Random Thought of the Day

Do you have the LinkTV channel? Every single show is a depressing documentary about the Third World. Yet somehow, cable television executives continue to deny us an "Erin Andrews All The Time" network. Now, that's what I call an injustice!

Conversation of the Week

Guy who painted the lines in my parking lot: "Damn, the guy who painted the lines in this parking lot sure did a nice job!"

Me: "Yeah, but too bad he's kinda funny lookin'!"

I Is Smart

Obviously, there are exceptions to the rule.

Still Hammerin'

"Outside Miller Park, among a clutch of cars in an auxiliary parking lot, a plaque in the ground commemorates the spot where Aaron's 755th home run landed. Asked about Bonds at the monument's unveiling less than two weeks ago, Aaron said, 'I don't even know how to spell his name.'" -- Jeff Passan, Yahoo! Sports, June 19.

Patpourri

"I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first." -- Peter Ustinov

Patpourri

Frank Costanza: Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way.

Cosmo Kramer: What happened to the doll?

Frank Costanza: It was destroyed. But out of that a new holiday was born -- a Festivus for the rest of us!

GD-Related Random Thought

Reminder: When Phil is on, the Dead are on.

Voicemail of the Month

Seamus (to the tune of "Folsom Prison Blues"):

"One, two, one, two, three, four

I see Sweet Lou is callin'

He's callin' to the 'pen

And I ain't seen good pitchin'

Since I don't know when."

Here's Lookin' At You, Amanda Beard

It's like this: You're hot enough to be in Playboy, but not hot enough to be really famous. No one's going to remember you in five years anyway, unless they're spanking to old issues of Playboy. So go all out. What the fuck?

Overhauling

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my grandfather and I once debated endlessly about many different things. In certain circumstances wherein I would refuse to budge on my advocacy of a wild idea, he would shake his head and look at me strangely and say, "You're a rebel. You're a revolutionary." Though I am committed to the ideas of Adam Smith, the Invisible Hand is not allowed to operate freely these days. Our natural reactions are constantly hindered by bureaucracies and, I would argue, a warped view of the meaning of liberty. A great example of this is the current energy crisis.

Let's get one thing straight: energy is a situation, not a crisis. A sensationalist drama queen bent dominates American culture, and it ultimately does not serve greater society very well. Things aren't simply what they are; events are without exception described as either the best or the worst in absolute terms, and after a while, people tend to ignore both the important and the mundane. Unfortunately, this callousness forces us to accept even the crappiest of situations, and it makes us vulnerable to easily avoidable frustrations.

In terms of the present gas situation, I have yet to witness an epidemic of long lines at the pump, and to the best of my knowledge, not a single gas station has closed due to a lack of availability. On the flip side of this consideration, I haven't met one person who's had to cash out a college fund or take out extreme amounts of debt in order to fuel their car or fill their car's gas tank. Yet we are lead to believe that the nation faces the worst gas crisis in at least fifteen years or thirty years (or whatever the hell number of years you want to pull out of the dictionary of overemphasis regularly used by the modern media). Nothing is as self-fulfilling as hysteria, and it's a bothersome problem.

I spend a good deal of time thinking about matters of transportation -- not just the price energy, but how we get around, the nature of traffic, and the resulting economic impacts. I've come to the conclusion that, if we ever did face a real energy crisis, and a revolutionary solution was required, it would not be so difficult to alleviate the problem and improve the state of human affairs to boot.

Several thoughts on the subject:

The minimum driving age should be raised to 21. First off, my license was still warm from the laminating machine when I started plotting how to get a fake ID, and I succeeded within a month. If high school kids want beer, they find beer. Second, most 16 year olds are not yet physically developed into an adult body, and it worries me to think about a 100-pound zit bag handling a one-ton piece of machinery. Third, and this is harsh but true, most high school kids only have two years of driving before they head off to either college or the military, where they are usually either not allowed or have no need to have a car for at least two years. Given the number of sham schools and all the quick and easy debt floating around these days, and the fact that we're fighting two wars simultaneously, a kid who can't find a college or a branch of the service to accept him or her is probably mentally retarded. Fourth, let us take their refusal to vote as a statement of indifference to everything. Their decision to neuter themselves politically implies that they don't mind getting shafted. Anyway, their idea of political involvement never extends beyond an MTV reality show, an apathetic campus demonstration, or the t-shirt du jour, which are adult-managed undertakings anyway.

