dannyman.toldme.com

An excerpt from an article on Salon.com:

In an interview with the Miami Herald, he seemed to endorse a moratorium on the death penalty, because there has been “a lot of discrimination and a lot of injustice,” and suggested cases be reviewed with DNA evidence. But when the reporters asked if he’d back a halt to executions, they noted, “Clark sat up straight. ‘Stop. Stop,’ he said. ‘I promised I wasn’t going to take a strong position.’”

In programmer speak, Clark threw an exception when presented with a case he was not yet programmed for. Something like:
ERROR: candidates.democratic.clark: deathPenalty.moratorium not yet defined

The other great catch-phrase from this article refers to the “top-down groundswell” behind Clark … if Howard Dean is from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, Wesley Clark is from the fully re-programmable wing of the democratic party that yields us charismatic automatons like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joseph Lieberman. Clark may have the charisma of Clinton to pull it off against his charismatic, right-wing-programmed nemesis, George Bush. All the same, I have a lot of nostalgia for man versus machine … I’d just as soon send Dean in there against Bush and see him inexplicably flailed by Bush’s mighty buzz-saw pincers and lose a little bit more of my faith in America than to see him toppled by the mightier android.

But then I’d also like to just see Bush gone. At any rate, it’ll be interesting to see what Clark looks like a few revisions from now. It’s too bad he’s still in Alpha.

/danny

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Proof-reading for Yayoi:

man == people
man == person with penis
men == people with penises
Be careful if you are talking about one man, mankind, or penis people.

So, if I do end up teaching English overseas, I’ll at least be somewhat prepared. Gotta remember to look around for a TEFL Cert program. :)

/danny

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So, I’m going to recommend an article published on Salon.com, because not only did it cause me to laugh out loud, but because it also scored a place for John Kerry in my fortunes file:

The swagger of a president saying ‘Bring ’em on’ will never bring peace. Pride is no substitute for protecting our young men and women in uniform. Half the names on the Vietnam Memorial are there because of pride — because of a president who refused to admit he was wrong.

John Kerry

I heard George’s “bring ’em on” on the radio and it made me cringe, and hope that they were somehow targetting that for American consumption and that such dumb sentiment wouldn’t make its way into the Arab press, and into the minds of radicals looking for some hair-brained reason to “bring it on.”

Anyway, the laugh-out-loud funny comes from Al Franken. You can read the article at http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/09/03/franken_dean/.

In other groovy news, a recruiter is presenting me today for a local university job that I think I’m a good fit for. With any luck, September will make up for August, karmically.

At any rate, I was thinking this morning that for D. Howard, Howard Dean is an obvious choice.

Well, since I’m babbling, I’ll mention that I saw a really chilling story in the Tribune today. A former minister is scheduled to be executed in Florida for murdering two abortion doctors. Excellent quote found on Yahoo, from Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood: “It’s sad that people like Paul Hill would murder in the name of life.”

I’m no fan of the death penalty, but a clergyman who is unrepentant about murdering people is the sort of monster that makes the death penalty sort of make sense. He says he’d kill again, because God is on his side. There is no question that he is a menace to society.

But perhaps life in prison would give him plenty of time to think about things. I would think a pious, pro-life Christian like Jeb Bush, who is supposedly going to let the man be executed, would want to allow the man time to repent for his sins before he dies so he could get to Heaven. Oh well.

Then the part of me that is just plain angry at Paul Hill would rather he rot in solitary until his God calls him off of this world. A long life of solitude is more deserved than the free press for martyrdom. But then, maybe that’s what Jeb is thinking.

And the whole idea of Christians in America murdering so that they can become martyrs seems to dovetail with all the Muslim fanatics seeking to be martyred in the Middle East. What with our Energy Consumption, and the vast military and financial involvement in the region that that brings us, most visibly with Israel and Iraq these days, it is like we our cultures deserve each other.

/danny

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From: Danny Howard
To: tuna
Subject: Re: [tuna] recall thoughts, anyone?

