Author Archives: jdtharp

Requiem…

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I wandered out the front doors of the hotel this morning and looked across Pennsylvania Ave at the flags flying in front of the Wilson Building. It was early, I was nursing my first cup of coffee and cigarette for the day (damn Marriott anyway) and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the flags were flying at half staff. It didn’t occur to me until 15 minutes later, over a bagel, that today was actually September 11th. Yeah, I actually had to do that math on that one… It doesn’t seem possible that it’s been six years.

It’s only on reflection that I realized the real weight of the day – What it’s come to mean in our history; The blood and treasure that we’ve poured out on the days from then until now; the schism that it has left on our politics in our collective effort to decide what September 11th really means. More painful, perhaps, is the indifference that most now feel towards those who waged unholy war on us on a clear morning that seems both cavernously distant and painfully close. We were not the aggressor, but the victim of a ruthless attack carried out by cowardly men on an innocent population. We’re quick to forget those minutes and hours that seemed to stretch out forever.

I went to see Lincoln tonight. It just seemed fitting somehow. But the words that stuck in my head weren’t those written to bind up our nation’s wounds. They’re still too fresh for that. All along my long walk tonight, I was recalling Churchill’s words from the frosted depths of the Cold War… “We have surmounted all the perils and endured all the agonies of the past. We shall provide against and thus prevail over the dangers and problems of the future, withhold no sacrifice, grudge no toil, seek no sordid gain, fear no foe. All will be well. We have, I believe, within us the life-strength and guiding light by which the tormented world around us may find the harbour of safety, after a storm-beaten voyage.”

Winston would have understood the 21st Century. Sure, we have different clothes and different music, but it’s the same old world. He’d tell us to never give in and to stay the course. He knew that the only way to defeat evil was to pummel it into unquestioned submission. Winston would have understood.

And then there was light…

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And I saw that the light was good. I’ve been working on a couple of relatively simple outdoor lighting projects and I must say, am please with the result on both counts. Did some small spotlight work on the front. Nothing major there, but it highlights some of the architectural details fairly nicely. Of course I’m never going to be able to resist the temptation to tinker with the settings and angles in search of perfection. The back got new floods and a motion sensor. It’s like daylight back there now, baby. Add in the mowing and trimming and you can tell it was quite the exciting Saturday here, no? There’s really not so much other “stuff” going on at the moment, so if you came looking for my usual misanthropic rant, I’m sorry to disappoint. Worry not, though, as I’m sure it will be no time at all before I feel another one coming on.

Garryowen…

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Editorial Note: Apparently at one point, I had default music playing on my MySpace profile *shudder*. It seems to be for the best that it went extinct some time ago.

OK, so more than one person has sent me a message asking what’s up with the music on my profile. If you’re that interested, Wikipedia has a good article on the song itself. Mostly it’s there because I sort of like it. I know, century old marching tunes aren’t exactly top-40 material, but then again, I’ve never been much of a top-40 kind of guy. Still, I like the imagery of Custer’s 7th riding out of Fort Lincoln, guidons unfurled in the breeze, to meet their destiny on the Plains.

What can I say, I’m got a soft spot for lost causes.

Dear Neighbor… again…

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Dear Neighbor,

Maybe you’ve been reading my blog, since it seems that you’re managing to get your trash can in from the curb by the time the weekend rolls around these days. Of course your lawn still looks like shit, so maybe you haven’t been keeping up after all.

It’s Sunday morning and I know I’m not really a late sleeper these days. It’s something close to physiologically impossible for me to sleep later than 7:00. You, on the other hand, were clearly up at 6:00, because that’s when you put your two Rottweilers out in their cage in your back yard (Incidently, I don’t really think an 8×6 cage is really big enough for two full-grown rotts). I know it was 6:00 because that’s when they started barking. You might remember it because we made eye contact as I glared at your sweat-suit wearing ass through my just-opened blinds.

In case you missed it, when you put your dogs out in the morning, they bark the whole time they are outside. It’s not so much a big deal during the week when I’m up at 5:30 anyway, but on the weekends, and since you know they are going to spend the next half hour barking at God knows what, maybe you could get up, put on their leashes and actually take them for a quick walk rather than sticking them in the cage 20 feet from my bedroom window.

So, dear neighbor, you are the clinical definition of a fucktard. I don’t usually wish bad things on people… mainly because I’m ambivalent about most of the asshats I’m forced to deal with on a regular basis… but in your case, I’m making an exception.

Regards,

Jeff

Well, there’s your problem…

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One of the biggest challenges of being young and ambitious and employed by the federal government all at the same time is that due to it effectively being a closed system, the ranks are filled with crusty old bastards who are blocking your route to plum assignments. They’ve been retired in place for years now and have no intention of leaving. For the generation coming up through the ranks, these are nothing so much as roadblocks, whose skill sets and mentality would be better suited for the government of 1967 than that of 2007. I’m not suggesting here that there should be a mandatory retirement age, just that there reaches a point where it’s no longer in the best interest of the government to keep these people on the payroll. In fact, I don’t know why you would reach 40 years of service and actually still want to hang around. Personally, I’m planning on playing a hell of a lot of golf by that stage of the game.