2. The maximum driving age should be 77. This would drive the AARP crazy, but I think there's something intrinsically good about anything that that vampire-like organization promotes. [AARP-related sidebar: Old people are completely engaged in the political process. Who do you think stuffs envelopes for congressmen? Who has unlimited time to think in-depths about public policy? Who watches C-SPAN? Therefore, retirees so totally enfranchised ought not to have a specialized lobbying group.] Realistically, modern humans begin to have major health issues as they approach the 80 range. Our ability to make rational decisions declines in a hurry, and we are prone to sudden health issues such as heart attacks and strokes. Mental lapses become daily occurrences, and most importantly, the mind's ability to think reactively becomes practically non-existent. Is it wise to let these people operate potentially dangerous pieces of equipment? I would say, no way in hell.

(Because I think they are such a problem, the next five points deal with the same problem.)

3a. All interstate trucking traffic should be banned in and around major metropolitan areas. If you think about it, achieving this goal would not be as hard as you might think. Some set of laws could be passed mandating that trucks operating within urban areas must have gas tanks allowing for no more than 10 miles of driving distance. For the life of me, I can't figure out why commuters are forced to drive slowly behind three shoulder-to-shoulder interstate trucks, when you know their routes probably run parallel to some series of train depots. Isn't it worthwhile for society as a whole to let our non-perishable goods sit on trains for an extra day or two, when you consider the time, energy and utility wasted by sitting around in traffic? You may ask, "What if somewhere is more than 10 miles from the nearest train depot?" I would say to you, "Be sensible, you short-sighted boob." Somewhere more than 10 miles from the nearest train is probably way the heck out in the middle of nowhere, and therefore pretty unlikely to have major traffic issues in the first place.

3b. When you drive on the highway as often as I do, you notice two main patterns of confusion on our highways, both of which come down to trucks. As I've discovered in a practical sense on a project I worked on this spring, systems can only operate as fast as the slowest mover. This point becomes terribly evident when there is apparently no reason for traffic, except that trucks take forever to stop and forever again to get rolling. Trucks clogging the highway at rush hour produces a big screw-you to car drivers, who are the ones who principally pay for the roads in the first place via taxes at the gas pump. My second point on this topic is, no one likes to drive behind trucks, especially people who don't like to drive fast in the first place, so what tends to happen is: slow morons get all the way over into the left lane, even if they're afraid to go faster than the trucks in the right two lanes, all so they don't have to drive behind the stupid trucks, thereby jamming up the people in back who would prefer to go faster than the trucks. One way or the other, trucks tend to cause traffic.

3c.) Instead of ganging up on businessmen, kicking the crap out of women, and employing horrendously obvious and immoral cover-ups, why don't we station cops on highway overpasses and nail trucks driving in the left lane? In Chicago, we have prominent signs at regular intervals that say "Trucks Use 2 Right Lanes" on our main 4-lane highway, yet trucks treat the 3rd lane as a passing lane. I suppose the Department of Transportation could draw picture signs to convey this (apparently) complex message to the truckers more easily, or maybe they could translate the signs into hillbilly ("Hey Y'All: Git 'Er Done Away From Yer Heart" -- might have to use a really, really tiny font.) Then again, it's not like the truckers would notice any sort of sign, given that most of them can't read, are high on crystal meth, or are too busy jerking off to bestiality porn. At any rate, when was the last time you saw a cop pull a truck over for a traffic offense?

3d. The price of diesel fuel should be kept artificially high to dissuade excessive trucking. When I was little my mom had a Mercedes that used on diesel fuel, but we got rid of it at least 15 years ago. I cannot for the life of me remember the last time I rode in a diesel-powered car. Diesel fuel is mostly there for trucks, so let's make the diesel a deterrent and thereby reduce the unnecessary amount of truck traffic clogging our highways. From an economic point of view, when you consider all the gas that idling cars are forced to waste thanks to the endless traffic caused by trucks, we would probably save money on the macro level by raising the price of diesel to nearly insane levels. We could then use the additional tax revenues to address the problems outlined in 3e and 4.

3e. Roads are built for cars, but trucks get to use them. We recently built a new road to the clubhouse at my golf course, and the guy from the paving guy informed me the only reason he's in business is: asphalt is manufactured with cars in mind, and trucks tear the shit out of it. So, if you think about it, without massive trucks rumbling down the highway, not only will passenger cars be able to move in an unimpeded fashion, we would avoid having to rebuild the same stretch of road every other years, thereby alleviating the potential for traffic jams caused by work sites. The cumulative economic benefits are obvious.

