America Day

A July 4^th cannot pass without me thinking about The Road Trip. Sixteen years ago this very holiday, a brother-in-arms and I hopped into a 1992 Chevy pickup truck and headed to Toronto for Independence Day weekend. This was partially due to the fact that we were not yet 21 years old and could not legally drink in the United States of America. And being the sorts of young men that never wanted to be on the wrong side of the law, we thought it best to go where it was legal to drink. We plugged a small Stars and Stripes into the back window of the truck and headed out down I-94, over the Ambassador Bridge, and down the QEW to Toronto, arriving just in time to sleep in the truck the rest of the night.

These years later and here I am, living in Toronto.

I worked today as I didn’t have the day off. I did have Monday off in observance of Canada Day. And I left early today to finalize the paperwork for an apartment just outside of the city. On my way back to my current basement room I’m renting, while idling in traffic in a different pickup truck, I got a little reflective of what these last 16 years have been.

Thirteen of them have seen a war fought all over Creation.

For eight of them, I’ve been a home owner.

I graduated college, started a career, and moved into the “middle professional years”, as the HR people call them.

The internet exploded and pretty much killed off phone books and porn you have to buy in a convenience store.

What else?

Sixteen years ago, I voted Republican. I hadn’t yet learned that the way adults see the world is on a thin, straight line between left and right. Learning that has made things easy. As someone that likes firearms, I’m on the right, but I really can’t stand most gun people. As someone that feels roads and other infrastructure is important (including healthcare) and should be paid for collectively, I’m on the left. But I know so many people on the left that cheat on taxes I find myself annoyed with them, too. So this right/left thing makes everything easier as I have realized that there are no quick fixes and just hope the next generation is stronger than I am. Not that I’m perfect. I do drink too much.

I don’t want to leave this where one could say I’m overly-simplifying both sides of the issue. Let me drone on…

The right wants freedom of religion and wants smaller government, but then uses government to enshrine specific beliefs as "the real ones" in the country.

The left wants access to shared services, but then doesn’t have the voice (read: backbone) to state that “shared” means we all have to pull our own weight.

The left states that as free citizens, we have the power to make our own choices, but then chills those choices by continuing and expanding surveillance into our everyday lives.

The right embodies the spirit of the individual being the thing that makes America great, then limits choice for so many by elevating a small few to an ultra-rich status, again, through law.

Having earned freedom, liberty and our own land after centuries of struggle in Europe, America now can’t seem to plan more than three or four months in the future. So our bridges crumble and we mine more coal.

But don’t let this lead you to believe that I am depressed or that I worry about America. I realize that there are no quick fixes. And I know that America is now only the latest branch that grew out of very early societies around the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East. There have been dark days on the path from then to now and Enlightenment has always saved us. It brought us out of the Crusades. It brought us back after the first World War. It developed clean water delivery, sewers, farming, and just laws. We’ll get back there. Come to think of it, the Enlightenment created America in the first place.

I had hoped before that it would be my generation that brought Enlightenment, but maybe the next one will.

Or maybe we still can. After idling my way to this hole in the Canadian earth I call “the place I sleep”, I spent hours talking with David, the Iranian Coptic Christian that just moved in down the hall. He shared some wine with me and said “happy Independence Day… may I celebrate with you?” He worked for years in the US with Greyhound and has seen every highway I could name. He was shocked that I knew both Highway 1 and the Shenandoah Valley first hand, as it is his experience that Americans, though proud, know nothing about their own country. He went on and on about how he wishes more of the world was like the America that he knows. We became fast friends talking about the unspeakable grandeur that is a Midwestern diner breakfast.

There are a lot of good people in this world. There are a lot of good ideas. David is a good person. America is a good idea. Let’s love them both.

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

Please, Mom, Don’t Read This

From what I can tell, it seems that GM has recalled every car it has ever made at this point. The first recall story that I remember on this issue said something like “GM recalls multiple Chevrolet models due to ignition failure that has killed a driver.” I immediately thought, “that person shut the car off with his knee.” I thought this not because I am omniscient, but because I did it in my Chevy HHR. Twice.