>I signed the anti-recall petition around the same time that the recall
>petition was getting press. I’m certainly voting against the recall,
>because I think this is the biggest sham, and frankly I don’t know
>much about Gray Davis. Unless there is blood in the streets, people
>can stick with the damn candidate they voted for until the term is
>up.

Well, you see, and I was out of the country for much of this, so I never got to not vote for Gray Davis, but the reason Gray Davis got elected is because he smeared the moderate Republican in the GOP primary, who had been leading in the poles until Davis pointed out that that anti-Christ wasn’t solidly pro-life.

So, instead of running against a the charismatic, moderate, and popular Republican mayor of Los Angeles, Davis ran against and just barely defeated his hand-picked opponent: a right-wing ogre.

You claim that Californians should stick with whom they voted, but very few Californians bothered to vote either for Davis or his opponent, because few Californians really wanted either one in office. Very few people in California have ever voted for Davis. Maybe a show of hands on how tuna fish voted in the last gubernatorial?

I, for one, did not vote, because I was in France, drinking wine and trying to explain George Bush to people, but I would have voted for Camejo. Davis is a smarmy freak who survives by his adept political manuevering and otherwise does whatever it is that his money sources tell him to do.

>Right below my vote against the recall will be a vote for Arnold.

I’ll be voting absentee. I never wanted Davis in there and I think his claim on the office is somewhat dubious. I am heartened that Bustamonte is leading Ahnold in the polls, so I may just skip the recall question and Cruz straight to my preferred alternative.

–d

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So, early in the month of August was Grandma’s seventy-fifth birthday. Not my Grandma Howard in da Yoo Pee of Michigan who died in May, who had previously turned ninety herself, but my Mom’s Mom in Chicago, who is pretty healthy and quite spunky. Anyways, since August is a big month for birthdays in our family, we had a big party at Grandma’s house in Chicago.

I also had to move out of the apartment that I was subletting from Dan. Moving myself out of an apartment is easy, because all my stuff packs neatly into a dozen or so boxes that fit into my station wagon with ease. The trick is, that I was also obliged by the terms of the sublease to clear all of the junk that had accumulated over the years in the apartment and store it with Dan’s Uncle Marty, who lives three blocks away. So, it wasn’t enough for me to just pack my stuff in my car, drive up to Chicago to attend Grandma’s birthday party, then continue a little farther North to start a new life at Mom’s house, but I’d have to come back to Urbana and clean out Dan’s apartment. By Tuesday. So I drove up Friday evening with the intention to return Sunday. But I’ll get to that later.

Friday, August 8

Now, being as I don’t drive much and my car is old and I value the occasional Confucian ethic of ritual, I keep a mileage log in my car of every time I fill up for gas. As I drove North toward Chicago with all my belongings and stopped for gas I noted with pride that I had not stopped for gas since May. The car has a fourteen gallon tank and gets a little over twenty miles per gallon on the highway, so you can see that I’ve been putting a lot less carbon dioxide into the air we breathe than your average meat-eating red-blooded American is obliged to. And that made me feel quite good about myself. All the same, since I was low on cash, I paid for the gas with my Busey Bank Visa debit card.

Saturday, August 9

The party was wonderful. We had old ladies, and neighbors, and family, and friends of the family, and plenty other people I don’t really know who they are show up. I invited a few friends myself though none were able to attend. There was lots of food and my sister Jessica brought lots of fancy pastries she home-made herself, and I brought some booze I’d found in the apartment that Dan doesn’t drink, and Aunt Linda brought a lot more booze, to add to Grandma’s booze collection, which was augmented by other gifts of booze, not to mention beer. And I was sent out to purchase ice with the neighbor lady who suddenly decided that we needed eight 22 pound bags of ice instead of 8 pound bags, which struck me as a bit excessive at the time, but what with all the beer and soda pop, there were many many coolers hanging around the place yearning for ice. And well anyway Aunt Linda, twenty-first century Renaissance woman that she is, is studying bar-tending, and was thus mixing drinks in Grandma’s basement. I don’t have to tell you all that we had a good time.