3f. Another main reason for traffic jams is, the number of cars on the road is greater than the available open space. Do I need to point out that you could fit two or three cars in the space that one truck occupies? This is another self-evident point: if we ban trucks from urban highways, we will have more room for cars on the road. I shouldn't need to mention that the extra space trucks require to accelerate and stop wastes additional space that could otherwise be occupied by more cars. Do you get the sense that I hate trucks? Enough about them.

4. There should be a 50% tax on domestic automobile sales and a 100% tax on foreign automobile sales. We Americans have developed the absurd idea that driving is some sort of individualistic right, not a special privilege. Thanks to the low interest rates set by the Fed following 9/11, and the need to produce more and more cars thanks to crippling union contracts, it's way too easy to buy a car. (I could go into it in more depth, but this is a rant, not a term paper.) If the common man needs to go to work, we should provide him with a common means of transportation. The country was founded on the belief that each man is his own individual ruler, but there's nothing in the Constitution about the right to live like a king. What's the cause of Americans' fear of dealing with one another? We are so anti-social, so reluctant to rub shoulders with our fellow citizens. If we insist on acting like islands unto ourselves (which I would argue is not the natural state of man) such a selfish stance should carry a hefty fine. The extra tax monies generated should be directed toward building a much more extensive system of passenger railway systems -- interstate, regional, and local -- which will produce a variety of benefits for society, not the least of which are environmental. Regular, face-to-face contact with our fellow citizens will, at the very least, make us deal with one another and thereby chip away at some of our more arcane fears of the other. It might sound slightly socialistic, but trains produce a leveling effect that can't but help make our country stronger.

So, there you have it. If we ever do witness an American Caesar, someone who is willing to buck the system and impose a revolution, I think he should start with completely revamping our transportation system. I am a Republican at the core, but I believe taxes should be used when appropriate. Anyway, I'm not much of a Republican these days; I'm definitely more of a Libertarian -- too bad the leaders of that party typically sound even crazier than I do.

In other news, I had a terrible premonition last night that we are in for a long summer of social upheaval; I am somewhat fearful that race riots are impending. Basically, I am throwing this out there at the tail end of this post because I think traffic and energy concerns contribute to rage across the broad spectrum of American society, and mass rage usually boils over into outward aggression against government institutions. It is becoming apparent to me at this point in history that Americans in general (and particularly in cities, and more particularly still among minorities) live in increasing fear of their government. For any republic to operate properly, the people must be the master, and the government must be the servant, but that is not the trend of current affairs. There seems to be a disconnect between what's best for the people and what the government is willing to offer, a point that is perfectly illustrated by our critically myopic transportation options. Some of this has to do with the Patriot Act. As Ben Franklin said, "Any society that would give up a little liberty to a little security deserves neither and will lose both." Our liberties are under attack, and our security is at risk. Once that ball starts rolling, what to do you do about it?

My Hero

When I was young, and my ambitions were uncertain, I wanted nothing more than to be like my grandfather.

During summers following my sophomore year of high school, and for intermittent periods thereafter, I had the singular pleasure of serving as his driver. For those of you who haven't met him, my grandpa is one of the coolest guys anyone could ever hope to meet.

He grew up on the streets in the near South Side, or the "Old Neighborhood" as he likes to call it, around Halsted and Taylor, in the Italian slums that were razed in a two-pronged effort by Mayor Daley the First: to make room for the University of Illinois at Chicago, and to disperse the Italian vote.

Despite being overweight for most of his life, and being of short stature (my mom, who I've always considered to be a midget, looks him squarely in the eye when standing), he's one of those people who commands instant attention the second he walks into a room. He is famous in certain circles for almost constantly smoking a cigar. He exudes a transcendent personality and overwhelmingly charming quality. This is due in part to his fascinating array of pinkie rings, his closets full of tailored leisure clothes, his deep caramel skin, his full head of hair at 89, his thick street-kid accent, and his tendency to treat everyone with respect and good humor. He's an unforgettable gentleman of a bygone era, the type of personality that's so original and genuine that his manner of being is sure to expire from the American landscape as soon as he does.

He is, above all else, a self-made man. My grandma's father was a hard-ass Lithuanian tavern owner who, once every year, would lock himself up alone in his bar, throw on his Prussian military uniform, and drink himself into a rage. Yet, this was the man who my grandpa had no choice but to turn to for a start-up loan for a business, and miraculously, my great-grandfather granted his request. Grandpa built one liquor store, then two, then three, and at one point oversaw a large chain whose delivery zone spread out all over the greater Chicagoland area. Additionally, he accumulated a number of commercial properties of various types and sizes, some of which we kept and allow me to make an independent living to this day.