The first time it happened, I was going down I-76 west in Ohio. I’d been driving for maybe seven hours and was shifting around in my seat instead of pulling off to stretch my legs. Suddenly something changed. It was hard to tell what exactly because in newer cars, the radio stays on even when the key is turned off. I was drifting toward the center line and the wheel wouldn’t turn. Or, it would, but it didn’t easily because the power steering was off.

This is when I said to myself, “oh, I turned the key off.” I reached over, put it into neutral (as it would need to be to restart), cranked it over, put it up into drive and floored it before the car behind me caught up.

How did I figure that out? I was your run-of-the-mill foolish boy. When there was nobody on the highway around me, back when I was 16, I’d speed up to 80mph, turn my old truck off, put it into neutral and see how far I could coast before I came to a rest.

And here’s why I haven’t said anything about this yet. There’s a joke that I heard recently from a stand-up comic that went like, “When your friend says ‘Now I’m not racist, but…’ get ready to hear something racist.” Here is where I say, “Now I’m not advocating any of this, but…”. I truly, deeply mean it when I say that nobody should just turn their car off on purpose when driving down the highway to just see what happens. But because I did (along with others I know), I didn’t panic and just turned it back on. I was irritated that the radio stayed on, though.

But then it happened again. This time the radio was off, I was on a country highway, and I wasn’t alone. The person riding shotgun did not grow up a foolish boy and went from zero to ape-shit-panic when my knee knocked the key a second time (this was probably two years before the recalls started). Once everything was back to the way it should be - engine running while car moving and what-not - she told me that there was something wrong with the car. Then, as I had the time before, I felt that it was my dumb fault for getting my knee way up there where it had no business being.

Is there a lesson in here? Certainly not. And regardless, it is only one side of the story.

A Citizen of Earth

Sitting here in the temporary housing I call home, I’ve been forced to grapple with a few things after having been working here for exactly one day. Here, in list form, and in no particular order, are my first observations…

1) When one reads of the history of the flintlock rifle, as I’ve been known to do, one reads about those few moments where the “entity” was North America, not only countries or states or territories. The Great Lakes Region extended to where I sit now, in Toronto. I suppose it still does, but in the textbooks of my youth, anything above St. Lawrence River and the Lakes was a pale blob on an otherwise colorful map of America. Anyway, I’ve become used to reading of that period and, as such, not paying too much attention to national borders. Borders mattered to the upper class warring over territory to own and I’m slogging through stories of beaver trappers probably first written down in a pub somewhere. It was those same godless schizophrenics that would rather be alone in the wilderness for months or years at a time, wearing animal pelts over a Michigan winter to stay “warm”, than to be anywhere near another human being, who settled both Canada’s and America’s first wild frontier.

As I drove around for the first day here, listening to the CBC, I heard a long story about the 100^th anniversary of a seal hunting disaster off of Newfoundland. There were terrible details that, if I tried to summarize them here, would only be an insult to those that endured, or tried to endure, that particular storm. Hearing the stories, I didn’t think “Those poor Canadians.” Instead, I heard a different version of the same stories passed down to me in my life, where Michigan families strived to take hold on this still new continent.

You may be asking…

2) Why was I driving around on my first day? I needed a bank account. TD Bank (the “T” stands for “Toronto”) is open on Sundays and, as I’ve heard it, has a good price for moving money back and forth over the border… legally. I had not yet worked my first day at my new employer, I was living in a hotel, and I did not have a Canadian cell phone. Still, they gave me an account without question. Lesson learned: banks will do anything to get your money.

3) Speaking to another former Michigan fellow that lives here, I stated that I purchased a few items at a small grocery store near my hotel. He said, “Have you heard of Canadian Tire?” Let me assure you, dear reader, that flash of confusion that just shot through your mind is the same sensation I felt when he said it. As I actually do need new tires on my car, I was also embarrassed that he noticed my balding tires. “Waaaait a minute,” my brain slowly said. “There’s no way he cares about the condition of my tires, let alone that he’d notice the shallow tread from here, inside this building, where I am totally NOT parked.” Probably recognizing the confusion contorting my face, he said “It’s like a Meijer.”