Anyway, I just tried to relax because the apartment was going to be tough, but I pitched in with getting the place cleaned up whenever I was asked. Uncle John and Mom did me the favor of driving my stuff up North in Mom’s mini-van. We pulled our tailgates together and shifted my boxes from my blue Ford station wagon to her blue Ford mini-van. And I proceeded to drive back South on Sunday, and carted several carfulls of Dan’s stuff to his Uncle Marty’s house.

Sunday, August 10

Now, Uncle Marty’s a good guy with an extremely beautiful house, and a good heart, near as I can tell. He asked was there any help we needed and I said maybe you have some boxes, and he said yes, he had some at work, which was in some agricultural research building on campus not far from Allen Hall, which is where I lived many years, so we drove over that way, and I noticed the University Police behind me, and then they were flashing their lights, so I pulled over across the street from Campus Visitor Center, where incidentally a friend of mine recently started working.

Now this here is where the story starts to get a little upsetting. I’ll share with you what I wrote to MikeyA about it:

You know when they pull you over, you have to go to court? They don’t just send you a fine in the mail and stuff. Well, I don’t even remember getting pulled over in Palo Alto, but the other day I was pulled over in Illinois on account of the license plate on the back of my car had no tags, because it was the license plate from the front of the car, because the license plate from the back of the car had been stolen while I was travelling in foreign lands.

Well they ran the plates and found my registration was expired. I’ve been putting off worrying about that because I’ve been kinda broke and not sure do I wanna change the registration to Illinois or renew in California or what. Anyhow, they pulled me over and asked for my license and insurance card. I have insurance but I don’t drive so often so I hadn’t gotten around to putting the new insurance card in the glove compartment yet and the one that was in there was two months expired.

Well, they ran my license through the computer and you know it was suspended!? I did not know that it was suspended. Well, so anyway, they asked if I knew why and I recalled them pulling me over in the Mission District one night when I was driving around, missing my back plate, looking for parking, and they had two cop cars then and they asked me to keep my hands on the dashboard because they didn’t know if I was really there to snuff anyone out, and they seemed nonplussed to find out that I merely had a missing license plate. I’d drove around the peninsula for two months or more and nobody ever wondered about my license plate, and the only reason the cops got excited in the Mission was because they thought I might have been up to something else.

I’ll interject here to explain that the Mission District is one of the less yuppified parts of San Francisco, where I was staying with some friends my last few days in California back in April before I went and drove through the blizzards back to Illinois. The cop told me that the license plates were a fix-it offense, and I’d receive a thing in the mail that I could send back to them after I showed my license plate to an Illinois cop and he signed off on it. For some reason, these past few months, this has not been foremost among the things that I’ve been worried about.

“They do it differently,” the Illinois cop told me. I had the front plate on the back of the car because in Illinois one day I was pulled over twice because I had no license plate and the second cop said put the front plate on the back for cryin’ out loud.

There was much more discussion about my shady story as to whether I live in Urbana or do I live in Chicago and the last time the University Police pulled me over in 1999 I said I was a student just about to leave town so it seems awfully suspicious to them that I had the same story in 2003, except that this time I wasn’t a student. Anyway, they said that since I must have lost my license because I had Failed To Appear that they couldn’t trust that I’d appear there. So they arrested me. The back seat of the cop car was split in half and I had my own little plastic bubble to myself.

Another aside here, but the cop who frisked me wanted to know if I had any Bad Things on me. I forgot about my tiny pocket knife, and he never found it. He examined my cell phone and castigated me that if I had enough to purchase a cell phone, but not to keep my car registered, that my priorities must be awfully screwed up. I couldn’t think of anything to say to that at the time, because I was more preoccupied with getting arrested. In my defense I’ll point out that the cell phone cost me $50, and was purchased when the car didn’t even have a working transmission, which was another piece of really foul fortune that I ran up against early this year, and that anyway, I do use the cell phone a lot more than I use my car, and have a greater need for it, as it facilitates job hunting.