Of course the reality is that the federal bureaucracy is, at some unspoken level, a make work program whose personnel system has an unfortunate tendency to softly discourage young employees from turning a job into a career. When there is no clear path to advancement or even lateral transfer into a more attractive position, what incentive does a mid-level 20-something employee have to stay the course? Why would they wait, possibly for years, for a position or a promotion that no one can guarantee? Organizational loyalty is a great thing, but it has to work both ways. If you can’t reward the hard work and dedication of the Young Turks who designed and helped build the organization, they have to look to other opportunities and to their own future. Our generation isn’t one to sit around and “pay dues” just because that’s what our parent’s generation did.

The time has come to distribute the spoils of the transition we helped carry out. Historically, though, revolutions have a bad habit of eating their own young – just ask Robespierre or Marat. I’d recommend we all stay out of the tub for a while, just to be on the safe side of things.

Right back where we started from…

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I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Fort Lee. When I was desperate to leave teaching and sloshing my way towards high-functioning alcoholism, Ft. Lee was my first step towards redemption. It was the place that restored my faith in my own abilities. Coming back to this place is a little like coming home to mama. It is one of those little pieces of geography that gives me a warm fuzzy. I am a firm believer that there are certain places, geographic locations that have a huge impact on who we become as people. I’m not going so far as arguing that geography makes the man (although there are some interesting theories floating around), just that it has an influence.

I’m sitting here 1000 yards from where Grant broke the rebel line at Petersburg in the last great battle of our Civil Way. After Petersburg, the worst of the conflict was over, though peace would come only after the fall of Richmond and the long march to Appomattox. After Petersburg, normal was still a long way off. There remained the struggle of national Reconstruction and decades of Jim Crowe. The Republic had endured the dark threat of disunion and although Gettysburg is remembered as the battle that turned the tide, it was Petersburg that finally broke the back of the rebellion. This is where the process of restoring faith in the Union began in earnest.

In so many ways, Petersburg did the same thing for me. There’s something about the symmetry that I like.

On a lark…

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I’d been kicking it around for a while now and boredom while waiting for clothes to dry finally got the better of me this afternoon… I’m now the proud registered owner of 2 websites – jeffreytharp.com and jdtharp.com. Now I just need to figure out what to do with them… And yes, I have to admit that there was a strong temptation make some quick money by linking my name inextricably with the internet porn industry, but I’ve resisted that temptation so far.

So, my gaggle of devoted friends, what the hell does one do with a website other than create a spiffy email address where both sides of the @ symbol are the same thing?

Two day pass…

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Having slept in until a ridiculously late 7:00 this morning, I’m feeling rested and ready to again take over the world. I’m on a two day pass to get some things done around the house… think laundry, lawn care, and general cleaning… and then I’m on the road to Richmond for a week. As an aside, there’s no good way to get from Memphis to Richmond. Apparently, the only way to do it on a Sunday is to go through Newark, New Jersey as an intermediate step. I’m sure there is a logic to the way airlines do what they do, but I’m damned if I can figure it out.

Standing down…

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This first outing of 2007 has been full of sound and fury, sure enough, but has come to nothing. We’re closing down, packing up, and heading out. Lots of build up only to watch everything fizzle when it was time for the big event. Is it possible for a hurricane to give you blue balls? Never mind, ignore that question.

I should be back in the MEM tomorrow afternoon… at least for a few days.

I’ll take “Conversations I never thought I’d be a part of for $1000, Alex”…

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As they get older, some people develop this Normal Rockwell idealized version of childhood where they think of themselves as “growing up poor” and spinning endless yarns about how tough they had it. I’m not one of those people. Though a far cry from wealthy, we were comfortable. Despite this, I managed to learn a healthy respect for money, which I even try to remember from time to time now that I’m in charge of my own.

One of the things that anyone who has every worked a big emergency event will tell you is that the day tends to stretch on in an unending series of telephone conferences and meetings where people say mostly the same thing again and again. Occasionally, though, you’ll hear something that either makes you shake your head in disbelief or shoot lukewarm coffee out your nose at something approaching the speed of sound.

This afternoon, I was lounging in my standard government issue office chair, leaning perilously back and swilling cup after cup of what passes for “official” coffee. The meeting I was part of was dealing with an impending budget request and since it wasn’t my budget, I’ll admit that my attention was wandering. The question that caught me not only by surprise, but completely unaware in this case was a simply worded affair: Do you think we should request the full $…illion? Now remember, a couple of million is no big deal between agencies, so I didn’t think much of the words that ending in “…illion,” until, of course, the answer came back, “no, I think we can get by on the $950 million for this one.”

That’s right, you just found the point in the day where the institutional coffee I had been drinking filled my sinus cavity. This room full of mid-level bureaucrats was tossing around a billion dollar budget request like people toss a $5 bill on the counter to pay for their daily Starbucks fix. Now that I’ve had the chance to think about it, in the grand scheme of the federal budget, a billion isn’t really that big a chuck of change to request… and that realization really got me thinking.

Growing up in Nowhere, Maryland, I never once would have imagined the places I’ve been, the things I’ve done, and the opportunities I have had. But today, there I was, the youngest person in the room easily by a decade, when we decided that we could “get by” on $995 million next year. There’s enough Western Maryland left in me to still think of that as real money, Everett Dirksen to the contrary.