4) I am the one with the accent. During our “meet and greet,” the locals at work were having a grand old time having me say things like “about” and “I know” and asking me - by pointing at it - “what is in this can?” (pop, as opposed to soda).

5) I’m working on one last piece of documentation to be official here. I’d love to tell you the name of it, which would be expected of any authoritative author in this spot of the story, but I can’t remember it. It’s like a social security number, but I think, maybe, it’s called a “social insurance number.” Anyway, one moving into the country gets such a number at the Service Canada Center, which appears to be something like a one-stop shop for government-related stuff.

Not having this number is incredibly stressful. Not that I’m doing anything truly wrong, mind you, but that without it, I feel like I’m somehow “in the wrong.” I’m not sure that that subtle word difference makes my point, but me going on about the way I wrote that sentence here certainly won’t help… So, it’s stressful.

I imagine all of the people that were the “immigrants” in all of the news stories I heard back home. Thinking of them now, I imagine how stressful immigration must have been on them, where people and local governments can be, at times, openly hostile.

That reminds me of a cliché I heard in college: A Republican is just a Democrat that hasn’t gone to jail yet.

6) As one would say “Give me a Lager” in Philadelphia to get a Yeungling, here one says “I’ll have a Canadian, please” to get a Molson. Yeungling is far superior.

I’ve not been sufficiently self-aware over the years to notice myself growing or changing, but it seems that changes have been made. However, living as an expatriate, for all of two days, I can say confidently that I’ve noticed nothing that could be chalked up as a change in my behaviour. I’m still the same guy, from A to Zed.

A Seven Year Old Question

For those in the various industries that produce physical goods for consumption, the intro to this little story may be redundant.  For everyone else, there is this a thing called a “5 Why Analysis.”  It’s a tool that many people in “Industry” will recognize as something that was, at one time or another, jammed down his or her throat by someone called a “Master Black Belt.”  The Master Black Belt, or MBB, makes a lot more money than us. 

What this analysis is supposed to do is drive a team to the root cause of an issue by asking “why” something occurred five times.  Or it could be less, if the root cause was not too far from the surface.  Also, it could be more, if the problem is very complex.  So the name is at best misleading and more likely just stupid and probably has something to do with its Japanese root at Toyota, but I’m getting way off the rails here, driven by my seething animosity toward a system that is really nothing more than using the scientific method but in such a way that is far more limiting and has become a huge industry in and of itself with hundreds of books published a year but still is only a management tool though it’s treated like it is science itself even though it is only holding back science…

Anywho, recently, I had a long conversation with a friend that was there during my formative years throughout high school.  We lost touch before Social Media existed as it does today, so that was that, for a time.  Through a series of happy accidents, we were able to spend an afternoon together.  During that time, I realized that we hadn’t seen each other for about seven years.  That evening, I tried to square how I could still feel like I was relatively young, but also have a gap seven years long between meetings with someone I’d call one of my dearest friends.  That got me thinking about where I was seven years ago and a question that I first struggled with around that time: Is it better to buy locally-produced milk cold, or to buy Ultra-Pasteurized milk, which is shelf-stable?

For a short period of time, I worked full time jobs.  They spanned the traditional third and first shift.  The most difficult part of the situation was eating.  Two 8.5 hour jobs, plus two hours of commuting a day left little wiggle room for first breakfast, the middle meal between jobs, and supper.  I don’t know how I would have done it without dedicated help.  An item that was almost a must was my little box of Horizon Dairy Organic chocolate milk, fresh in its little juice box-type container.  I looked forward to it more than sleep most days. 