At the Champaign County Jail a guy with a moustache and tattoos who looked like he had experience in such matters smiled and waved at me in the back of the cop car as we waited to go into the secret garage. Then another guy who had been working too long and was slap-happy took all my stuff, and my shoelaces, but then let me keep my credit card so I could bail myself out. I never went in a cell, but got my mug shot taken and fingerprints scanned and then my hands covered with ink so they could have an old-fashioned paper record of my prints.

When it finally came around time to bail myself out, they had me call this service that processes credit cards for people who are getting bailed out, and as soon as I was off the phone a fax came through verifying the payment. But they were confused because it was already signed. Huh? Dan’s Uncle Marty, who had been in the car with me, had bailed me out on his credit card. So we called the service up again and asked that Uncle Marty get refunded and I signed my own piece of paper and I was released.

Now, to get back to the story here, and the task at hand, which is that Uncle Marty had come with Milly, my subletting-from-Dan roommate for the summer, and I thanked Uncle Marty for being such a noble character here, and we drove all together in his Volkswagen Golf and picked up boxes from his office. I had a dinner date to catch up on that evening because Yayoi had baked an Apple Pie that she had wanted to share with me, but she’d been pretty confused when I didn’t show up, why didn’t I call? Because I got arrested. But then, why didn’t you call? Because they don’t let you do that, when you get arrested. And she said oh, because my friend Yayoi is from Japan, and maybe they do things differently over there when you get arrested. I don’t know. But I finally got to her place and we made curry rice together and it was delicious.

Monday, August 11

The next day I dropped by the bank to clear out my account. They had the $220 charge from Sunday recorded as deducted, and I hadn’t wrote any checks lately, so I took the remaining $400 or so in cash. I felt somewhat glad that even though I had had to post $200 in bail, I was leaving Urbana with a little more money than I had when I left Oakland.

Milly’s Dad and Little Sister came down in their own mini-van to help with the moving. Together, we loaded up the rest of Dan’s stuff and made a few more trips and completely filled Uncle Marty’s living room with stuff. Mom and Uncle John were nice enough to register my car in Illinois on short notice when I explained that the title was in a box of my stuff in Mom’s van in Chicago and I was down in Champaign without a license, but the Police Officer wasn’t satisfied to hear that the car was registered, he bitched about “plates on the car” that he never was going to look at anyway so I hopped the Greyhound to Chicago. I told Milly that I’d say that I felt bad about leaving the remainder of the apartment cleaning to her, but that I’d be lying, because I really wasn’t eager to scrub the apartment’s naughty bits, and anyway, I’d already hauled a dozen heavy bags to the trash in removing, among other things, cans of soup from the mid-nineties, and numerous other mysterious things, and all of Dan’s stuff, and I felt somewhat done.

I have my proof of insurance, which was actually in a box that I’d kept in the car when I was originally pulled over, but I hadn’t thought of that at the time, but I can’t get my driver’s license so quick. I called California DMV about twenty times and finally I got through and the lady said two FTAs, here are the docket numbers and telephone numbers in San Francisco and Palo Alto to call. Of course, the San Francisco number went to an automated system that only worked if I had my Courtesy Warning Notice with me, and the Palo Alto number played some new-age space music and said please leave a message. So I looked on the Internet and found an e-mail address for San Francisco that told me that they wanted $250 over the missing license plate, and an accurate phone number for Palo Alto informed me that they wanted $300 for a “traffic-related fine” and a $7 fee for a copy of the abstract that I could send to DMV to get my license un-suspended.

Tuesday, August 12

Anyway I rode back to Champaign the next day, though the surly Greyhound bus driver threatened to not let us on the bus because we must have been deliberately ignoring him when he said Champaign people move to the front of the line to get first crack at the local bus but because we hate his guts we deliberately stood at the very end of the line ignoring him, but he eventually swallowed his resentment, because we never met the guy and hadn’t had anything against him and had never even heard his voice before even when he told us to get at the front of the line, so he moved some people from the local bus to the bus that would get them wherever it was that they were going faster anyway, and drove us down to Champaign.