The two of us must have made for some sight back in my high school days: the long-haired know-it-all hippie intellectual, and the hardscrabble street-educated self-made millionaire, arguing over orange juice and bagels at 7 a.m. in the bakery near his house. We would engage in heated discussions about all manner of things, almost always capped off by him delivering some folksy bit of wisdom. He would regale me with anecdote about past business deals, all of which I had heard time and time again yet could never get enough of. He would ask me what I was studying in school, and I'd try to explain to him various points about philosophy, art and religion. Without fail, whenever I finished up one of my mini-lectures, he would wave a dismissive hand and say, "I didn't graduate from high school; I had to work to help support my family."

The thing that always gets me is, I can't help but wonder what he would have become if he had had half the advantages that were handed to me on a silver platter. Maybe he would have been Warren Buffett, or a professor at Harvard, or even the president of the United States. He has the soul of a great man, and though he is a great man, I mean it as the soul of a Great Man. In another life, he was probably Ghengis Khan or Charlemagne or another visionary leader capable of leading men to doing grand things.

I can honestly say that I learned far more about business and the world from him than I did in either college or graduate school. Essentially, his wisdom revolved around five simple maxims:

1. Always buy dirt, because God don't make it no more.

2. The world is complicated, so keep your business simple.

3. Take care of your people, and your people will take care of you.

4. Never sell anything that sells.

5. Get up early and get back home early, or you'll spend your whole life sitting in traffic.

There isn't a day that goes by that I don't recall one story or another about him, whether it's something he did before I was born or something we did with him in the lead, that either causes me to take pause to think or applies directly to a situation I'm in the midst of handling.

Our conversations more often than not proved to be vexing tests of will. He would beg me not to drink. I would point out that it was ironic for a man who made a fortune selling liquor to despise drinking. He would tell me to stay in school. I would point out that he dropped out at 16 and did better than most. He would tell me to listen to my father. I would remind him that he never seemed to listen to my dad. We were like Mutt and Jeff -- so diametrically opposed in nearly every way imaginable, yet somehow cut from the same cloth.

For as long as I can remember, he has been my best friend, and he remains so today. Though enfeebled as the result of a gastrointestinal condition (yet another irony -- the man who never drank has come down with a chronic liver problem), his eyes still light up with excitement when I talk to him about my vision for taking his businesses in the 21st century. A couple of years ago, when he turned 87, my dad -- his trusted counselor -- gently advised him to call it quits. He would have worked forever if it was up to him; but now, when I ask explicitly him for advice, he says, "I'm retired; you and your father figure it out." But there are times when he can't help himself, and when he comes to me with an urge to inquire, his enthusiasm for the great joy that comes with industry cannot be contained.

We still spend a great deal of time together. I was going to go down to Florida to bring him home toward the end of May, but he wasn't feeling well (he hates doctors even more than I do) so my cousin brought him home a couple weeks early. He has a house near to ours, but we're all more comfortable with him living under my parents' watchful eyes at their house. So at least four times a week, we end up sitting around together and watching C-SPAN, Fox News, baseball or golf. Most of the time we are silent, but it's a glorious silence, the kind that screams affection and understanding. He smokes his cigars; I smoke my cigarettes; and we enjoy the feeling of mutual admiration that flows between a master and his protege.

He's on a variety of medications to counteract his condition, the most physically detrimental of which is a blood thinner aimed at keeping his pulse rate to a minimum. As a result, he often complains that he is dizzy and tired. However, hhe has slowly accepted the reality that if and when his the capillaries near his neck burst open, we might have a chance to rush him to the hospital before he suffocates on his own blood.

I remember being a little kid and curling up in bed with him and my grandma and thinking, "Grandpa is boiling alive; how is grandma not sweating her ass off?!" He was always so hot, whether because he was a big fat guy or such was the energy that emanated from deep within him. These days, however, he is ice cold, regardless of how many sweaters he wears or how many blankets he puts over his legs, and it eerily corresponds to the viscousness of his movements. A few nights ago, we were sitting on the couch eating dinner and watching the Cubs game, and he casually dropped his hand onto my forearm. I was startled to feel how freezing cold his hand felt, which I mentioned to him. He frowned slightly and said, "Pat, it's these drugs they got me on. I can't do nothing about it." He looked back at the t.v. inquiring as to the Cubs' record, thereby deftly changing the topic away from his own mortality and toward something easier to comprehend.