Having worked in a dairy previous to this, I was very familiar with what is commonly referred to as the “cold chain” storage and shipping required with traditional dairy products.  The small dairy I worked in received milk in unrefrigerated trucks.  The milk was put into the truck cold and, with such a large volume, it maintained temperature, so long as the turnpike wasn’t backed up too badly.  (Days the turnpike was backed up turned the milk into hog feed.)  The milk was then put into large refrigerated silos before processing.  After the homogenizing and traditional pasteurizing (retronym) it was stored in a huge warehouse that was as cold as your small refrigerator at home.  The warehouse had big bay doors (where the heat desperately tried to get in all the time).  There, refrigerated trucks backed in to be loaded.  The trucks went to grocery stores all over the area, where cooler cases (often left wide open to the store) kept the milk cold.  Finally, someone would buy the milk and take it home.  Even if it wasn’t opened for a day or two, the milk had to be kept in the refrigerator.

Ultra-Pasteurization, or Ultra High Temperature Pasteurization, rendered the milk shelf stable for a long time, provided it was in a well-sealed container and protected from light, preventing oxidation.  This cut the cold chain out, save the refrigerated silos prior to processing and the need to refrigerate after opening.  Green, huh?  At first blush, I thought so.

Seven years ago, the internet was still a young child.  Every once in awhile, earth-shattering revelations came out in some new-to-me media outlet (back then, though, they often contained citations to scientific literature, as young children are prone to being overly-honest).  One of those revelations was that the juice box, a tried-and-true staple of my childhood and the new container for my Ultra-Pasteurized milk, was filling up landfills and never breaking down.  The packaging revolution that had won every major award when it was developed was comprised of so many mixed materials that it couldn’t be recycled.

After some time, I stopped buying the shelf-stable milk. 

At the time, when I searched my soul for the right decision, I reasoned it like this:

1) Why do I need to decide between one or the other in the first place?  Because I am a consumer, and consumption impacts the world around us.
2) Why do I care about that?  Well, I’m in that world, so I’d like it to not be destroyed.  Also, if I ever have a family, I’d be pretty peeved if my kids got sick because of the decisions I made.
3) Ok, so what is it in my actions that cannot be undone?  This is the easy one.  It’s the use of petrochemicals.  Once you pull it out of the ground, it’s up here to stay.
4) Why?  The processes that turned dead vegetation into oil and coal don’t happen anymore.  Or, if you want to be way too pedantic about it for the purposes of the way you live your life day to day, not anywhere near fast enough to put carbon back into the earth. 

So there I settled that of paramount importance is the need to conserve finite resources, or, better yet, not use them at all, because no matter how much one limits pollution from something like petrochemical plastics, those petrochemicals are never going to be turned back into a natural oil deep in the earth.  That carbon will now always be up here on the surface, in the water, or in the air.

What about the alternative, then?  I’m no Luddite.  I totally love progress and convenience and the “Western” way of living.  It isn’t the case now (then… seven years ago… this is all a flashback, remember) that all the electricity used to cool that milk is renewable, but it is perfectly reasonable to assume that it can be.  Moreover, it is certainly possible that it can be.  All signs point to it (seven years ago)! Thus, support the local-as-possible, organic production methods as the primary goal.

And I still operate that way.  The only reason I’m bringing this up after so many years is exactly because so many years have passed.  Energy isn’t keeping up with my ideals.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  I see wind turbines and solar panels outside of the US all the time.  To be fair, I do see them in the US often as well.  I guess what I mean to say is that energy management is holding back the science.

My History with the Telephone

A few months back, as I noticed a little message on my smartphone screen that said something like “five missed calls,” I had a momentary flash of nostalgia for the way telephones (and telephone etiquette) used to be.  As the smartphone rang again, I ignored it and thought back to all of the changes…

My earliest recollection of a telephone was in the house I first lived in on Red Arrow Highway.  There was one phone in the house, I think.  It had a rotary dial and a heavy receiver and it sat on the desk next to the dining room table.  Quaint, huh? 

We moved to a new house in 1987.  At the time we toured the house, before my parents bought it, I remember seeing phone jacks in every single room.  This, to me, was amazing.  What was even more amazing our first cordless phone, which we got that Christmas, I believe.  I’m sure I don’t remember the absolute first time I used it, but I remember the pull out antenna, the channel selector button, and talking outside on a telephone at my house.  This, children of today, never happened before.  Not in the Midwest, anyway.  At least three people I knew had that exact same phone.  There wasn’t a whole lot of variety in the beginning.