I needed proof of registration and two licensed drivers so we could all go over together in one car and return with two, but I wasn’t a licensed driver. I got Raad, who is another great guy with a white heart, and Yayoi, who has a great attitude about life, to join me at the Public Safety Building, where I showed them the sticker and my two friends driver’s licenses, and then Raad drove us over to Tatman’s and I got my car out of the towing lot. It had been $75 to tow and $15 / day to store. And since it was two days to get everything together, he wanted $105, but he didn’t have any change, and none of anybody else was around had any change, but the boss was around and said make it an even $100.

We dropped the car off at Yayoi’s and then Raad took us to his place for dinner. We ate a delicious, hand-made, vegetarian pizza, because Raad’s a vegetarian, and drank beer and wine, and Raad shared with us what he believes is the greatest movie ever, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” which I admit was pretty good, but Raad was probably uniquely able to relate to it most vividly because he grew up in Iraq and I don’t think Yayoi got much out of it, but it was a nice way to punctuate everything else that is going on, and I got to see Raad’s paintings and his cats. Yayoi likes cats. And I got to see a picture of his girlfriend in Malaysia, and he was flying to Texas to see his son next week. It was all extremely homey in that comingled diaspora kind of way that makes me smile. Such distances we all have to go to live and to love!

And then as I had further written to MikeyA:

So, I got my car back but I couldn’t legally drive it. My Japanese friend, Yayoi, drove it back to her place, where I stayed for a couple of days, coaching her driving skills. You see, Yayoi grew up in the enchanted land of public transportation infrastructure. And she was kind of scared of the Interstate, but she wanted a ride to Chicago, on the next Friday, so we got along well enough.

Eventually the big day came and we drove up North. We got started kinda late though, and when it got dark I took the wheel, brazenly driving without a license, on the story that it is better I drive than Yayoi deal with my unreliable headlights while driving into Chicago for the first time at night. No troubles … no troubles.

Ugh.

So, you can see, I’ve been kinda slow in getting around to updating my web site. :)

/danny

Post Script

I returned to Urbana for court the other day, and I was the first called. I was charged with insurance, and I showed them my proof-of-insurance card. I was charged with driving without a valid license, and I showed them my driver’s license. The charges were dropped. I’m waiting for the $200 to show up in the mail.

Why did that go so easily? Because driving on a suspended license implies that you were busted for a DUI. It’s a really big deal that I think you actually do go to actual jail for, so unless the cop thinks that you deserve a Really Bad Day, they just charge you with the technically incorrect, but inconvenient offense of driving without a valid license. Apparently my license is valid if you show it to a prosecutor in a court room, but suspended if you have it run by a traffic cop. All the same, I have the CTA at my disposal, so I’m not driving until some unemployment comes through.

Two weeks after I filed for unemployment in Ilinois I was told that I had to re-open my existing claim in California, which had previously been determined invalid, but was subsequently validated when I showed them my earnings from the Coffee Shop. Since I was terminated, I had to do a phone interview, and the lady was able to just pull my account of the story right off of the Internet via a private URL. She was very pleased to have this, because it turns out the Owner lied to her about what had happened, but the burden of proof is on him to show gross misconduct. She has ten days to make a determination in the case, and that was a week ago, so I’ve been anxiously watching the mail for word, and likely cash from the State of California so I can pay off the State of California and drive around Illinois.

Anyways, Busey Bank later called me because they received the charge from the gas station for $19.24 on Wednesday. And they wanted that and $25 fee for overdrawing the account I no longer had. Gah! Anyways, I had put off paying them until I have a bank account, but the other day they called and said, really, the $19.24 would make them happy, so Yayoi said she’d take care of that on my behalf and I get to pay her back. After that call I returned a call from a recruiter who thought I was in California but wanted to present me to a very prestigious University in Chicago. The job sounds good and we’re working to tune my resume, so … things are looking up for a change.

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Cute! Salon published my note to them about Arianna Huffington: http://www.salon.com/opinion/letters/2003/08/26/franken_arianna/.

My letter is short and sweet, the one after that, by Mark Klein, states the case better, I think.