Four years ago, my grandma became very ill as a result of a variety of medical complications, not least of which was Alzheimer's, the cruelest of all diseases. Her deterioration took a major toll on him. He was scared of leaving her alone or going to sleep without his hearing aids on, lest she wander off or need his help. Long after justifiability, he refused to place her in a nursing home. So, when one day she complained more than usual that she wasn't feeling well, he took her to the hospital one last time. I moved into her hospital room with him to look after him looking after her, so that we could take turns going out to do errands and monitoring her decline over three long weeks in the intensive care unit. It was the most trying time of my life -- not so much watching her die, because she was a sick lady for most of her life (she beat cancer at 76), and everyone was aware that the end was impending. The thing that got to me was the outpouring of unconditional love that resulted from his watching her fade away, his constant companion for 66 years, the ready fountain of support that allowed him to go out and build his empire.

I'll never forget the day before she died -- it was the second anniversary of 9/11, and when I walked into the room to find that her situation had suddenly passed the point of no return, he looked up at me and said, "This is it. We'll always remember this day." I walked to the window and looked out at the Hancock and Sears Tower some 15 miles off in the distance, and I began to sob uncontrollably. I never remembered him being sad in his whole life, but even he couldn't help himself from sobbing at the funeral. I partly take the blame for this; I broke into sobs during her eulogy, and I wanted to be strong for him. But there was nothing I could do about it; I kept looking at his state of despair, and my sadness got the best of me.

Time and again, Grandpa taught me that practical men of character deal with realities head-on. So, I wonder what I will say when I am called on to give his eulogy, as I have done for each of my other two deceased grandparents. I am uncertain as to whether I will have the strength or ability to capture his spirit and essence without making a sobbing mess of myself. Because grandpa would not want me to react that way -- not me, his mini-me, his pet project, his buddy. He is my hero and always will be, and I keep reminding myself that he is not dead yet, that I still have time to learn from him, and that as long as I live, so will something of him, the most admirable man I've ever known, my hero.

Explain-Nation

I apologize for being away writing-wise. I was focused on a big project at work, and my thoughts were on things that either no one would find interesting, or things that I would rather keep private. This is why all I could write were cryptic little tidbits here and there, and from them you should be able to tell that I still do the same things I've always done -- mostly working, hanging out, and going to Cubs games. Also, I finished a really good book about ancient Rome, written by the same guy who wrote another one, both of which I absorbed intentionally slowly.

Anyway, with the project out of the way, I've been trying to figure out my next move. In anticipation, I've been reading news wire services, plotting a few charts, and tracking a handful of securities. That doesn't mean I want to do securities work -- I most definitely don't. The name of the game is spotting trends, looking out for the next opportunity, wherever it may be. In other words, I need to take my recent experiences and trade up. If it means going to work for the right kind of people, setting up my own shop of some sort, or tackling another project like the one I just did -- that I have yet to determine. Welcome to life, I guess, playing it when you want it to come to you. Don't you think?

Unfortunately, I do not cope with external change with anything approaching grace. I understand change as a concept of measurement (thank you calculus). I am good at making changes happen -- there's an asshole general lurking inside me, believe it or not -- and this ceaselessly restless portion of my personality tends to drive my actions, and I tend to fluctuate between active and distant. Sometimes the restlessness shows when it should not, and sometimes it doesn't show enough when it should. Sometimes I fear that what I'm thinking and how I appear to others does not match. What to do about it?

The simple answer: Fuck it -- start writing more.

So here we are.

To build a seemingly out-of-nowhere tangent, I would like to point out that the physical nature of our beings limits the potential number of decisions we might made from instance to instance. Therefore, if you put some thought to examining a small handful of ticks and tendencies of any given person, it is not impossible to figure out what might happen for at least a short period in the future. It's a parlor trick, but essential to the creative writing process, and I haven't had the time to practice it recently. I should now. I will now, damn it.

I guess I'm back to essay form, like Jordan wearin' the 45.


[There now, Paddy. Was it so difficult to make the time to sit down and write for a few hours? I guess, me. (Pause) Wait, what the hell am I talking to myself for? Oh, that's right -- because it's What I See. Almost forgot.]

Ball of Confusion

That's what the world is today.

But the beat goes on...