Sometime in the next few years, I saw my very first “car phone.”  We also called it a “bag phone.”  This was because the phone was in a bag.  It would plug into the car lighter for power and, I think, had a battery that could last up to ten minutes or so if not plugged in.  That was the state of things for awhile.  Some cars, though, had built in car phones.  These were mostly Cadillac sedans. 

Middle School rolled around and I was on the Student Council.  Many of my friends were involved in after-school activities, as was I.  A lot of the activities, like Science Olympiad or scrounging around in the basement of the building for god-knows-what, didn’t really have a solid end-time, so getting rides set up was a pain.  I lobbied to get a payphone put into the school lobby so students could call home when needed.  It cost us, as I remember, $120 out of our budget to get the phone installed.  We had plenty of money then because we had also, the previous year, installed the first pop machine in the school and the Student Government took all the profits.

I recall this was the time when 1-800-COLLECT launched.  One could dial that code and, when the automated service asked for your name, you’d just say “Pick me up” and your parents would come and get you.  Brilliant.  Almost worth having to put up with Carrot Top…

High School started with the bag phone getting scaled down to a large handset that could be carried in the car.  The term “cellular” telephone started being used, but most folks I knew still called it a car phone, because why would you carry it anywhere else but in a car?

Once I could drive, I started working.  Once I started working, I fell in love.  She lived in a different town 12 miles away.  That, my friends, was a LONG DISTANCE phone call.  Services like TalkAmerica, providing free US Long Distance formed (along with a lot of pyramid schemes).  Soon, the “local long distance” charges disappeared and I was free to talk to my girlfriend from a landline telephone in my parents’ basement.

There’s this word I love: retronym.  It is when an advance in something makes you come up with a new name for the old type of that thing.  Until there was an electric guitar, all were just “guitars”, but the advance made the need for the term “acoustic guitar” to be coined.  The same is true for “landline telephone.”

All was stable through college.  We had one telephone in the house in Kalamazoo.  The phone number was 388-8193.  I used to remember lots of phone numbers.  Anyway, it was a cordless phone that lasted all four years.  When I needed to focus on studying, I could go in the basement of the house and read.  The phone stayed upstairs.  Nobody was too upset when we didn’t connect immediately.

I moved from Michigan to Pennsylvania in 2002.  That year, I got my first cell phone.  It was a good ol’ Nextel Brick.  I was driving for third shift work in a dairy out in what used to be the middle of nowhere, so the added security of a cell phone felt good.  I used it maybe ten times the first year.  The landline was still the way to go.  Though I would use the “direct connect” feature to say hello to my Dad once in awhile.

I have had five cell phones total.  The first two were Bricks.  Then a flip phone.  Those all lasted a long time.  Somewhere in that flip phone era, for me, I migrated away from having a landline.  In that same space, I started noticing a change in people.  Since my phone was not a landline, not a “car phone”, but could be carried on me at all times, it was pretty much expected that it be on me at all times.  Responses taking more than a few hours were an insult.  Then in more than an hour.  Then the expectation with some was the need for instantaneous responses. 

And here is where it was, as I sat with six missed calls on the screen of my smartphone from the same person.  There were also five text messages, but that’s another story.

"Dumbphone" is a retronym, too.

A Resolute New Year

Welcome to the end of 2013, dear Reader.  As I sit watching the snow fall gently on the City, I think back to all of the changes this year has brought.  I bought a new house, got married, but most importantly, I joined Facebook.  I mean that as sarcastically as possible.  That too, actually. 

Thanks to Facebook, one of the things that I saw, for the first time I can recall, is a whole lot of popular culture.  I’ve never been one to watch the hit Reality TV shows, listen to commercial talk radio or drive-time pop music stations.  Admittedly, I would learn about new cultural idioms and inside-jokes through satirical shows or thorough my friends (the latter, usually after something like “You can’t be serious that you haven’t seen that!”).  What I learned this year from Facebook is that at as soon as life isn’t perfect, it is popular to believe that you deserve better than whatever you have.