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Well, it is Monday and I’m back in the swing of full-time unemployment. I swept out my room in the basement today and arranged the furniture around a bit. Sue lent me a box fan that I can get in the window, to provide valuable late-summer-in-Chicago cooling. After much interstate bureacratic process, my unemployment claim should be validated and checks will soon be on the way, the claim period properly backdated. Yay.

Grandma treated me and Uncle John and Bert and Jane to brunch at Le Peep this morning, in Evanston, on the idea that Bert is another year older today. The French toast was darned good. Not Sam’s Cafe in Champaign good, but darned good for sure.

I spent a lot of time today in e-mail proof-reading resumes and cover letters for Yayoi. She moved to a new place on Sunday, and she doesn’t have a phone line yet, much less Internet access, so she was chilling with the ol’ laptop down at Green Street Coffee House. After much of this helping someone else find a job, did my laundry and got started trying to write up ideas I want to implement on a future web site. The idea is if I can write down the ideas I have a better chance of implementing them, and of recruiting external resources to my cause. We’ll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, Salon.com reports that I can retain my faith in the legal system, as U.S. District Judge Denny Chin smacked Fox down for being shrill and unstable. We can add that to the fact that Mister Alabama-Supreme-Court-Chief-Justice-Ten-Commandmants man has been overruled by his peers on the Alabama Supreme Court, and last I recall he’s been suspended because he apparently has a hard time following the laws on the United States of America. I can relate. But then we expect a bit more of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, especially if he thinks he’s so fucking pious. Well, maybe he thinks he’s a little too so fucking pious, but I mean, who does he think he is? Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama? That’s still a few ranks down from Moses.

I mean, it’s Alabama for Christ’s sake.

/danny

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Which Curt Tucker are we talking about?

Curt Tucker is a tall, middle-aged, white male. He lives in or around Champaign, Illinois. He is co-owner of Verdant Systems, the Verde Art Gallery, and Verdant News and Coffee, all located in Champaign, Illinois. As of July 2003, Curt is balding, wears round glasses, and sports a goatee. He claims to hold a background in social services and psychiatry. (more…)

14 Comments

< How would you describe “the hunter s thompson of systems administration”

< Sounds kinda monkeybagely

> Haha

> “One of God’s original prototypes: too dangerous for mass production, too weird to die.”

> What’s this for?

> How you doin’?

< The flying out to interview with <prospective_employer> in california thing just fell through and so I immediately start talking about my plan Bs like hop a greyhound to NYC.

> Argh, that sucks. I didn’t know you were talking to them

< And I realized that I’m really just an adventurer and I treat sysadmin as an easy money-making lifestyle and that sounds hunter

< You need to gossip with Angel more.

> Yeah

> Heh

< But if I can bum around thailand on $1,000 / month I can try my hand at nyc.

> Nice

> How’s CU, then?

< I am getting laid like crazy out here and its great for contemplation and the clouds are really hot to look at.

> Haha

> Well, that’s something.

< The cafe owner prick fired me this is documented on my web site. But it should requalify me for TMTA unemployment

< And that could fund nyc

> Argh

> Oh, nice

1 Comment

An important component of maintaining psychological health while unemployed is to have rituals and other outgoing activities that are cheap and can sponge up the slow, potentially depressing hours.

Every day I get out and purchase the Chicago Tribune, and enjoy a pastry and two cups of coffee at one of the local coffee shops. Between the newspaper, the crossword puzzle, free newspapers and others that might be found at the coffee shop, as well as whatever book I’m carrying in my backpack, and the occasional visits from friends and my own muse, this is a good, inexpensive way to pass a few of the morning hours.

The afternoons are for writing, cleaning, or one of my other favorite activities: walking. I’ve done this around the world, and even in the quiet of Champaign-Urbana, I can enjoy myself by taking off in one direction, and returning a few miles, and a few hours, later.

In case anything hits me, I always have a few pens and a paperclip of index cards on hand to catch a passing thought.

This past Saturday I started at Kopi in downtown Champaign, and walked North along the Railroad right-of-way. The weather was fantastic: warm and dry. I noted to myself:

I would take pictures, but I’ve lost my camera.
I’d write poetry, but I can’t find my muse.

