passable meal and not sitting down to eat until Wednesday night until after 7PM. That might be fine for you continental types who keep late hours, but for me on an average weeknight seven o’clock is closing in on the middle of the damned night. Maybe it’s just an artifact from childhood, but at my house 5PM is dinner time. Most weeknights I don’t quite make it, but I’m not usually far off – but then again I’m usually not coming up with something from scratch. So yes, currently as much as I usually enjoy it, I’m sick to death of cooking and the butterfly effect it’s having on the rest of the evening. I guess I should have grown up to have a job with a personal staff. More poor decision making on my part.

The illusion of interest…

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I could probably fill a book with number of bits and pieces of daily ephemera I declare “one of the hardest things I do.” Somehow that doesn’t keep the list from growing. In that spirit, one of the hardest things I do currently is simply pay attention. Actually it’s not even that so much as it is just trying to look interested.

Once the charts start flipping, I’ve got a window of 20-30 good minutes where I’m attentive and focused. After that it’s a doodle-fest or I start making notes on whatever it is I would be working on back at my desk. Either way, whatever is on those slides is barely getting a head nod. I’m basically doing whatever it takes to keep my eyes from glazing over and accidentally falling out of my chair. Nodding off and landing on your ass is considered bad form at meetings. I’ve seen it happen and it’s not pretty – although it is completely, gut wrenchingly hysterical.

The challenge to look interested doesn’t discriminate between my own material and stuff that has no impact or influence on my day-to-day existence. After the 30 minute mark everything falls into the category of probably interesting, but irrelevant. It’s not irrelevant by nature, but simply because my brain has lost the capacity to receive new information while struggling mightily just to give the illusion that the lights are on upstairs.

If you see me in a meeting blinking rapidly, shifting in my seat every 30 seconds, or jabbing a #2 pencil into my thigh, try not to take it personally. It’s probably not your subject matter, it’s just that you let your meeting run way, way too long and I’m doing my level best to offer the illusion of interest or, if that proves impossible, to not fall asleep and start drooling all over myself.

Mixed signals…

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I grew up in a part of Maryland where it’s possible to stand in one spot and see well into both Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Inter-state rivalries were common and a “mixed” relationship could easily mean one part of a couple was a WVU fan and one cheered for UMD. Most people are (reasonably) good natured about it.

Confederate_Rebel_FlagWhile I was home, though, I saw something I couldn’t bring myself to reconcile – Flying side by side from someone’s shed were the West Virginia state flag and the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (or what the internet is determined to call the “Confederate Flag”).

I don’t mind state pride (even though this individual was flying the WV flag over the sovereign soil of the great state of Maryland). Flying the battle flag doesn’t bother me (even thought, again, we happened to be standing in a part of the country that was never even tangentially represented by that flag). What annoyed me to no end, of course, was that the West Virginia flag and any flag representing forces of the Confederate Flag_of_West_VirginiaStates of America are, historically speaking, mutually exclusive. They’re so mutually exclusive that the entire state of West Virginia was created in order to make that fact absolutely clear to everyone who may have been confused.

The voice in my head who just wants everyone to have some semblance of logic supporting what they do urged me in the strongest possible way to pull over just to ask the guy in the driveway what, exactly, was the point he thought he was making. The other part of my brain, the one given over to self preservation and not wanting to get my ass kicked by a redneck yokel told me to just keep moving… so I did… but I’m dying to know what kind of tortured logic is banging around that guy’s head.