A friend of mine recently was having some relationship issues.  I’m a “he” and she is a “she”.  She asked me generally what I thought she should do, so I said to love him even more.  She appeared surprised.  But when I look at what I see tossed off on Facebook as self-help wisdom, I can see why my answer was surprising.  There are hundreds of items each week with short statements meaning “Don’t Look Back”, “If it didn’t work out the first time, it wasn’t meant to be”, and “Love yourself because you matter most.”  Also, it’s not like I haven’t dated over the past few years.  I know that when past relationships hit hard times, my friends told me “there are more fish in the sea” and her friends told her “you can do better than him.”  With that type of support, there is no chance to forge a stronger relationship, to grow, to learn, or to soften your edges. 

There were a few exceptions.  Those in the generation I’d call “Group A baby-boomers” (the oldest of the baby boomers) or those even older, were usually quick to say “stick it out and it will be even sweeter later on.”  But that is a too-quickly dwindling cohort. 

My fortunes were incredible this year.  Someone chose me.  I chose her, too. 

In 2014, should I get the opportunity, I choose to be resolute in my support of loved ones.  Don’t give up on each other.  Don’t let arguments, disagreements, even momentary pure hate take down long-term love and friendship.  If you are happy, be thankful for what you have.  If you’re not happy, look in yourself to see why not.  Chances are, you have a lot more to be thankful about than you think, and it’s your own fault you’re miserable. 

Peace.

I am not outraged

A little bit ago, the popularity of the IRS went down even more.  It was reported - widely and with vigor - that the agency that collects taxes targeted a particular group of potentially tax-exempt groups unfairly.  To boil that down some, that is Government singling out particular Americans.  That is one of the things that always gets my blood boiling, regardless of the target.  Government is a greater good organization, in my mind.  I don't believe that the government should be in the business of fixing my life personally, but I enjoy the fact that it functions to make all of our lives better by balancing the nature of other institutions, like business interests.  Blind justice and all that.  Anyway, this one made no sense to me and I have, until now, kept my mouth shut.

I've long understood the greater metro area of Cincinnati to be rather conservative.  And since the IRS is a professional organization and not a political one, I just kinda figured that the local hires would be Midwestern Conservatives.  At least a healthy portion of them would be, preventing the liberal subversives from hatching their master stroke.  So why would those Conservatives torpedo their own cause? 

Then, it was the silliness that got me.  TEA party groups cried about how they were singled out for something regarding taxes.  Again, the "Taxed Enough Already" party cried about taxes.  The stories in the news were little comedies.  The IRS had a rule - the 501(c)(3) - that allows groups to NOT pay taxes if they meet certain criteria.  Because it took too long to work, the TEA party cried out.  It sounded to my ears like this:
"Here child," said the parent, "here's exactly what you want, but you have to wait for it."
"NO," cried the brat, "I WANT IT NOW!" 

So it all smelled like the sort of thing that blows up and doesn't work out the way the brats intended.  I was on the right side of quiet.  Most of the "reputable" news outlets now seem to report that it wasn't that way at all.  And further, there appears room for inquiry into why the original inspection of the complaint was allowed to focus only on right-wing parties.  Regardless, I wasn't outraged.

Except, of course, everything else still existed.  Like the fact that we allow for 49% Political operations to be as tax-exempt as religious day-cares, veteran outreach groups, and homes for abused women.  Or that this story was pushed off of the front pages by a Southern woman that cooks and uses offensive language.  I'm no flat-taxer, but the "complexity" of the tax code starts right here with these groups - left and right alike.  Elections shouldn't be wars of attrition, anyway.  Let's just give PBS a few extra million dollars, let them host debates between all candidates for all elections, and leave it at that.  We'd free up all of that capital to create jobs! The billion dollars spent on the last presidential election alone would have been 20,000 jobs at $50,000 each.  Before taxes.  

I guess I was outraged...