And I recalled another recent walk along the railroad tracks, when I saw a guy wearing blue jeans, combat boots, and a white tee shirt with the American Flag on it. He looked up when he saw me coming, hesitated, and then turned to walk away from my approach. He called out an explanation. “Were you wearing another shirt I might receive you, but I don’t like sunflowers.” I was wearing a black shirt with a sunflower print. I am usually complimented for it.

I sat down on a box beside the railroad tracks to commit these thoughts and memories to paper, when I had a weird moment:

I read in the paper today that over 30,000 Japanese ended their own lives last year. That is more than the population of Urbana. Many were jobless and at a loss for something better to do.

I look up from the box I’m sitting on beside the railroad tracks. There is a stack of pre-fabricated railroad switch track segments sitting before me. On the iron rails is a marking: “115 RE VT NIPPON 2002 10”. And I wonder how many Japanese kept their lives last year by building the railway equipment that sits before me this year, rusting in Illinois.

Coffee, computers, iron rails, or walking around the railroad tracks, chasing the phantom muse, we are fortunate to find a living.

/danny

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She was a young lady with short hair, sitting on the quad, wearing a nice little black dress. She was having her lunch: a sandwich, chips, and soda. She caught my eye because as young ladies eating lunch on the quad go, the little black dress was more fashionable than the tees and shorts or dowdy office uniforms worn by most of the landscape. A little black dress and relaxed black loafers, complementing pale skin and a doo that was unusual not just for being short on a woman.

What caught my attention, and hers, were the birds. One perched near her and peered up, have you any crumbs? She certainly did, and she certainly shared, and she certainly enjoyed the sharing.

A few crumbs later and her friend flew off. Both our heads tracked its flight out of range. More birds came and went, more crumbs she shared. She was finished eating now and pulled out a magazine. Scientific American! But her reading was interrupted when the birds returned. Two, then three, and before long she was parcelling crumbs out to a half dozen admirers.

< I love watching people feed birds.

> umm ok

Feeding is intimacy. We are, after all, mammals who have breasts to form that first important connection with our young: the act of feeding. Perhaps that is why housewives and chefs and waitstaff are undervalued by capitalism: it doesn’t take much for the human engaged in these activities to groove to the meme that food is good, and that serving food to others is deeply satisfying.

Kissing, this most revered expression of kinship, affection, and desire between lovers, is enjoyable because our mouths were formed to touch flesh, to caress the things that we most value, to try and ingest the things that we love, at least symbolicly. I have frequently noticed that when the little birds approach me, and look up and ask for food, that their mouths are open, at least a crack. I suspect that the real reason for this is to help cool these aviators in the humid heat of Illinois’ summer, but I can also see that open mouth asking the question first asked in the nest – will you put food in me?

Birds are not mammals. They have no soft lips seeking the milk of mother’s breast. All the same, parents prepare and share food into the waiting, plaintive, open beaks connected to hungry, growing stomachs. When a human is feeding birds, they are stretching a handful of crumbs out across the space of time, to that moment when human and bird is the same. It is a statement of shared sentiment from one corner of the animal kingdom to another, that we are all together, however temporarily sharing existence in this fantastic experience that is our world.

/danny

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I had recently been switched to the morning shift, Monday through Saturday. This was done by the old Cafe Manager, who had a very polite habit of asking us how we felt about changes to our regular schedules. Regular schedules being an understood trade-off for the fact that the employer does not tolerate the concept of “unpaid leave” for “full-time” employees.

On Thursday morning we saw the new schedule had been posted. In addition to four eight-hour shifts, Monday through Thursday, I was scheduled to work Friday and Saturday evening. I considered how comfortable I could be with this schedule, lamenting to my colleagues that it struck me as rude to schedule me for an extra day of work, overtime, without asking me first.

I didn’t really want to work overtime, and I had been invited to a birthday party on Saturday.

I tossed it around in my head how I wanted to deal with this, over the course of the day. In the early afternoon, near the end of my shift, the Co-Owner passed by, and asked if I’d seen the new schedule, and had any problems with it.

“Well … I do have a prior commitment on Saturday …”

“When we hired you you agreed to be available Monday through Saturday.”

“I was also told that I was expected to work a regular schedule.”

The phone rang, I asked if she wanted me to take the call. She left me with the telephone. I could feel the electricity in the air. Just in case things were about to get ugly, I gathered my personal belongings in to a convenient pile, in case I might have to leave suddenly.

The Owner came around looking for me, having checked the washrooms. I was in the basement, storing some supplies. I was asked to come around the front to have a meeting with him and the Co-Owner. I had to turn around and double-check that the basement door was properly secure. After all, I wasn’t sure that I’d be back around, and this door had featured prominently in the final straw that had broken the Cafe Manager’s back the week before.

I was invited to sit. I was reminded that I had previously agreed to be available for work Monday through Saturday. I responded that when I agreed to this, I had also been told that the schedule would be provided two weeks in advance. The Owner responded that he had never made such a claim. I reminded him that he had told me this at my interview, when I had been considering additional employment to supplement my income.

(When he denied that he had ever said that the schedule would be posted in advance, I felt that I had caught him in a lie. At that moment, his face seemed to separate from his skull, and become a rubber mask, the rage behind it revealing itself in his eyes, his forehead, and his extremely tense body.)

He explained that the schedule was to be posted two weeks ahead of time, only in the best of times. Since one of the employees was on three weeks leave, which she had arranged months in advance, this was clearly not the best of times.

We have been soliciting for and interviewing candidates to work in the Cafe. I inquired as to whether we might bring a new hire on line soon enough, that they would be trained and available to work next weekend. The Owner got visibly angry, and admonished that this was none of my business, and it was not my place to make such a suggestion!

They cut to the agenda at hand: are you refusing to work?

“… not yet …” (I did “not yet” view the problem at hand as unsolvable, by reasonable people. If nothing else, it wouldn’t be the first time I had scrapped recreation plans to accommodate an employer.)

They cut to the chase. The Owner told me that he’d do what I had wanted him to do for a long time. On the grounds that I was “being difficult,” I was fired. I would hand him my apron, and he would return with my belongings, which I had just before arranged for easy retrieval. He would also punch my time card. I offered to bring him an S.A.S.E. He agreed.

I was free.

I didn’t want to get behind the wheel until after the adrenaline had passed. I took a walk around the block, stopping in a knick-knack store where I had heard that the lady knew of the difficulties that my predecessors had had with the Owner. She engaged me in conversation, and I admitted that I was relaxing. One of my regular customers was there and asked if it were my day off. I confessed that I had just been fired. Why? For being difficult … about working overtime. They both looked surprised, and the store owner then told me that she had heard of other bad stories. She flipped the bird in the general direction of my former employer, which helped me smile, and feel more sanguine.

That evening, I got together with some comrades, and many drinks were purchased for me. The Cafe Manager had just returned from a vacation, and showed up to buy s’more drinks and help us share horror stories. The consensus was that the Owner has a great idea in what he wants to do with his business, and he does what he can to hire the best people, but then for whatever bizarre reason, he can’t trust them enough to do their job, and does what he can to make an ass of himself, and it is frustrating to see his good idea ground into dirt this way, where there’s been 300% staff turn-over since they opened six months ago.

“It is like he’s a Shakespearean character,” I explained to a sympathetic friend today, “engaged in a great enterprise, which will be destroyed because of his tragic fatal flaw … which is that he is a big dick!” I was in another Cafe, and an employee passed, and laughed at this analysis of whatever it was that I was talking about. I may have to apply for work at that Cafe.

It was a groovy time. I felt good. And the rest of the evening segued in to an exceptionally joy-filled, romantic night. But, that is a different story. I have to apply for unemployment benefits on Monday, and explore the different possibilities that will lead me to Chicago, California, or to further adventures in Champaign-Urbana, as the lease is kaput on August 12. At least I have time to clean the apartment now.

/danny

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